Too much weird political news? It's not good for us
Too much weird political news? It's not good for us
We're distracted from what needs to draw our attention
Sometimes it’s hard to get what’s weird out of your head. (Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash)
Am I the only one who is desperate for some reassurance right now that things won’t get any weirder? Nobody can promise you that, of course, but you’ve got to hope that we don’t have too many more weeks featuring such diversions as a puppy-killing governor, a porn star detailing her tryst with an ex-president and the revelation of a dead brain-eating worm inside the head of a presidential candidate. At least, please give me the comfort of knowing that nobody mentioned in the preceding sentence has a chance of setting foot in the White House.
This is not what ought to be distracting the attention of folks in the world’s most important and powerful country — which is just now at the center of two major wars and a fierce economic battle with its greatest adversary, even as it struggles to avoid further polarization in an election season that threatens to undo its democratic institutions. The political show seems to have jumped the shark — that is, hit a level of craziness suggesting that the series is ripe for cancellation.
Even mentioning this stuff, of course, makes me complicit in giving it a lifespan in our attention beyond what it seems to deserve. But just because information is superficial doesn’t mean it’s inconsequential. The constant pummeling of our attention by strange developments involving players in our political affairs risks leaving us indifferent to what ought to jolt us. And if what used to shock us begins to matter less, then less of anything begins to matter to us at all. So we shrug and move on, succumbing to a sort of viral apathy.
That can be fatal for a democracy. Our framework for governing hinges on people paying attention. “An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy,” Thomas Jefferson wrote — that word “informed” referring, surely, to the issues that matter for the public good. But what matters is just now being crowded out of my brain by sensational trivia — like what Stormy Daniels allegedly said when Donald Trump answered his hotel room door in satiny PJ’s (“Does Hugh Hefner know you stole his pajamas?”), and where South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem ended the life of her family’s 14-month-old German wirehaired pointer (she shot Cricket in a gravel pit, then used two more shots to blow away a pesky goat), and whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. actually has an excuse for being a flat-out wacko (he has plenty of them, the brain worm likely not even the most salient).
So it goes in America: Even among people who pay attention to the news, what’s served up often pulls us away from the sort of news that is intended to help us perform the duties of citizenship. A Gallup survey last fall found that only in one group of Americans — people over age 65 — does even a tiny majority pay close attention to what’s going on in public affairs. Just about a quarter of people between ages 30 and 49 closely follow political news, and only 9 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds do.1
It's not surprising that folks don’t want to focus on what’s going on in politics, because they mostly find it disgusting. When a Pew Research study last year asked people to sum up their view of politics in a word or phrase, 79 percent of respondents came up with critical words, with “divisive” and “corrupt” being the most frequently cited, and “messy,” “joke,” and “s—t” following. Who can blame them for tuning out, then? Nobody is eager to embrace a downer.2
Edward Increase Bosworth, an influential clergyman and professor who was president of Oberlin College at the end of World War I, counseled, “What gets your attention gets you.” That’s true partly because attention is a finite resource, so diverting it toward one place diminishes its availability to be used elsewhere. And attention is the first step toward allegiance.
It’s a principle well understood by Donald Trump, who tirelessly amassed attention long before his political career, and crushed Republican opponents in 2016 by relentlessly drawing the spotlight to himself. American politics used to reward not only flamboyant candidates, but also sober ones, or even people who were a bit boring. The 1976 presidential race between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford might be the last national campaign featuring two flat tires, but other less inspiring figures since then have managed to elevate themselves at least briefly to national attention — like Michael Dukakis, Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Mike Pence.
And, well, Joe Biden. The concern of Democrats these days is that for all the reasons voters ought to distrust Trump — he’s corrupt, unprincipled, incompetent, short-sighted and autocratic — he casts a shadow so large that even the incumbent president finds it hard to draw our gaze. Our distraction, then, could change the course of history.
Trump’s lessons in self-aggrandizement haven’t been lost on others in his orbit. Congress has become dysfunctional not so much because its members are far apart on issues — there have often been polar drifts between left and right in America — but because politicians have come to see their jobs as more about performance than achievement. Getting attention has become not a means to draw voters toward one side or another on an issue, but an end in itself for an ambitious politician.
We are especially vulnerable to this switch from substance to slapdash because of our diminishing attention span. Gloria Mark, a professor at University of California-Irvine, has documented the decline in Americans’ ability to focus their attention, using the time people spend on a particular computer screen as a metric. By that measure, Mark’s research found, the average attention span has dropped by two-thirds over the past two decades.
Apart from the impact on our politics, Mark concluded that the loss of attention span increases physical stress and diminishes productivity. “It uses more of our very precious mental resources on top of the work that we actually need to do,” she said.3
The alarm bells about this trend were sounded long ago. In 1985, Neil Postman, a media theorist at New York University, published Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which argued that the power of visual imagery in communication was reducing journalism, politics and our understanding of history to little more than entertainment. Writing before the Internet Age, Postman noted that a society’s ability to handle complex matters would be driven by the demands of the media it mainly uses — which in his day was television.4
Now, Pew reports, Americans prefer to get even their local news from websites or social media, with television trailing by a bit and newspapers and radio far behind.5 The digital landscape is more susceptible to quick hits and frivolous choices than other media in part because the barriers between information producers and consumers are minimal; that is, you don’t need an expensive printing press or a big studio and broadcast technology to get your message out. And even legacy media are driven by the principle Postman articulated, because media respond to their audience’s needs. Even those of us who get a lot of our news from an old-fashioned source, then — an app from The New York Times, say — are likely to prefer what’s light rather than what’s heavy, like a diet that includes plenty of ice cream but not much broccoli.
