Most of the news we see each day is negative. This constant stream of bad news fuels news avoidance, anxiety, and animosity — all of which harm us at a spiritual level. This episode proposes a new, spiritually healthy way of engaging with the news, looking at how we can use our media diets to help us fulfill our personal vocations and cultivate the virtue of hope. Focusing on news you can act on will improve your mental health and your ability to make positive impacts; as Emma Varvaloucas explains, focusing more on positive news also increases your ability to create positive change because it allows you to see that change is possible and what strategies best advance it.

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Article 13 is produced by Maria Devlin McNair, Zachary Davis, and Gavin Feller. Music is by Steve LaRosa. Art is by Charlotte Alba. You can learn more about Article 13 here.

We express our thanks to the Wheatley Institute for their support.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

* Introduction

It’s 1 AM. You should be asleep. But instead, you’re doomscrolling – swiping through story after story on your social media feeds and news channels, and they all seem to be negative. Democracy is under threat. AI is coming for your job. Children are dying in wars abroad. The climate is about to collapse.

This deluge of danger makes you want to do what a lot of people have done – stop reading the news altogether. But then imagine you come across a story like this:

Documentary: Humans are extraordinary. We're such a miracle. The land is resilient. We are resilient. We've got to believe that there's a better way where people have clean air, clean water, available food, cheap, abundant energy. The big shared human projects confronting climate change, staying a step ahead of the next pandemic, preventing nuclear conflict, will require cooperation. That's the key for success, and we are one team, the world. It's ideas that determine our trajectory as a species. The idea that progress is possible is probably one of the most powerful ideas we've ever had. People are building better futures for themselves and the communities around them.

Most news stories about our future aren’t nearly so optimistic. But that’s precisely why this story needed to be shared.

This footage is from a 2024 PBS docuseries called A Brief History of the Future. At an Aspen Ideas event, Executive Co-producer Kathryn Murdoch explained why she wanted to create it:

Murdoch: Of the main reasons I did this project was actually because my daughter came to me a few years ago and said she didn't see any hope for the future. And I was really shocked because I've been working on climate change for like 17 years, and she knows all the solutions that we work on, and and we do democracy reform, she's very familiar with all those things, but she said to me, “But look at the films, look at the television shows, look at the books, especially the YA books. Everything is dystopian.” And I sort of went around trying to prove her wrong, and I couldn't. Everything that we have visualized about our future is dystopian now. Some of it's ecological, but, you know, there's all kinds of choices, there's 27 flavors of dystopia, but there's no version where we actually get things right.

A Brief History of the Future offers visions of what it could look to get things right– and how we could get there.

Alexis Soloski discusses the docuseries in a New York Times article titled “Climate Doom Is Out. ‘Apocalyptic Optimism’ Is In.” The article discusses recent climate books that are striving, like this docuseries, to replace climate doomerism with a certain kind of informed, well-earned optimism. None of them deny that the problems are real and gravely serious. But they insist that focusing solely on the problems will make us worse at solving them. As data scientist Hannah Ritchie put it, “There’s been a really rapid shift in the narrative, from almost complete denial to, ‘Oh, it’s too late now, there’s nothing we can do, we should just stop trying.’”

If the news convinces us that the problems are insurmountable, then we won’t be motivated to do anything about them. That’s why Ritchie, Murdoch, and many others believe we need a different approach to world issues and how they’re reported. And the most practical approach here may, in fact, be one founded on a certain spiritual virtue. Soloski puts it this way: “Intimations of doom have failed to motivate us. Perhaps we will work toward a better future if we trust that one … is possible. When it comes to climate catastrophe, is our best hope hope itself?”

Welcome to the Angle – a podcast that brings together cutting edge research and spiritual wisdom to provide blueprints for a better world. I’m your host, Zachary Davis. In this episode, we develop spiritual guidelines for navigating the news – especially the division and negativity the news now fosters. We examine the spiritual stumbling blocks posed by our media environment; we outline a media diet that can help us live out our personal missions; and we explain why we need the virtue of hope – so that what we learn about the world can change the world.

