All the News That Gives You Fits

In August, researchers writing in the journal Health Communication reported findings from a study of media consumption habits. In results that will come as no surprise to anyone who has spent five minutes on Twitter, they found that Americans who engaged in “problematic media consumption”—that is, excessive amounts of news viewing online, in print, and on television—experienced harmful mental health effects as well as disruptions to sleep and in their personal interactions with others. “While we want people to remain engaged in the news, it is important that they have a healthier relationship with the news,” one of the researchers noted in a press release.

Thankfully, Chris Stirewalt is here to help. In Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back, the former Fox News Channel political editor and current fellow at the American Enterprise Institute offers a sharply observed and at times hilarious journey through our contemporary media ecosystem, with particular focus on how Americans helped build and now gleefully participate in the running of the “rage machine” of the book’s subtitle. (Full Disclosure: I recently became a colleague of Stirewalt’s at AEI.)

For a book about an industry riven by political strife, Broken News is refreshingly free of partisan cant. In fact, Stirewalt makes clear that the problems facing journalism impact everyone on the political spectrum: “What is wrong with my vocation and the industry in which I work is harming Americans left, right, and center,” he argues.

Why are we so angry and polarized? Stirewalt traces the shift from print to radio to television to the Internet and the challenges these different modes of communication pose to civic health. He describes how these developments contributed to the growth of national media, often at the expense of local news. And he argues passionately for the importance of healthy media for American life. “The American Creed requires written words and a common culture in which to understand them,” Stirewalt argues. Today, however, “much of our news does not aim to make ideas understood, but to generate powerful feelings—often fear, anger, and resentment.”

Stirewalt

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