It's not that we ought to avoid the news that’s unsubstantive but alluring. There’s value in knowing how callous a potential vice presidential candidate is, what ailments may disable a presidential candidate, and how Trump shuffled Stormy Daniels offstage to protect his campaign from another moral shock just after his infamous “grab ’em” video had surfaced. But this is what ought to concern journalists who choose what to cover and how it is presented — executive editors and producers, for example — and it should likewise get all of us thinking about our own priorities: The focus of our attention can skew our perspective about not just our politics, but our whole society, and it can affect our own emotional health, as well. The relentlessness of the tawdry, the weird and the ugly in our political ecosystem is broadly harmful.
It suggests that we ought to regularly look away. Epictetus, a 2nd-century Greek philosopher, had advice that has for good reason survived through the millennia. “Your life is too short and you have important things to do,” he wrote. “Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mid. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest.”
Those words came at a time of great advancement in the arts, poetry and technology. Wouldn’t it be remarkable if by mental discipline we might control our own distractions, and thus help birth a similarly vibrant era in our own society? It’s worth a try: Sometimes, just turn away from the weirdness.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/513128/attention-political-news-slips-back-typical-levels.aspx
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/americans-dismal-views-of-the-nations-politics/
https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2024/05/07/americans-changing-relationship-with-local-news/
NEWSCLIPS FROM THE UPSTATES
Dispatches from our common ground *
Wherein each week we look around what we call the nation’s Upstates — those places just a bit removed from the center of things — to find illuminating news and intriguing viewpoints, which you might not otherwise see.
This week, we share reporting published here:
Erie, Pa. (Erie Times-News, goerie.com)
Jackson, Miss. (Mississippi Clarion Ledger, clarion.ledger.com)
Salina, Kan. (Salina Journal, salina.com)
Sioux Falls, S.D. (Sioux Falls Argus Leader, argusleader.com)
NOTE: The complete “Newsclips from the Upstates” section, and The Upstate American Midweek Extra Edition, which is sent to email boxes on some Wednesdays, are available only to paid subscribers. Thanks for your support!
PENNSYLVANIA
After-school programs at risk as federal dollars expire
Federal aid authorized during the pandemic funded key after-school programs in Pennsylvania and elsewhere to help kids catch up, but with the money running out in the fall, pressure is rising on local school boards to keep the services in place during the 2024-25 school year. Ed Palatella reports in the Erie Times-News that the Erie schools already plan to raise taxes 2.46% — about $47 a year for a typical home — but that won’t be enough to keep the programs going. So far, the state hasn’t provided funds to make up the difference. The district kept the programs in place this year by hiking taxes 4.45%, but that extra money got eaten up by an expansion of mental health services for students. Now parents are urging the board to go ahead with another tax hike this year, a dynamic found elsewhere around the country.
MISSISSIPPI
Big folk festival coming — but what does that mean?
When the city council in Jackson was asked to authorize a contract for the city to host the national folk festival for three years, starting in 2025, there was some confusion. Charlie Drape reports in the Mississippi Clarion Ledger that council members were skeptical, and hesitated until the mayor rushed into the chamber and assured them that the event, which for 81 years has moved around the country under an independent organization’s sponsorship, would be a good idea. It has been about six decades, after all, since the so-called second folk revival, and American folk music has faded from popularity. “I'm pretty sure that when you go to your car and you turn it on, you don't hear folk music playing,” the mayor said to a dubious council member. But she insisted, “This festival, it will be America's music and all of the diversity of that.” Further details will be announced later, the mayor assured the council — which passed the resolution authorizing the festival.
KANSAS
When more trees aren’t beneficial for the climate
Most folks assume trees are good for the environment, notes Celia Llopis-Jepsen, a reporter for the nonprofit Kansas News Service, but that’s not true everywhere. In Kansas, the grasslands reflect more of the planet-warming sunlight, while trees absorb the warmth. That adds urgency to grassland conservation efforts, the report noted. Prairies are vanishing beneath a rapidly spreading blanket of woody plants that threatens rancher livelihoods, makes wildfires worse and eliminates habitat for grassland wildlife. Rebuilding forests is often a great idea where they existed historically in recent centuries, such as in the Pacific Northwest and many eastern states, but adding forest is generally a bad idea in places that were historically prairie, scientists agree.
SOUTH DAKOTA
Good news for parade-goers: Candy ban abandoned
For 40 years, it has been illegal to distribute candy at any parade in Sioux Falls. Trevor J. Mitchell reports in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader that the candy ban, intended to protect children who may scramble to get the sweets, has sometimes been ignored (including by some politicians eager to sweeten their constituents’ view of them). But kids can rejoice, and parade organizers can now rejoin the company of the law-abiding: By a unanimous 8-0 vote, the Sioux Falls City Council has voted to lift the ban.
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NOW, LEARN TO WRITE OP-EDS
If you’d like to learn how to write opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the live class Rex co-teaches that is offered by The Memoir Project. Click below for information. Our next class is coming up on Wedmesday, June 12 at 7 p.m. Eastern. Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too. Join us!
THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country.
-REX SMITH
As Neil Postman wrote nearly 4 decades ago, we are “amusing ourselves to death.” Huxley may have won, but Orwell did permanent damage.