The Liberal New Yorkers Who Say They’re Tuning Out the News

Since the presidential election more than two weeks ago, it has been common to hear certain kinds of left-leaning, reflective New Yorkers declare that they were breaking up with the news. The prospect of a second Trump administration with all the anticipated chaos felt like too much — they were drained, exhausted, resigned, ready to choose a plaintive ignorance. These were high-information voters who mainlined political coverage through every available 21st- century platform; a month ago they would have been able to give you the over-under on statehouse races in rural Ohio.

But now they questioned whether consuming so much news was good for them, whether it was really a civic virtue or something to be fought like any other addiction. Where had all that passion and all that focus on the constant phone alerts ultimately landed them? It was the other side, they thought — the side that had come out on top — that had been fasting from legitimate news all along.

When I spoke with a friend in Brooklyn a day or two after Donald Trump won, he told me he had committed to reading only the print paper — and just in the morning, forgoing any possible all-consuming afternoon digression into whatever might be up with Tulsi Gabbard. When I checked with him earlier this week, he was still maintaining the ritual and it felt good, he said.

But in a city where so many of us are animated by the competitive urge to know more than the person on the other side of the room, I wondered how long he could pretend it was 1982 — and how long so many people like him, up and down Prospect Park West or Riverside Drive, all so impressively well versed in the political discourse, could manage to sit things out on the sidelines.

Four years ago, a Swiss philosopher and businessman named Rolf Dobelli wrote a book called “Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life.” A decade earlier he had eliminated newspapers, television news and related apps from his life, which he later described in a TED Talk as “one of the best decisions” he ever made. In an interview with The Irish Times when his book was published, he lamented that his news-obsessed friends had lost the ability to read more than 10 pages of a book at a time. He remained informed by organizing regular “news lunches” with experts in different fields, which is something he believed, however implausibly, that regular people, without TED Talks, could also do.

Whether the liberal MSNBC audience has turned to group lunches or just drinking alone in the dark, the sense that people are shying away from the political conversation is showing up in ratings. In the week following Election Day, the network averaged 500,000 viewers a day, a decline of 39 percent compared with average viewership in October. On Nov. 11, “The Rachel Maddow Show” had roughly half the viewers, on average, than it had a month earlier.