"A responsible person keeps up"

This is the belief that gives the habit its respectability. In a democracy, citizens ought to know what's going on. People who don't follow the news are part of the problem. You may have been brought up in a house where the six o'clock news was watched in silence, and where being well informed was a mark of seriousness.

I agree with the principle. A society works better when people understand the issues, vote with some knowledge, and notice when those in power misbehave. If I thought the alternative to checking was ignorance, I'd tell you to carry on.

But look at what citizenship asks of you in practice. It asks you to vote every few years, with a reasonable grasp of what the parties propose and how the last lot performed. It asks you to form views on the large questions, which change slowly. It might ask you to write to your MP about something you care about, give money or time to a cause, serve on a jury, or turn up at a local meeting. It asks you to talk to other people about public matters in a way that sheds some light.

None of those is improved by the twenty-fourth look of the day. Your vote at the next election will be no wiser because you read on Monday afternoon that pressure on the minister was mounting. The large questions are better understood through one long article than through a hundred headlines. And good conversation about public affairs comes from people who've thought about a subject. Having been alarmed by it many times doesn't help.

I think something subtler is going on as well, and this is my interpretation. Checking produces a feeling of participation. When you've followed a story all day, you feel involved in it, as though your attention were a contribution. It's a bit like the feeling of having dealt with your email, when all you've done is read it. Reading about a famine isn't doing anything about the famine. The feeling can even stand in for action. Someone who's spent an hour absorbing bad news has the sense of having done their civic duty for the day, and is less likely, not more, to do the ten-minute thing that would make a small difference.

You're also far from alone in finding the volume too much. The Reuters Institute at Oxford surveys news habits in dozens of countries every year. In its 2026 report, 42 per cent of people said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29 per cent in 2017. Many of them are conscientious people who've found that the way news now arrives is bad for them. The institute regards this as a problem for democracy, and if it means people switching off entirely, I agree. It's a reason to find a way of keeping up that a person can sustain.

Responsible citizenship can be measured by what you understand and what you do. On both counts, one deliberate session a day beats twenty-five glances, and a weekly read like Neil's probably beats both.