What is News? My Thoughts on the Modern Information Diet

It's Time to Take Control of the Stories in Your Mind

Chances are, you know the latest thing happening in Washington, but you couldn't name the ten most important scientific advancements of the past year, or which countries have recently made meaningful progress on climate change. I’m not criticizing you for that. It’s actually not your fault. Our information environment is often not in our control, especially if we’re not approaching information consumption with specific intentions.

When I was a college student, I became fascinated by how differently the same set of events could look depending on who you were. The moment that cracked this open for me: learning that what we in the US call the Vietnam War is called the American War in Vietnam. That single reframing stopped me cold. If the name of the war changes depending on who's doing the naming, I thought, what else shifts when you change the vantage point? Whose version of events am I walking around with, and how would I even know?

That question has stayed with me. And lately, it's been surfacing in the context of the information I consume every single day.

Today, I see people in both my personal life and in my practice who treat keeping up with geopolitical news as a kind of moral obligation. Before I've said anything remotely resembling "you might consider reading less news," I'll hear things like "I can't just bury my head in the sand" or "I need to know what's going on." The defensiveness is telling. It suggests that the relationship people have with their information diet isn't entirely conscious. It's almost compulsive, a habit dressed up as a civic virtue. That's worth sitting with.

I've been following the work of The Progress Network, whose tagline is "Let's create the future of our dreams instead of our fears." This reminds me of one of the foundational insights of Positive Psychology: it's not in our best interest to ignore the hard and painful things in life, but when we deliberately emphasize what's going well, just as much if not more, we feel better and become more capable of contributing in the ways that actually matter to us. That's not naivete. That's intentionality.

Do You Eat Chips for Dinner Every Day? No? Then Why Would You Consume the Informational Equivalent Every Day?

All of this brings me to a crossroads I've been sitting with personally. I've started to notice that my own information diet has drifted rather than been chosen. I absorb news not because I've decided it serves me, but because it's there: in my phone, in my conversations with friends, family, and clients, in the ambient noise of modern life. The pace of the news cycle has accelerated. I'm a person who is sometimes asked by writers to weigh in as an expert source, and even in that small corner of the media world, I've noticed how tight the deadlines are. I often feel the tension between giving a more considered response versus simply getting something in on time. If I feel that pressure, I can only imagine what the writers feel. The whole ecosystem is moving faster than is conducive to careful thinking.

The very concept of what even counts as "news" has shifted dramatically as well. The traditional business model in journalism has collapsed and local journalism has largely disappeared. There are so many communities across the US who have no accountable reporting where they live. That absence is its own crisis. Most people under 50 years old now encounter news primarily through Instagram, X, and YouTube, where there are no editorial standards, no fact-checkers, and no real consequences for getting things wrong. When we get our information from these sources, algorithms now determine what we consume. It’s a tradeoff most of us never consciously agreed to but actively perpetuate. Kyle Chayka wonders in his book Filterworld, “In passively consuming what I was interested in, had I given up my agency to figure out what was truly meaningful to me?”

Yes, we have given up our agency. How can we reclaim it? I am trying to figure that out.

On The Progress Network's podcast "What Could Go Right?", the host asked a question that I keep returning to. If we are intentional about what we eat, why wouldn't we be equally intentional about what we let into our minds?

So I want to ask you the same thing I've been asking myself. What does your information diet actually consist of? How do you decide what gets through, what goes in through the eyes and ears and takes up residence in your thinking? Do you have any guideline or intention around it, or has it mostly just accumulated? And perhaps most importantly: how does the information you consume affect you, emotionally and psychologically?

I don't think there's one right answer. But I do think most of us have never really asked the question and we have to start in order to reclaim our psyches.