Avoiding reading the news does not address a deeper problem: the way we think can be hijacked by people who know how. I am reminded of Blaise Pascal's "Pensées

Avoiding reading the news does not address a deeper problem: the way we think can be hijacked by people who know how. I am reminded of Blaise Pascal's "Pensées" from which I'll try to translate a passage: "Man is but a reed, the most feeble in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The universe need not entirely arm itself to crush him: a vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But when the universe would crush him, Man would be even more noble than what kills him, because he knows he's dying, and the advantage the universe has on him, the universe knows none of it. Our dignity consists, then, in thought. It is from this that we must elevate ourselves and not from space or time, which we cannot fill. Let us work, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality." Maybe we could look at it from this perspective. That avoiding the news is avoiding a channel we are aware of but not tackling the way we think makes us vulnerable to the channels we're unaware of that use the same mechanics. The intelligence community has a body of knowledge on this subject. Richard Heuer and Randolph Pherson's work might interest HN members: "Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis". "Thinking Fast and Slow" has been mentioned here quite often.