* Spiritual formation and dispositions

When people tell us why we should read the news, the reasons aren’t usually spiritual ones. It’s to hold people in power accountable, to be well-informed about issues on the ballot. It’s a vital political issue – serious scholars of democracy agree that it needs an informed citizenry.

But there are also vital spiritual dimensions to our news-consumption habits. How we get our news affects the way our minds are shaped, the moral dispositions we cultivate towards other people, and our ability to carry out our mission in the world.

In their 2023 book The Great Dechurching, pastors Michael Graham and Jim Davis ask why 40 million churchgoing Americans have recently left their churches. In this book, they spent a lot of time looking at how different demographics get their news. That’s because Graham and Davis noticed a relationship between news consumption and spiritual formation – what we fill our minds with, and what our minds are like.

A report released by Pew Research Center in 2023 relayed that “half of U.S. adults get news at least sometimes from social media.” It also reported that “Facebook outpaces all other social media sites” in terms of where Americans regularly get their news. But as Graham and Davis note, “Through … leaked internal Facebook corporate memos, we learned, ‘[Facebook] algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness … If left unchecked,’ Facebook would feed users ‘more and more divisive content to gain more user attention and increase time on the platform.”

“We are in a crisis of spiritual formation,” they conclude, “because we live in an attention economy. Attention is money.” And nothing sustains attention like anger.

Every proprietary algorithm at all the large tech and social media companies has discovered what the Bible has already told us, Graham and Davis write. We are inherently prone to division, strife, and anger. We consume content that puts our brain in a cortisol state and makes it increasingly difficult to be renewed in our minds and to embody the fruits of the Spirit.

But you don’t have to be a pastor to be concerned about media consumption and personal formation. You could be a psychologist. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who studies religion and moral psychology, points out that spirituality is a core concept even for those who don’t belong to a religious faith or believe in God. People innately perceive certain kinds of objects and actions to be pure or elevating or sacred in some way, and some others to be disgusting or degrading. A spiritual life, on this account, is one that strives to embrace what is elevating and avoid what is degrading. And Haidt believes that a lot of mainstream media is dangerous for our collective spiritual lives.

Haidt: We're drowning in trivia that was created yesterday.

This is Haidt speaking with Trinity Forum

Haidt: Epictetus says, If your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren't you ashamed that you've made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you, so that it automatically becomes confused and upset? I mean, that's Twitter, he said, Don't go on Twitter. And then this is Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius said, The things you think about determine the quality of your mind; your soul takes on the color of your thoughts; so avoid degrading things, avoid things that lower you, focus, expose yourself to things that elevate you.

We might agree that it can be spiritually corrupting to immerse ourselves in outrageous stories about our political enemies, or trivial celebrity gossip, or the videos of real-life violence that show up all over news channels and social media. But could even the most thoughtfully chosen stories feel “elevating,” if so much of the news is simply so bad?

* Negativity

Varvaloucas: There has actually been research that's been done that counts the number of times negative emotions appear in headlines over the last 15 or so years. And there's been a definite uptick in negative emotions in headlines, meaning anger, fear, disgust – there has been a real change in how the news is presented in recent years.

This is Emma Varvaloucas, Executive Director of the Progress Network. Working in journalism herself, she has a close look at this phenomenon of increasing negativity in the news. This negative tone isn’t accidental. Varvaloucas explains that the news is “negative by design”:

Varvaloucas: What I meant by the news is negative by design is that it's not designed to tell you what's going on, average all over the world on any given normal day, which right now is mostly peacefulness in most corners of the world, it's mostly people making more money and living better lifestyles than they did 50 years ago, 100 years ago. So what the news is reporting on are the things that defy our idea of normal, so things that go wrong.

Part of this negative focus comes down to a desire for attention: as the industry mantra goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” People feel compelled to read about crises.

Part of it also comes down to mission. Most of what we experience in daily life doesn’t qualify as news. News organizations prioritize events that are unexpected, disruptive, or have widespread consequences, ignoring everyday occurrences that don't meet the criteria of conflict, controversy, or urgency.

And journalists often feel the best way to help the world is by calling attention to problems that need solving. Reporting on what’s doing just fine can seem a less urgent task – even a less responsible one.

