News

This category is about the news media itself: how it works, what it does to us, and why I have come to read it with a deeply skeptical eye. After years of consuming the news compulsively and then stepping back from it, I have strong views about what it is actually doing to the people who watch it.

My argument, in short, is that the news as a system is not built to inform you. It is built to capture and hold your attention, and the most reliable ways to do that are to alarm you, anger you, and oversimplify the world into conflict. The result is a population that is anxious, divided, and worse informed than it believes itself to be.

The posts here examine media bias, negativity, echo chambers, and the steady manufacture of outrage, along with what it looks like to get genuinely informed without letting the news run your emotional life.