The Situation: A User's Guide to Following the News

The Situation on Tuesday took on one little piece of the news: the mass pardons and commutations that have freed the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

Today, I’m going to give you seven principles for following the rest of the news emerging from the first week of the second Trump presidency—and, more generally, the flood of news that emerges from a presidency that is all about attention. 

Over the past week, I have had a number of conversations with people deeply stressed out by the news, people who feel like a whole lot of stuff is happening very fast and who find it all very anxiety-inducing. If you can see yourself in this description, then “these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart.”

They will help. I promise.

Principle #1: Slow Down.

The news actually doesn’t care if you follow it. Not a single one of the president’s executive orders, nominations, pardons, or statements would have been worse if you had ignored it, come to it a few hours later, or stressed about it less. Your emotional reaction to the news actually affects it not one whit. Stressing about the news doesn’t make the news better. It just makes you feel worse.

Not only does your anxiety not accomplish anything productive, it actually inhibits productive thought on your part. How are you supposed to think creatively about what you might do about Thing A if you finished worrying about Thing A four hours ago, because you’ve already motored through Things B, C, D, and E and you’re currently fretting about Thing F? What if you had spent those four hours baking a strudel with Thing A vaguely on your mind instead? You might have had a great idea of something useful to do about Thing A during that time—and you’d have a strudel.  

You need to accept that you can’t follow all the news. There’s too much of it. It’s coming too fast. And a lot of it requires genuine expertise to understand.

I am about as sophisticated a consumer of executive power news as there is. I do it for a living. I have a team of professionals that I’ve set up to do it with me. And I can’t follow it all either. The most I can do is follow certain discrete streams of news, assign others to follow other discrete streams of news, and ignore the rest.

Principle #2: Feel Free to Ignore Important News

There’s an important principle that follows from not being able to follow all of the news: You have to ignore some of it.

Grant yourself this indulgence. If you follow everything, you follow nothing well. Allow yourself to specialize. You’ll be better at the stuff you do follow.

Note that ignoring the rest does not mean deciding the rest is unimportant. Far from it. The rest is very important. But I don’t do tax policy. I don’t do health care. I don’t do environmental policy. I don’t do basketball. The rest may be the most important things in the world, but they are someone else’s job.

The first trick to staying sane is deciding which part of the news is your job to follow and which part is not. 

Someone once asked Richard Posner how he managed to write so many books. He responded that he doesn’t spend a lot of time watching sports on television.

There’s a lesson for us all there, not about sports, but about specialization. 

Principle #3: Let Others Do The Work For You.

There are many different levels at which one can follow the news. It’s critical, if you want to keep your head above water, to choose the right altitude at which to understand a given issue you have decided to follow. Once you decide you don’t need to do things right now, you actually have the option of letting experts do a lot of the work for you. For example, instead of plowing through all the Trump executive orders on military matters involving the border—or the tweets about them—you could just read this careful walk-through by Chris Mirasola. Want to understand the orders affecting the civil service—that whole scary Schedule F stuff? Nick Bednar has you covered. Alan Rozenshtein can take you through the TikTok order. The quality of the information in these pieces is dramatically better than you’ll get by doom-scrolling. You just have to be willing to wait 12 hours, or 24, or 72 until someone has taken the time to do the work—rather than getting your news hit at the speed of the feed.

Note that I have made a point of highlighting Lawfare work here, because—well—I’m super-proud of the work the whole Lawfare ecosystem is doing right now. But my point is not limited to Lawfare resources at all. The point, rather, is that whatever issue you care about, there’s someone out there who knows it well, isn’t talking out of his or her ass, and will provide you with resources through which to understand it. Use those resources. They will help. They will also slow you down—and that increased slowness is a good thing.

Principle #4: Choose Trusted Sources

This is really important. There’s a lot of garbage out there. And a lot of it is specifically intended to rile you up. If you’re reading something that sounds dramatic, consider the possibility that it may not be true. Ask yourself why you haven’t seen it anywhere else. Ask yourself whether you know and trust the writer, the publication, the supposed source of the information. A lot of the time, you will not regret ignoring things that seem to fall into the “big if true” category—because they are not true, or not true as stated, or true but actually not that big. Sometimes the answer to the “why is nobody talking about this” question is that nobody is talking about it because it’s not true or not interesting. There are very few news items that are so urgent that you need to react right now and can’t give yourself time to breathe, evaluate, and check against other news sources. 

Principle #5: Don’t Get Your News From Social Media

I have nothing against social media. I like it for makeup videos and projectionsagainst Russian embassies and finding out which of my friends’ brothers-in-law just died and other such stuff. But it’s a bad way to get news.

The reason is that while it appears to put control of the news in your hands (you decide whom to follow, after all), it actually does something else: it lets you decide to whom to subcontract your sense of what is important. And it asks an algorithm to decide for you what is “for you” or what you should “discover” or what is popular among your friends.

When you look at the New York Times home page, you are making a decision that you’re going to let the editors of the New York Times—for the next block of time, at least—prioritize the universe for you. When you go on your Bluesky or X or Facebook feeds, you’re deciding to give that task to a random assortment of people you selected because they were something like you or related to you or interested in things that interest you. The overwhelming odds are that you have chosen a group of people who are (a) less expert at organizing the universe for you than the editors of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and (b) likely to magnify your prior opinions and anxieties. So if you get your news principally by scrolling, you are likely to speed things up, be less cautious about information, and be more anxious about it. 

Just say no.

Or, failing that, just say no more of the time.

Principle #6: Use The Information You Are Taking In

It is good citizenship to be informed. But the ideal citizen is not one who voraciously inhales news and does nothing with it except fret.

It is better to absorb less news and use that which you take in efficiently in the exercise of thought and civic action than to take in more than you know what to do with and just stew on it.

One good way—by no means the only one—to discipline one’s intake of information is to decide to give away a certain amount of money per unit of time and use one’s news consumption to determine how to spend that money. For example, one might commit oneself to donating a dollar a day to something and consume information with the goal of doing that in an informed fashion.

Another good strategy is to team up with a group of people and brief each other on important issues. Person A can follow a certain set of issues, Person B another set, and Person C still another set and meet every so often to keep each other up on stuff. Each person then follows some portion of the news in order to educate others about it. This can induce a sense of responsibility toward information quality, and the briefings can offer a chance to discuss sourcing and how we purport to know what we know.

My point here is that doom-scrolling is a choice, not an inevitability. There are better ways to consume information, particularly in periods in which information is coming at you fast and it’s hard to tell what’s important.

Principle #7: Don’t Be Afraid of Primary Sources

For those issues you decide you really care about and want to follow most carefully, get into the habit of reading the primary sources themselves.

One of the reasons we make a point of posting primary source materials on Lawfare is so that people have the option of going to the sources themselves and not trusting us. I almost never read news stories about court opinions any more. If I care enough about the court opinion to know about it, I care enough to read it. Does that slow me down? Yup. Do I care? Nope. In fact, I think it’s good. It makes me move at the speed of the actual text of a document someone took the time to write, rather than at the speed of an often ungenerous caricature of that document that someone else chose to tweet.

The bottom line is that consuming information, not unlike consuming food, is a matter that requires a certain amount of deliberation and strategy.

 Otherwise, you feel gross.