How to Follow Events and Stay Sane

 

After following the wars in Ukraine and Gaza with great anxiety, I have found at least one piece of advice on how to follow such events and stay sane. 

It is a rather square piece of advice that will no doubt be unpopular, but it really is best to follow CNN, AP, or some other mainstream outlet.

In response to howls of protest, let me explain.  When you follow non-mainstream sources, there will be a huge profusion of rumors and speculation.  Some rumors will raise fears; others will raise hopes.  Editorials will have wildly divergent interpretations of the events and mutually contradictory projections about what is going to happen.  Some of these rumors will pan out.  Others will not.  

In Ukraine, for instance, I recall panicked accounts of planes leaving Moscow for remote areas in Siberia.  Further investigation revealed that the planes almost immediately turned around and went home, and that nuclear drills of this kind are actually routine.  A report of explosions over Belarus gave rise to fears that it might join the war.  They were sonic booms.  One thing at least I did not panic over were reports of bioweapons in Ukrainian hospitals, which some people took to mean the Russians were about to launch a biological attack. Actually, they had just found a useful propaganda weapon that caught on in the West. Gaza, in the meantime, has been rife with rumors of relief supplies from Cyprus, but nothing has come of it.

Mainstream sources, by contrast, do not usually report these rumors until they have been investigated and verified. This filtering process does delay mainstream sources from publishing rumors that turn out to be true.  But it also screens out a lot of rumors that turn out to be false (see above).  Memory being what it is, we tend to remember that rumors that mainstream sources delayed in publishing that turned out to be true and forget all the rumors that never panned out.  This can create the illusion that non-mainstream sources are more reliable, but it is an illusion.  

Chasing unverified rumors is also extraordinarily stressful because such rumors often invoke groundless fears or feed false hopes.  Reality is quite bad enough without this baseless speculation.  At the height of my fears that the Ukrainian war would lead to nuclear war, I found it strangely comforting to read about what was actually happening, which was never quite as bad or as scary.  And remember C.S. Lewis, "[R]eal resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible."