Take a week off, dear readers

Dear Readers,

A new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism notes that a growing number of people who once were regular news consumers — in print, online and from television and radio — seem to be turning away. You can understand why, right? Sometimes it seems that the news is relentlessly bad.

So here’s a chance for a break: I’m taking a weekend off, and that means we won’t have a full edition of The Upstate American in this cycle.

But just let me say this, first, about those folks who are leaving the news behind.

Paul Farhi in The Washington Post cites that Reuters study, noting that two-thirds of Americans in the survey group said in 2015 that they were “extremely” or “very” interested in the news, but that the new data shows that now just 49 percent are that eager to know what’s going on. Some 38 percent say they sometimes skip reading or watching any news. There’s even a term for the phenomenon: “news avoidance.”

It’s understandable. There’s a lot that’s distressing in what we read: crippling heat and devastating floods from climate change, political upheaval sparked by the outrageous and shameless lies of public officials, economic inequality, the violence of war and the disruption of forced migration.

But there have always been hard issues to resolve. Until now, most of us didn’t turn away.

What’s different now is that the news is always with us. We have smartphones in our pockets and news alerts on our laptops. There are TV sets playing in airports and bars, or even sometimes at the gas pump. News is ubiquitous, and often it’s giving us information we’d rather not know — or presentation of the news we already know, but with details and drama that we really could do without. It just wears us down to be relentlessly bombarded with all that information.

We can talk more about this in coming weeks. But even as a guy whose career has been spent gathering and presenting the news, I’d say that it’s quite appropriate for all of us to take a bit of news-free time when we can. The world will go on spinning without us, and we can find whatever we missed through the wonders of digital archives.

For myself, I plan to hang out on a mountain lake a bit, and maybe toss a fly into a rushing river. For just a couple of days, anyway, I’ll be paying more attention to the sun and the sky than what’s on any screen. I wish the same to you.

And then in a few days we can get back to the business at hand — namely, to fully grasp the reality of this world and figure out what we can do to help address the challenges of the day. For now, though, let’s just take it easy.

- Rex