Covid-19 cases are rising across the country, but the virus had an early foothold in Washington state, where the Seattle area became an early epicenter of the pandemic.
HT Ellis, a microbiologist for a biotech company in Seattle, said the city’s reaction reflects its laid-back culture, but school closures announced this month heightened concerns.
“So, there is a bit of chaos hanging over us right now,” he said.
Since the 2016 election cycle, Ellis has had news fatigue – a feeling of being exhausted by the news. For him, this feeling can turn into irritation, anxiety and a kind of fight or flight response. The deluge of information about the coronavirus pandemic has only amplifying those feelings.
“Whenever I hear people talk about it, I just want to isolate myself and try to go on with life as normal, but it’s really difficult these days,” Ellis said.
In a recent Pew Research Center study, 66 percent of those surveyed said they felt worn out by the amount of news out there, compared with 59 percent in 2016. Both surveys took place before the coronavirus became the first national crisis in years and before the story seemingly hijacked every newscast, front page and press conference within view.
The pandemic also may be the first national crisis to strike at a time when the ways we get our information are in flux. Our lives are enmeshed in social media, news deserts are creating distance between people and their communities and misinformation consistently pollutes public understanding of countless issues – including covid-19.
Why people avoid news
As a freelance reporter and writer based in Washington, DC, Catherine Sweeney is used to consuming an above-average amount of news, but reading about covid-19 was different. Last week, she fell down a rabbit hole of stories about people exploiting the situation, and in the background were a host of uncertainties: How will this affect workers across the country? How long will this last? What will the long-term impacts be?
“We still don’t have answers for that, … because they can’t exist,” Sweeney said.
She wants to stay informed on coronavirus developments from the state to federal level, “but I think I can’t just unabashedly take in every single thing that’s coming out about covid-19 right now. It just got to be a little too much.”
A Reuters Institute survey from last year found that a third of people from around the world avoided news altogether.
And during a national crisis, like 9-11 or Hurricane Katrina, news burnout is par for the course. Anxiety drives a need in many people to learn as much as possible about a disaster in order to know what to do to stay safe. That can lead to news fatigue.
Along the way, people might also tune out the news as a form of emotional self-preservation, especially if they’re coping with struggles of their own.
Benjamin Toff, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and Ruth Palmer, an assistant professor at Spain’s IE University, interviewed people in the United Kingdom and Spain who said they accessed news less than once a month or never. Many of those interviewed found keeping up with the news time-consuming and emotionally draining.
Toff said for a significant number of people they interviewed, “it came down to the sense that news was doom and gloom, upsetting, created a lot of anxiety, and many of these individuals also described themselves as being people who had a lot of anxiety generally. And so, avoiding news was a strategy for how to navigate the world and sort of tune out the things that they felt were too overwhelming and upsetting.”
At the same time, many of the people they spoke with didn’t trust the news, especially if it had a political bent. Many also found news manipulative and didn’t buy into the view that journalists are watchdogs who work in the public interest.
This distrust is something that author and former journalist Rick Treon has seen firsthand in his hometown of Stinnett, a town with a population under 2,000 in the deep-red Texas Panhandle.
A few weeks ago, and well into his own news fatigue, Treon said: “I do feel like (journalists) are swarming on this with perhaps a little too much – just too much of everything – and that is causing, at least here, … most people to think that there is a big conspiracy, that the news is trying to cause panic, trying to make the stock market plunge and trying to get the president not re-elected.”
Treon later said people’s views have evolved with the situation, and they’ve begun taking the threat more seriously.
Still, false and misleading information, including inaccurate statements from President Donald Trump, continue to muddy the waters, adding to partisan dismissal of traditional news stories on covid-19.
How to fight news fatigue
University of Tulsa psychology professor Elana Newman, who also serves as research director for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, said it’s important to find a balance between taking in too much and too little information.
“I think that we all need to learn to moderate to get the information that we need, … and everybody has a different threshold for what is the necessary and needed amount of information that I need to be safe, to feel a sense of control, to make good choices – and what is too much,” Newman said.
Ellis, the microbiologist in Seattle, still follows science news, but he ignores stories that he knows will lead to feelings of hopelessness and impact his mental health.
“All I can do is, in the case of covid-19, take care of my personal hygiene, stay away from other people to try to prevent spreading it and help out where I can,” he said. “But hearing every single detail – I don’t have that fear of missing out that other people might be experiencing right now where they hyper-indulge in news.”
Sweeney, the DC-based writer and journalist, is switching gears after she realized frequently scrolling through Twitter was affecting her.
“There’s this weird, … unproductive compulsion to keep looking at it,” she said, “and I think that I’ve just needed to cut my screen time and also just make it more intentional.”
For her, that means seeking out work from reporters and news outlets that she already trusts and disregarding the flurry of anecdotes on social media.
Toff, who is also going through a bout of news fatigue, gets a boost from finding ways to decompress, like taking a walk.
“I think scheduling that time is going to become incredibly important, and making some decisions around how to make time for not thinking about news is necessary as a strategy to not get burned out,” he said. “I don’t see any other way.”
What about the journalists who are covering the crisis?
Part of what makes covid-19 news feel inescapable is it’s invaded nearly every aspect of our lives. Last week, the Department of Labor reported that the pandemic caused unemployment claims to reach 281,000, a 70,000 increase from the week before. Many white-collar employees are working from home, and there’s a collective cabin fever after the past month’s mass cancellations of conferences, events and classes.
With the steady crawl of coronavirus, every journalist is on the covid-19 beat, covering a topic that is not fully understood and that involves a constant flow of often complex information. It’s also an emotionally taxing topic – one that is undoubtedly affecting journalists’ personal lives outside of their coverage.
In recent years, a growing number of journalists have called attention to the harsh toll reporting on traumatic events can take.
At the same time, journalists face significant pressure to not get emotional about things that they cover. The industry standard is to be unbiased, to the extent that some journalists, like The New York Time’s Peter Baker, believe casting a ballot would shatter their image as an impartial observer. Being emotionally jarred by our reporting – let alone acknowledging it – doesn’t fit with the news industry’s determination to stay objective and emotionally aloof.
The mental health field deals with negative feelings in a much different way. Newman said she trains clinical psychology students to acknowledge their emotional state “so that they can be more objective,” which is a sharp departure from journalism’s tradition of ignoring emotions.
“If you know that something’s going to set you off, you have strategies in place so that you can really focus on the other person and not let your stuff, whatever it is, get in the way,” Newman said.
And why couldn’t this approach work for journalists, too?
“By knowing what it is that you’re worrying about and being able to even put it in a box, … you will be able to better engage with your sources and with your community and your coverage,” she said.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Newman said that “sitting with other people’s fears is going to be hard” for journalists, which makes self-care important. For each person, what that looks like is different. Some people need “a minute to think about something beautiful,” and others find relief by writing a list of things they can and can’t control.
“I think that remembering the purpose of journalism and the mission is a really key thing,” Newman added. “Journalists are providing the public with important, important information, and remembering – even if you have to write it down – your purpose and meaning for civil society building for getting us through this, I think will be an important thing.”
That mission is a driving force for Brooke Binkowski, the San Diego-based managing editor of the debunking site Truth or Fiction. She put it simply: “You have to give your brain a break.”
“That’s kind of what we all have to do from time to time, because we only have so much work we can do and produce before it takes a toll on us, and we can’t let ourselves fall to this,” she said. “We can’t buy into the sort of forces that benefit from a whole burned-out cadre of reporters, because look what happens when we’re not around.”
Contact Big If True editor Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
We’re nonpartisan and nonprofit. Support Big If True.
