We post all of our transcripts and galleries of the art we use in the videos at Academy

of Ideas.com. News is to the mind what sugar is to the body, appetizing, easily digestible,

and extremely damaging. Most people think that consuming the news makes one uninformed

citizen who is equipped to form intelligent

opinions on social and political issues. In this video, drawing from the Swiss author Rolf Dobelly's

book, Stop Reading the News, a manifesto for a happier, calmer, and wiser life. We argue that the opposite

is true. News consumption fosters ignorance, intolerance, passivity,

and chronic stress. News organizations want you to believe they're giving you a competitive advantage.

Plenty of people fall for this. In fact, consuming the news is far from a competitive advantage.

It actively disadvantages you. There's no question that the

dross where spoon-fed every day is not only completely worthless but actively damaging,

writes Rolf Dobelly. To understand one of the problems with news consumption, we can turn to a

well-known set of experiments conducted by psychologists Martin Seligman and

Stephen Meyer in the 1960s. In these studies, rats were subjected to electric shocks. One group

could stop the shocks by turning a wheel, the other group had no means of escape. The first group

of rats did not display any adverse effects to the shocks, but the rats that were powerless to stop the shocks developed what Seligman and Meyer called learned helplessness, which is a condition marked by passivity, reduced motivation, and anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure.

In many ways, the news functions like these electric shocks. We are continually

bombarded with distressing reports that provoke stress, anxiety, fear, and a sense of hopelessness.

Yet instead of turning off the news or taking meaningful action on the issues that concern

us, we continue day after day, year after year, to expose ourselves to this steady stream of negativity.

In doing so, we place ourselves in a similar position to the helpless rats, and we gradually

develop a learned helplessness that insidiously seeps into our personal life.

...