Do you have plans to actually respond with some kind of positive action? Just reading the news is akin to doing nothing.

To be clear this is not a jab, rather the observation that this is how most of us will respond.

I read the news then I think, "How awful and depressing." Then I go back to my normal day only slightly more down.

Even just talking to people about the issues can make a difference. We live in a society - engage your friends and family in rational and respectful conversation about the issues of the day. Show them that the "other" side are not the rabid fanatics that the partisan media portrays. Talk about real world examples - "my health insurance went up x% this year, why does it cost $y just for insurance and other countries get it for much cheaper?", " My commute takes x minutes to travel a few miles. Why aren't our politicians trying to reduce congestion?", "Flint has lead in the water, how do can we pay to replace aging infrastructure across the country?"

I find it terrifying that people are responding to the world by just turning off the news. I get why they want to do it but it's not a pathway to a healthy society if we all bury our heads in the ground.

> Do you have plans to actually respond with some kind of positive action?

Spot on. Activism changes the world. Watching "awful and depressing" news kills your motivation and makes you cynical.

If you want to learn about a political topic read big books. The ones written by experts, well known writers, academics, not journalists.

Democracy kind of depends on people knowing what's going on. If people just show up on election day and choose the prettiest name there's absolutely no incentive to do anything as a politician.

Playing Devil's advocate, what if one simply votes based on what's going on around them? Not reading the news doesn't imply you're secluded from the rest of society, especially if one uses the free time to make an effort to take a more active interest outside of one's bubble.

Takes 5 minutes of skimming campaign sites and the first page of google results, tops, to pick the least-horrible candidate among the (if you're lucky) two viable ones for a given election at the state or national level in the US, assuming you haven't picked up enough by cultural osmosis to make the decision with no further effort.

Local elections are a different matter, but closely following state and national policy and politics is a fairly useless hobby (so it's fine to do so if you enjoy it!) for most people, unless they plan to get much more seriously involved in the process than voting and maybe stuffing envelopes for someone. Or if they have some kind of need for deep knowledge of that stuff for business reasons, I guess, but few have such a need.

Personally, I keep up with the news, but I understand the author's position. The news is mostly depressing stuff I can't do anything about or it reads like an editorial piece that I'm left wondering what the truth is.

I'm looking out for potentially helpful side projects - for example, I built https://dcinbox.herokuapp.com a few weeks ago to help out a transparency project. I've been making increased charitable donations to relevant orgs as well.

I doubled my monthly donation to the ACLU and will now go back to ostriching.

I agree that this is a problem. I have been paying attention to the news on executive appointments that require confirmation, because I have a Republican senator I can call to encourage him to brave the populist backlash and stand up for his values in those votes.

Dropping cable and not watching CNN, Fox, or what ever your preference would be hardly counts as 'turning ostrich'. That would imply that cable news actually had some value beyond entertainment. Which, I think can be argued it hasn't. And in fact staying 'educated on what's going on' should probably be achieved some other ways and medias - especially if being 'educated' is the keyword here.

Completely agree, cable news is mostly worthless. The headline of the linked article uses the word "watch" but the actual article talks about avoiding other sources as well.

> Staying educated on what's going on feels very important to me

When people randomly talk about random news that they don't even remember the next day or some celebrity news that have no impact on him/her whatsoever, I'd feel that the person isn't really focused on his/her life.

I've ditched TV for 10 years but do read headlines on national news site daily at least to catch what's going on generally but otherwise spending time for myself that's supposed to matter more than "following" the world which is very unproductive.

What are some of these opportunities?

I'm getting more involved with local policy and an environmental groups, and hosting events for similarly motivated people.

Can you not do that without watching the news, though?

That line was quoted in one of the more recent Batman movies. Takeaway: be more like Batman.

I stopped watching the MSM news propaganda years ago along with websites that don't allow direct comments to the stories. I would say the MSM is the worst way to stay educated.

I find that some of the alternative sites where everyone beats themselves over the topic with opposing views far better method to dissect the truth (middle-ground) than from a MSM news source.

Also helps that I don't constraint my thinking and views by boxing myself into one political ideology over another. I also don't do social media news and couldn't be happier.