I Stopped Watching The News

A response to The White Privilege of Ignoring The News

[Listen to an audio version of this blog HERE.]

Shortly after the presidential election, I stopped watching the news. It was all so insincere and contradictory and exhausting. Not watching the news, though, is not a popular thing to do. There has been much discussion around the inherent privilege of ignoring the news and disconnecting from media. One author, in a piece entitled, “The White Privilege of Ignoring the News” went so far as to write, “If there is evidence of privilege, that’s it: to feel so insulated from adversity, so inoculated from suffering, so immune from struggle, so unaffected by reality — that you could simply turn off the news, because the act feels inconsequential to your existence. It reveals that not only do you feel the events of the day have no tangible or lasting effect on you, but you’re blissfully ignorant to the way those events are painful, invasive, and even deadly to less fortunate people who lack the luxury of being oblivious..” His premise seems inherently flawed in that he assumes only white people ignore the news, but I digress.

Here’s my bone to pick with this aggressively inaccurate accusation: sometimes, people need a break from the news cycle because the news cycle seems set on inciting anger and stoking fear…