Is it Callous to Avoid the News?

The contemporary novelist Barbara Kingsolver, in a marvelous essay detailing why she and her family don’t watch TV, describes a conversation she had with a friend about the airplane crash involving John Kennedy Jr. Kingsolver writes that she hadn’t heard the news because she had been “attending only to the news of my own community” for several weeks, and her friend was shocked that she didn’t know about this tragedy. Yet Kingsolver averred that “it would make no real difference in my life”:

It’s not that I’m callous about the calamities suffered by famous people; they are heartaches,…