"But just when information is needed most, to many Americans it feels most elusive."

"The rise of social media; the proliferation of information online, including news designed to deceive; and a flood of partisan news are leading to a general exhaustion with news itself.... [People are] tuning out. Mr. Trudell, a registered independent, stopped paying attention to national news about a year ago. He found it toxic and mentally taxing, and it started arguments that had no end.... The degree of alienation is new. In the late 1970s, nearly three quarters of Americans trusted newspapers, radio and television. Walter Cronkite read the news every night, and most Americans went to bed with the same set of facts, even if they had different political views.... New academic work is emerging that supports the view that news avoidance is not about left or right. Benjamin J. Toff, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota, conducted in-depth interviews in Iowa this summer and found that those who say they avoid the news tended to be younger, female and poorer — people already stretched between jobs and home, making hours of evaluating news sources 'the last thing they wanted to do with their time,' Professor Toff said. 'They had this sense that they had to be skeptical of everything out there but they didn’t have the time to spend hours to make sense of it,' he said."

From "‘No One Believes Anything’: Voters Worn Out by a Fog of Political News/Paying attention to the impeachment inquiry and other developments means having to figure out what is true, false or spin. Many Americans are throwing up their hands and tuning it all out" (NYT).

This made me think of that NYT article from March 2018, "The Man Who Knew Too Little/The most ignorant man in America knows that Donald Trump is president — but that’s about it. Living a liberal fantasy is complicated." A guy named Erik Hagerman was disturbed by what happened on election day, 2016, so he "developed his own eccentric experiment, one that was part silent protest, part coping mechanism, part extreme self-care plan.... 'It was draconian and complete... It’s not like I wanted to just steer away from Trump or shift the conversation. It was like I was a vampire and any photon of Trump would turn me to dust.'"

Silent protest... coping... extreme self-care plan.... Yeah, lots of us are coming around to that.