The Hamster-Wheel of News Coverage

For all our hunger for the next bit of breaking news, we quickly forget it once we’ve extracted the emotional charge it can give us. We are soon hungry for the next outrage, the next unbelievable headline, the next political scandal. We have an intense desire to know something, but the object of that desire remains indeterminate and vague.

So we scroll hurriedly through our news feed looking for something to latch onto. The desert fathers knew that discipline is the only cure for such a condition, and Thoreau agrees: “By all kinds of traps and sign-boards, threatening the extreme…