Four years ago, I asked an acquaintance to coffee. He’d begun his career after graduating from Harvard by joining the staff of the Chicago Tribune as an editorial writer. Over the next four decades, he’d risen to become a member of the Tribune’s editorial board and a nationally syndicated columnist.
After small talk, I jumped into my questions. “Who can I trust?” “How can I know what’s really going on?” “Is Hunter Biden’s laptop real?”
I explained to my friend that I’d spent the last few years consuming news from both sides of the aisle, hoping to figure out what was going on. I complained that it hadn’t worked. “Instead of just being confused,” I said, “I’m also exhausted and angry. Who can I trust to report the truth?”
I didn’t expect his response. “Mike, it’s worse than you think, and I’m more frustrated than you are.”
Through that conversation and my subsequent research, I’ve discovered four truths that won’t surprise you:
We’re being chased by a never-ending stream of news.
The quality and trustworthiness of much of this news is lower than it was 10 years ago. Some has been designed to reinforce our views and keep us online so we maximize the news site’s revenue stream.
You and I are less able than we realize to see how bad-quality news misleads us.
Even from trustworthy news sources, little of what constitutes breaking news deals with ultimate issues.
In his 2021 book, Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs notes that those who “traffic in high information societies” like ours often lack the “personal density”—a kind of mental maturity gained from knowing history—they need to live well. I think he’s right. I also think the kind of things he recommends to gain personal density—such as reading novels and biographies, studying history, and learning to lament—are invaluable. But I believe the primary way forward is to cultivate a more vibrant relationship with God the Father through Christ his Son.
If you’re going to become the thoughtful, wise, nonanxious person you want to be—and that your friends and family need you to be—you must move from seeing the gospel through the lens of the news to seeing the news through the lens of the gospel.
Neither the state of today’s news nor the state of a heart addicted to it is in good shape. Is there a way to make things better? I think we can take several steps right now to manage this broken news moment. Three stand out to me.
1. Consume less news.
After starting my morning with an hour of silence, devotional reading, and prayer, I skim the headlines of the The Wall Street Journal. I may dip into a story or two before turning to sports, but I’m in and out of “breaking news” in five minutes. I may glance at the Journal a few other times during the day, but that’s it. No social media. No TV news.
If you find this unthinkable—or irresponsible—consider the news habits of John Huey, the former editor in chief at Time magazine. In “All the News I Intend to Quit,” an opinion piece he wrote for the The Washington Post, Huey said,
Having spent more than 40 years reporting, writing and editing the news, I am surprised to conclude that overconsumption of the news, at least in the forms I’ve been gorging on it since 2016, is neither good for my emotional well-being nor essential to the health of the republic. . . . There isn’t really enough of it, good or bad, to fill the 24/7 maw opened up by cable news, talk radio and social media. . . . I don’t intend to stop fretting about my country. Nor will I give up reading the newspapers and magazines I deem essential to understanding the world around me. But I am planning a crash news diet.
Are you consuming too much news? Why not turn it off for a week and see how that goes? Better yet, why not replace news reading with more Bible reading?
In the last pages of my book How Do You Know, I share several ways I revamped my devotional practices during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. While what I’d been doing was enough for the normal-life chaos I’d been navigating, they weren’t adequate for the pandemic. Likewise, your devotional habits may not be sufficient for this politically polarized, culturally divisive, broken news moment.
After Mother Teresa told Malcolm Muggeridge that she didn’t listen to the news or read newspapers because “when she did she got confused,” the great British journalist said, “It occurred to me that this was why she knew so much more about what was going on in the world than those who tried to keep up with current events by studying newspapers, listening to the radio and watching television. She was in touch with what really matters.”
To put a sharper point on it: If you’re spending five minutes a day reading the Bible but two hours listening to Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow, it’s no wonder you’re acting more like their disciple than Jesus Christ’s.
2. Find, follow, and support good journalism.
Limit who you trust. For a few years, I consumed both liberal and conservative perspectives to triangulate the truth. It didn’t work. All I got for my efforts was angry, confused, and exhausted.
I now believe that rather than triangulating the news, we’re better off identifying a couple of trustworthy media organizations and relying on them to do the triangulation. (My son works on one, The Pour Over.) Let them monitor what’s going on in the world, vet the sources, and tell you what’s worth knowing.
3. Strengthen yourself in the Lord.
Spend less time on the news and more intentional time with the Lord.
In 1 Samuel 30, David was navigating a particularly vexing crisis. Though the prophet Samuel had anointed David as king years earlier, Saul still occupied the throne. Worse yet, because Saul was threatened by David’s popularity and skill, he kept trying to have David killed. So the future king lived on the run.
By the end of 1 Samuel, David had gathered a group of outcasts around him and was paying his bills by hiring this group out as a mercenary force for foreign kings. But that isn’t the half of it. On the day in question, David and his men returned from a raid to discover their camp had been looted and their wives and children kidnapped. 1 Samuel 30:3–6 (NASB) says,
When David and his men came to the city, behold, it was burned with fire, and their wives and their sons and their daughters had been taken captive. Then David and the people who were with him lifted their voices and wept until there was no strength in them to weep. Now David’s two wives had been taken captive, Ahinoam the Jezreelitess and Abigail the widow of Nabal the Carmelite. Moreover, David was greatly distressed because the people spoke of stoning him, for all the people were embittered, each one because of his sons and his daughters. But David strengthened himself in the LORD his God.
You don’t need much imagination to see how bad things were. David hadn’t only been chased out of Israel and reduced to working as a foreign vigilante—his family had also been kidnapped and his friends were threatening to kill him. I’ve had bad days, but nothing like this.
So what did David do? He strengthened himself in the Lord.
Of course, this isn’t all he did. He eventually rallied his men, rescued their families, and restored order. But all that came second. The first thing David did was manage his own heart by leaning more fully into God.
I’ve pondered this passage over the years, both because it places whatever challenge I’m facing in perspective and because I need to lead myself first. As a Christ follower, I must attend to my heart before I engage with other people or in other arenas.
The Gospel Coalition