But this well-meaning mission can backfire by making people avoid the news. Given the uptick in negative news, it’s not surprising that there’s also been an uptick in news avoidance. In 2023, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 38% of US survey respondents actively avoid the news. The Washington Post reported: “Digital media has made news ubiquitous … And much of it, people say, drives feelings of depression, anger, anxiety or helplessness.”

Varvaloucas: I think what the news is serving people is really, really negative, and I think people are just tired.

Reading the news can feel like the opposite of spiritual elevation – an immersion in hatred and hopelessness. But there is a way to engage differently. First, we can avoid the news-consumption habits that drive the worst kinds of emotions. Second, we can focus our engagement in the same way we focus our spiritual engagement.

* How to read the news – the basics

So which habits are the worst drivers of anger, anxiety, and out-of-control doom-scrolling?

1. Getting your news from social media,

2. Getting your news from free news sites

3 Getting your news from cable television.

All these platforms have incentives, usually related to advertising revenue, to serve up the most high-drama, high-stress stories possible. These stories are designed to grab our attention and trigger our most reactionary emotions – not to engage our minds and conscious judgment. A good alternative habit to watching sensationalized video clips is to get your news by reading it. Reading “interrupts our reaction cycle and invites slow, careful processing,” write media scholars Benjamin Peters and Seth Lewis in their article “How to Make Sense of the World: The Case for Reading the News.”

And what kind of news should you read? Peters and Lewis recommend starting with Reuters and the Associated Press, for basic, accurate reporting on events around the world. Then, to dive a little deeper, invest in a subscription to a high-quality mainstream news source – one that doesn’t need to support itself through clicks. Think The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal.

And if at all possible, subscribe to a second news source, one with a different perspective from your first source – and from you. Deliberately reading news that challenges your existing beliefs will help you counteract confirmation bias and see the world from the perspective of others.

Stirewalt: If you're doing it right, if you're living up to your obligations as a citizen, you should regularly be hearing things that you disagree with, you should regularly hear ideas and points of view that make you uncomfortable, that might even point out that you're wrong from time to time.

This is Chris Stirewalt. Like many media theorists, he strongly recommends reading multiple sources with different points of view. This doesn’t mean turning to hyper-partisan outlets to see what the “crazy other side” is doing. It means seeking out legitimate, fact-checked sources that will surprise and challenge your instinctive opinions. This balanced reading won’t just give you a more accurate picture of the world; it will also help you cultivate curiosity and generosity towards people outside your own tribe – much more spiritually fruitful dispositions than contempt or hatred.

Stirewalt: My plea to Americans is, Break out. If you're conservative, you better have NPR on in the morning, you better do something to break it up a little bit. If you're a liberal, you better be reading The Dispatch, of course, which is delightful, or National Review, or the Wall Street Journal editorial page, you better be listening to something else that shakes it up, that breaks it out.

* Embodiment

Now, even if you adopt these practices, keeping up with the news can still feel unproductive and overwhelming, simply from the sheer volume of stories you can access – information from literally around the world. Brett McCracken, author of The Wisdom Pyramid, cites an argument from educator Neil Postman to explain why so many people face this sense of overwhelm:

McCracken: Postman argues that our mental health is actually better when that information action ratio is pretty even, when the information that fills our brains is largely things that we can take action on. Now with the Internet, it's just like become way out of whack, so that the vast majority of information that we come across in our mental space is unactionable information, and so you can understand why anxiety and mental illness is on the rise, because we were not created to have the burden of the world's worth of unactionable information in our minds, like we were created to be in physical embodied space where the inputs that came into our mind were actionable.

Information becomes merely distressing, rather than inspiring or helpful, when it gets too far away from our own decisions and actions – what we, as embodied creatures, are able to act upon. Many religious practices involve physical motion or in-person gathering or communal feasting, and for the same reason – we are embodied creatures.

So a more spiritual approach to reading the news would be a more embodied one. Try targeting your news-reading around those areas where you can take action in the physical world. Build a general picture of world events, but focus your most intensive reading on the information that will shape the decisions you make that impact people around you.

