“I’m taking a break from the news.” It’s a refrain I hear more and more often.
Last week, Dan Rather sent out a tweet saying that “even I feel I need a break” from the news sometimes. His remedy: a walk in the woods. Last year, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that over a third of American respondents avoid the news, the main reason being the “depressing nature of the content itself.”
The solution isn’t to soften the news, of course. But if journalism provided a more comprehensive view of the world, it might not be so oppressive. That’s one of the central arguments in Steven Pinker’s new book, “Enlightenment Now Scaredbythe News? Takethe Long View: Progress Gets Overlooked,” which assesses many forms of progress that have been made to improve the human condition in recent centuries and decades — progress that many people (in some cases most people) are unaware of or have lost sight of.
[For more on this story David Bornstein, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...lightenment-now.html]
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