“Reading the news is the new smoking” — and the comment section argues about whether quitting is a privilege

The smoking analogy, stated and stress-tested

Adam Mastroianni's 2022 essay argues daily news is the new cigarette: habitual, stress-inducing, harmful to bystanders, and long mistaken for a civic virtue. His evidence is the familiar canon — two weeks of New York Times front pages skewed overwhelmingly toward wrongdoing, readers who badly overestimate homicide and accident deaths while underestimating heart disease, and “fire alarm fatigue” that renders constant alarm meaningless. After quitting in 2020, he writes, “my brain got quieter and I started hearing myself think.” His prescription: drop the daily drip, substitute long-form, focus on the local sphere where you can act.

The rebuttals that complicate the clean quit

The thread's most piercing reply came from lived experience. A reader in Ukraine described quitting news from 2015–2019 as “the best period of my life in terms of … clarity of mind” — until Covid, and then a war at home, left “my system … completely broken,” with going offline no longer an option. The abstraction of “just quit” collides hard with a front line.

The civic objection came from someone whose job is the news. The tech lead at ProPublica drew the line at withdrawal:

“If you do nothing about genocide, you don't care about genocide. You always have levers to pull. Our role in a democracy is not to be a passive consumer.”

The data point that quietly undercuts the thesis

The most interesting empirical challenge questioned the essay's own central evidence. One reader pointed out that the gap between crime perception and reality probably isn't caused by news at all: local news is effectively dead, and national outlets “generally don't cover crime less severe than mass murder” — so the distortion tracks social media, not newspapers. That reframes the whole argument: maybe the thing to quit was never “the news” but the infinite feed it now arrives through. Fittingly for a story surfaced on a news aggregator, the thread's most-shared coping strategy was the one you're using right now — “I only read hacker news,” several admitted, with varying degrees of irony.