One way to do this is by attending to news about your immediate area. When you follow local news and react to what you hear, whether that's through contacting your local government, or introducing new ideas at a town council meeting, you're helping make your neighborhood better. But local doesn't just mean the geographic space nearest to you. It also means the issues nearest to you. Maybe you're a doctor advising patients on the latest developments in a particular field. Or maybe you're a parent gathering information about teen mental health. Those subjects are local to you because they have a direct impact on you and your decisions.

Reading on these issues may still be discouraging at times But it will also be empowering, because the knowledge you gain will enable you to do more good with the actions you take.

Then there's the one other vital piece to our approach. As noted, for reasons good and bad, news, for most news outlets, means bad news. What's absolutely imperative is to read more good news.

* Positive news

Sharing good news is Emma Varvaloucas’s mission as Executive Director of the Progress Network. Founded by Zachary Karabell, the Progress Network brings together journalists and organizations dedicated to sharing stories about progress.

Varvaloucas: And the idea is really to balance out this strongly negative viewpoint that,not only the mainstream media, but also media influencers on the right and the left, have these days, to help show people there is progress actually happening.

Progress is happening. But it often happens invisibly. It’s not just because many news organizations are incentivized to publish negative news; it’s because progress often doesn’t take the form of “news” at all. It’s isolated, unique, stand-out events that tend to get reported on – not slow, gradual change where each day looks quite similar to the day before. And so gradual progress – like the way millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 30 years – never gets reported as “breaking news.” But, Varvaloucas warns, ignoring these slow, positive stories has negative consequences.

Varvaloucas: So if you don't believe that progress on any particular issue is possible, it leads you to a certain set of decisions, right? UYou look at global poverty today, there's been a spike in global poverty in the last maybe three years, but it's been on like the long term decline. And if you look at that and say, ‘Well, lots of people are still starving, nothing that we did made a difference,’ what kind of decisions are you then going to make? First of all, you're going to stop paying attention. Second of all, if you're someone like a government employee or someone's voting, you're not going to be interested in funding international aid because you're like, ‘Oh, we're just throwing money around and nothing's happening.’

If you never hear or learn about the progress that is happening, you probably won’t think it’s possible. And if you don’t believe that progress is possible, you won’t invest the time and resources needed to make it happen.

Varvaloucas: But if you are aware that that progress has happened, it leads to another completely different set of decisions. For me, that spurs further action. If I give money to XYZ place that actually does something, those efforts have actually improved people's lives, so, let's do more of it, because we know that these steps have already worked. Societies that are convinced of their destruction, I think, hasten that destruction, right? And societies that feel like, ‘We might not have the road specifically planned out on how to get from point A to point B, but we believe that something is possible,’ like, that's the first step.

The philosophy behind the Progress Network is akin to that of “solutions journalism.” The Solutions Journalism Network was founded to change the way people understand and shape the world by changing the way it’s reported on. The Network’s co-founder, David Bornstein, explained the problem this way on the PBS Newshour in 2022:

Bornstein: The main way that the news harms democracy is by providing a view of the world that is largely deficit-framed. I mean, we are amply informed about what is going wrong, about what is ugly, about what is corrupt. But because we don't have a similar amount of information about what's growing, what are the new possibilities emerging, we have a very flawed, kind of one-sided view. It's as if your parents were only ever criticizing what you did and never [] where you had possibilities to grow. Many people who would, I think, would love to participate in contributing to a better community, even a better society or world, have an impoverished sense of their power to do so.

On a political level, what Solutions Journalism offers is a blueprint for successful policy going forward. On a spiritual level, what Solutions Journalism offers is hope. Hope that there are other possibilities. Hope that a better future is within reach. Hope that your actions actually can have an impact in making that future a reality.

Because hope is not about sitting back and trusting that others will take all the action that's needed. The hope that we as spiritual news readers are called to embrace isn't presumption or complacency. It's a vision that spurs action.

Brous: And I want to say this about hope. Hope is not naive, and hope is not an opiate.

This is Rabbi Sharon Brous in a 2017 Ted Talk called “It’s Time to Reclaim Religion.”

