Addicted to the News

News seized my attention in elementary school and never let go. The most fun I had in the classroom was when our seventh-grade social studies teacher handed out a weekly magazine called Current Events. How that innocuous periodical breached the ramparts of our insular ultra-Orthodox Yiddish-oriented yeshiva, I do not know.

In contrast to most of my classmates, my mother read a tabloid newspaper regularly, and we had a television.

By the time I was finishing high-school (at a somewhat less inward-looking yeshiva), I had begun picking up the New York Times at the newsstand. That sufficed through college. When I started graduate school, I had discovered kiosks that sold out-of-town newspapers and started getting The Washington Post. At some point, a newspaper home delivery company belatedly began servicing our Lower East Side neighborhood. I “took” the Times, Washington Post, and either the Daily News or the New York Post.

The mailman delivered The Christian Science Monitor (because John K. Cooley, based in Beirut, provided coverage of Palestinian Arab affairs available nowhere else). On Fridays, the weeklies arrived, such as the Village Voice, The New York Jewish Week, The Washington Jewish Week, and the Forward (between 1983-2000 a balanced must-read).

Separately, I’d buy the pricey Economist weekly and the Manchester Guardian (which carried Le Monde), both printed on thin airmail newsprint.

Clipping file 'Hamas' 1996

Through involvement in Zionist politics, I met NR (Ricky) Greenfield, a Wall Street guy who went on to buy the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, who subscribed to a slew of newspapers, magazines, and Jewish periodicals. Ricky would send out a weekly packet of photocopied opinion clippings, and I felt privileged to get on his mailing list. In the pre-Internet age, getting Ricky’s clippings helped me know what pundits were saying.

Still, I had a craving for more. I was taking the JTA Daily News Bulletin (awfully expensive to private subscribers like me but, in those days, a unique fair-minded resource) and Beijing Review, the airmail edition of The Jerusalem Post – and who remembers what else. The Beijing Review weekly because I was researching China’s policy toward the Arab-Israel conflict. Eventually, I built clipping files (anti-Semitism to Zionism) something newspapers and organizations did on a bigger and better scale in the pre-Internet age.

The written word didn’t satiate. So, I tuned into Kol Israel over shortwave and watched (what is today) the PBS Newshour and C-SPAN (which transmitted congressional proceedings). When I could, I also listened to Morning Edition and All Things Considered on NPR. 

The news and views that I was hooked on were explicitly about politics. Fortunately, it was a compulsion I could feed legally without having to mug anyone.

I knew there was no way to maintain my expensive habit once I gave up my job and moved to Israel. I did arrange for the New York Times Book Review and a handful of other subscriptions to be forwarded to me via my Israeli family, knowing I probably would not renew them.

Fortunately, by 1997 the Internet had taken off, and soon I was reading online newspaper websites. I’d still buy the International Herald Tribune (in those days a joint endeavor of the Washington Post and The New York Times), which arrived in Israel from Paris within a day or so of publication. When I started working at The Jerusalem Post, I began to read the news in Hebrew laboriously. The Post used to print several Haredi newspapers, and I began perusing those to get a sense of their jargon and sensibilities.

My obsession with current events was undiminished, but it narrowed parochially to Israel (with an eye on the Old Country and perhaps Britain). Now, I faithfully watched the Hebrew news on television, switching between the channels.

However, my world broadened again when I began working for a US news outlet, and I had to refamiliarize myself with the personalities and players.

As I soaked-up news and views, it dawned on me that people around me not only did not take in much news many conscientiously avoided knowing what was going on. Israelis no longer reflexively stopped in their tracks for the hourly radio news bulletin.

Nowadays, my impression is that Israelis do not routinely watch the nightly news broadcasts on TV or read newspapers or make it a point to tune into radio news broadcasts. Israel’s various tribes, clans, and demographic clusters get views/news tailored to their worldview via provincial newspapers, wall posters, or blinkered social media posts.

Now, instead of being passively uninformed, the masses (Millennials & Gen Z especially) are actively stupefied by news packaged as entertainment, tendentious misinformation, or purposeful disinformation.

Even as the 24/7 news cycle churns, and websites and social media platforms proliferate, fewer and fewer sources of firsthand reliably reported news survive. Media outlets who don’t rightfully subscribe to a news gathering agency such as AP or Reuters might cannibalize information gathered by others and repackage it to fit their worldviews – perhaps burying a hyperlink to the real source of the story.

This watered-down product that passes for news and views today was playing havoc with my habit, as was the intensification of brazen advocacy journalism, particularly at The New York Times.

It was as if high-grade heroin had been cut so often that the only ingredient remaining was the talc filler. I was effectively being weaned off original news/views and consequently going through uncomfortable withdrawal pains. I’d anyway shifted professional gears to book editing and website content writing. After decades of dependency, my news cravings were easing.

These days I can limit my daily intake to several newspapers (which I prefer to read in PDF form) and media outlets — and a few visits to Twitter. I restrict how much time in toto I devote to news/views.

A significant aid to curbing my intake is the availability of newsletters whose editors vet and aggregate the torrent. I don’t feel I may be missing something.

Those that I have come to rely on most are:

The Drudge Report (flagship of aggregators, right-leaning but unpredictable/US focus), News Nosh (left-left-leaning/Israeli focus/ opinionated), JI Daily Kickoff (excellent, balanced, comprehensive/Israel/diaspora), Politico’s Playbook (US politics/liberal), and the Daily Alert (Israel/Middle East/center) and Real Clear Politics (which aggregates opinion and averages polls).

It is even possible to blend these aggregators into one funnel through platforms such as Feedly, which aggregates the aggregators.

It’s been a hard slog, but I’m drinking in less news/views without going off the grid entirely — one day at a time.