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To follow the news, or to avoid the news, that is the question; whether one has a duty to engage with mankind's inhumanity to man, or whether there is no point in plunging oneself into despair by staying informed about daily horrors and atrocities we are powerless to prevent.

The news is presently so sickening that those of us who are news-addicted understand and envy the growing legions of folk who successfully observe the sanity-saving, despair-avoiding practice of news avoidance.

"Globally, news avoidance is at a record high, according to an annual survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published in June 2025," The Guardian has reported. .

"Forty per cent of respondents, surveyed across nearly 50 countries, said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29 per cent in 2017."

And everywhere the main reason the surveyed gave for actively trying to avoid the news was that they found the news unsettlingly nightmarish, that it gave information they, the surveyed, could do nothing with.

Your columnist has had a long, news-mongering working life in journalism and so often lacks the willpower to ignore news. News tempts me in the ways that all vile temptations tempt the weak-willed. And so the phenomenon of news avoidance is an occasional theme of this column.

I return to it today and not only because today's news (especially of Trumpian wars and of the USA's accelerating descent into fascism) is so grotesque. My other reason is that a new idea about us and our news-consumption has just alighted in my inbox. This is column of ideas, not of news, which is why so many of you, dear readers, instinctively turn first to it when you open this otherwise distressingly news-obsessed newspaper.

In........

© Canberra Times