Brous: Hope may be the single greatest act of defiance against a politics of pessimism and against a culture of despair. Because what hope does for us is it lifts us out of the container that holds us and constrains us from the outside, and says, ‘You can dream and think expansively again.’ That, they cannot control in you.

As Hannah Ritchie related to the Times: “In order to build a better world, you need to be able to envision that one is possible.” Hope is the ability and the willingness to envision that world, to dream and think expansively about it, and then to accept the responsibilities that vision entails for how we, personally, must help bring that vision about.

Hope in this sense is a “spur, a prod, an uncomfortable goad”, as Soloski puts it. But hope is much less uncomfortable and much less difficult to cultivate when we have a realistic picture of the tools we do have to build our future.

In her TED Talk, Rabbi Brous talks about four commitments she sees in revitalized forms of religion around the country. The first she names is “wakefulness.”

Brous: We live in a time today in which we have unprecedented access to information about every global tragedy that happens on every corner of this Earth. Psychologists tell us that the more we learn about what's broken in our world, the less likely we are to do anything. It's called psychic numbing. We just shut down at a certain point. Well, somewhere along the way, our religious leaders forgot that it's our job to make people uncomfortable. It's our job to wake people up, to pull them out of their apathy and into the anguish, and to insist that we do what we don't want to do and see what we do not want to see. Because we know that social change only happens when we are awake enough to see that the house is on fire.

Solutions journalists might add, “We know that social change only happens when we are awake enough to see that the house is on fire, and when we know what’s working today to put fires out.” We do have unprecedented access to news about every global tragedy. We do risk spiritual overwhelm, either in despair over problems we can’t solve or hatred for people we see as causing the problems. The answer isn’t to shut down and tune out. But neither is it to focus only on “what we do not want to see.” It’s essential that we make positive news a staple of our spiritual news diet to nourish our hope and guide our action: to let us see a better world is possible, and to give us the knowledge we need about how best to bring that world about.

* Conclusion

So what does a spiritual approach to the news entail? Being mindful of how the content we consume forms our minds and hearts. Avoiding those platforms and stories designed to generate hatred and contempt. Seeking out stories that make us better able to understand those we disagree with. Diving into those stories that help us live out our vocation. Maintaining a basic working picture of the world. And building in much more positive news so we can cultivate the virtue of hope and help the world change for the better. You can start finding those vital positive stories by going to TheProgressNetwork.org and signing up for their free weekly newsletter; subscribing to the “What Could Go Right?” podcast; visiting the Solutions Story Tracker at SolutionsJournalism.org; and subscribing to updates from OurWorldinData.org.

Reading the news is often framed as political duty, but in a talk at the American Enterprise Institute, Stirewalt framed the same duty slightly differently:

Stirewalt: You do owe your neighbor something about how you get your news and how good you are at consuming it. As citizens, we all owe each other a filial duty of love to each other in the country to be well informed.

A spiritual approach to reading the news is nothing less than an extension of your devotion to truth and to love. Your love for others is what motivates you to understand and improve their world. Let the news help you do just that.

Errata: 1) In the recorded version, Jim Davis’s last name is once spoken as “David” rather than “Davis.” 2) A podcast is referred to as “Common Grounds”; the correct name is “Let’s Find Common Ground.”

EPISODE CREDITS

A special thanks for Benjamin Peters for his feedback and suggestions on this episode.

Ari Wallach (host), A Brief History of the Future (trailer) | PBS | 2024

“A Brief History of the Future: Kathryn Murdoch & Ari Wallach with Mariana Atencio” | | The Aspen Institute | 2024

A Conversation with Andy Crouch & Jonathan Haidt, “After Babel: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World” | The Trinity Forum | 2022

Interview with Emma Varvaloucas | Article 13 | 2023

How The Media Rage Machine Divides America: Chris Stirewalt | Let’s Find Common Ground Podcast | 2024

The Wisdom Pyramid with Brett McCracken | Church at the Cross Grapevine | 2022

David Bornstein, “A journalist's Brief But Spectacular take on telling the whole story” | PBS NewsHour | 2022

Sharon Brous, “It's time to reclaim religion” | TED | 2017

Broken News: A Book Event with Chris Stirewalt | American Enterprise Institute | 2022

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