"When something big happens, I have to follow it"

Ordinary days are one thing. When something enormous happens, such as an attack, a disaster or a war breaking out, it seems natural and even right to follow it hour by hour. Everyone does. It would feel callous to carry on as normal, and you want to understand what's happened.

These are the occasions when heavy news consumption has been most carefully studied, and the findings are some of the most striking in this book.

In April 2013 two bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. In the weeks afterwards, Alison Holman, Dana Rose Garfin and Roxane Cohen Silver surveyed representative samples of nearly 4,700 Americans, including people in Boston, people in New York and people across the rest of the country. They asked about symptoms of acute stress, such as intrusive thoughts, feeling on edge and avoiding reminders. They asked whether people had been directly exposed to the bombing, by being there or being close to someone who was. And they asked how many hours a day of bombing-related media each person had taken in during the following week. Because the participants belonged to an existing survey panel, the researchers also had measures of their mental health from before the bombing.

People who'd consumed six or more hours a day of bombing coverage reported higher acute stress than people who'd been directly exposed to the bombing itself. That held after allowing for their mental health beforehand.

I should put the limits on that. It's a survey, so it can't prove the coverage caused the stress. It may be that people who were more distressed sought out more coverage, and the researchers think that's part of the story. In a follow-up that tracked more than four thousand people for three years, they found a cycle. Heavy media exposure to the bombing predicted more post-traumatic stress symptoms six months later. Those symptoms predicted more worry about future events. And that worry predicted heavier media consumption, and more acute stress, when the next atrocity came, which was the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016. Following one event hour by hour seemed to leave people more vulnerable to the next.

Think about what following a big event involves. The same footage is played again and again. You might see the worst thirty seconds of somebody's life forty times in a day. Someone who was really there saw it once. The coverage goes on long after there's anything new to say, because the audience is there. And in the first hours and days, as chapter 3 said, very little is known. It's the period of wrong numbers, false leads and speculation by people filling airtime. When you follow hour by hour, you're taking in the most distressing material at the time when it's least informative.

The World Health Organization drew a practical conclusion from this kind of research at the start of the Covid pandemic. Its advice to the public was to minimise news that caused anxiety or distress, to seek information mainly in order to take practical steps, and to seek updates at specific times during the day, once or twice. It added that the sudden and near-constant stream of news reports about an outbreak can cause anyone to feel worried.

Once or twice a day was the advice of the world's health authority during the largest news event of our lifetimes. If it was enough for a pandemic that did affect your daily life, it's enough for a crisis in a country you've never visited.

Turning the coverage off doesn't mean you don't care. The people at the centre of a disaster aren't helped by the number of hours you watch. The next chapter is about what does help.