I used to be a news junkie. I subscribed regularly to a major newspaper, and watched TV news of some sort almost every day. It all started when I took a political science course as an undergraduate student at the University of Georgia. My professor required that all the students in his class subscribe to a daily major newspaper, on the theory that we should all keep ourselves up to date on political and world events.

In fact, it seems to be a common idea — not just among professors — that any intelligent person should be knowledgeable about world events. The media heaped scorn on George W. Bush when he referred to the people of East Timor as East Timorians instead of East Timorese. The interviewers at the Miss America pageant thought nothing of asking questions such as "What really caused the events at Columbine High School?" To be part of our culture seems to require being perpetually updated on the news of the day.

But I've sworn all off. No more news for me.

I had suspicions about the news industry after reading Neil Postman's How to Watch TV News, which described how television news is consumed with entertainment and glamour, rather than substance. But what finally pushed me over the edge was C. John Sommerville's latest book: How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Age. Sommerville, a professor of history at the University of Florida who has published scholarly studies of the history of journalism, penned this provocatively-titled book in order to persuade us that the news industry is positively harmful.

The central problem is not that the news is biased, or that journalists are incompetent, or that the news industry is devolving into an elaborate version of Entertainment Tonight. No, according to Sommerville, the one problem with the news, from which most other problems stem, is that the news is daily. Thus, the New York Times and CNN are just as problematic as USA Today or the National Enquirer.

Why is dailiness a problem? Sommerville offers several reasons. First, the daily nature of the news (which means that publishers have to sell their product on a daily basis) encourages journalists to create a sense of crisis or tragedy.

One example, of course, is the death of JFK, Jr. For the first couple of days after his plane was reported missing, no one could offer anything more than speculation about Kennedy's fate. Nevertheless, the TV news channels carried a steady stream of updates with headline like, "Breaking News on the Kennedy Tragedy." Of course, given the death rate in our country, there were likely a few thousand deaths that same day, and the Kennedy death was no more important in the grand scheme of things than any of the others. But because of the news industry's continuous operation, the journalists had to have something to sell — and nothing sells like a story that can be deemed a "tragedy."

Another problem with dailiness is that it discourages the placement of issues and events into a larger or deeper context. "The very survival of the news business depends on our seeing life as jumpy and scattered," says Sommerville, rather than as falling into a historical pattern or embodying some philosophical outlook. The constant need to find new events to talk about tends to displace any serious attempt to discuss the historical and philosophical implications of such events.

Sommerville tells a story about Hilton Kramer, a journalist for the New York Times. One Times editor invariably began meetings with the question "So what's new?" Finding this question irritating, Kramer once answered, "There's absolutely nothing new this week." The editor's response: "Is that a trend?"

As Sommerville explains, "This is a parable for our time, in which we are determined to know only what is new and nothing about the world of thought in which the new will find its place." (p. 39). It all brings to mind Thomas Jefferson's opinion: "The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."

The news industry's concentration on excitement and gossip — exacerbated by the need to sell product daily — likely causes it to ignore events which history will deem the most important of our time. Events are seen as newsworthy only because they carry some immediacy or excitement, not because of any per se impact on the course of world events. Sommerville quotes Malcolm Muggeridge's poignant statement: "I've often thought ... that if I'd been a journalist in the Holy Land at the time of our Lord's ministry, I should have spent my time looking into what was happening in Herod's court. I'd be wanting to sign up Salome for her exclusive memoirs, and finding out what Pilate was up to, and ... I would have missed completely the most important event there ever was."

So it may be in our time. While the journalists and news organizations are consumed with what the celebrities wore at the Emmy's, the people who will be remembered in the future as the most influential of our time may be quietly laboring, unheralded and unsung. As Sommerville says, "If you tried to write the history of the Renaissance from the news of that day, you would miss everything that we treasure from that time."

The impact of the daily news on our system of government is also disturbing. Again, because of the voracious appetite of the news industry for new events on which to report, journalists desire political change above all else. Sommerville quotes a 1992 Time magazine report to the effect that journalists overwhelmingly supported Clinton, in large part because of a "simple yearning for change" and a "hunger for new battles, new issues, above all new faces."

Another effect of daily news is that the focus of our national political discussions becomes centered on the question, "What have our politicians done for us lately?" An example is the recurrent penchant for analyzing the first 100 days of a presidency, with the implication that any new president must begin by instantly proposing dramatic new pieces of legislation or social programs. Thus, Sommerville argues, the daily news is a deeply anti-conservative industry; it is "liberal by its very nature." The assumption of the daily news is that "change is the really important feature of life, and this is not a conservative sentiment."

Sommerville answers the expected counter-argument that the news industry is necessary to expose the corruption of government, a traditional example being Edward Morrow's challenge to Senator McCarthy. Au contraire, says Sommerville. McCarthy held what power he had because of the news industry's need to put out daily stories. That is, McCarthy was able to manipulate the news industry by calling press conferences at strategic moments, leaving journalists "reluctantly grateful" to him for providing them with so much material for their daily enterprise. More generally, the news industry and politicians are engaged in a symbiotic relationship — journalists make careers by reporting every day on the foibles of politicians, while politicians make their careers by vying to be on the nightly news.

What is Sommerville's solution? To abandon the daily news outright in favor of reading periodicals and books. The very reason that Sommerville concentrates on dailiness — rather than on the usual complaints, such as bias, commercialization, censorship, incompetence, etc. — is to emphasize that the news industry is irretrievably flawed and must be discarded. "Our knowledge and sanity depend on giving up news product," says Sommerville. "My recommendation is that news be put in its place, perhaps on a monthly schedule but in more substantial amounts, and that it be read after we've read more substantial fare, if there's time." "The things we actually need to know are very few. And they don't fall into the category of news. If we have to ignore something, it ought to be the ephemeral. What we need to concentrate on are what we suspect are the great truths, the age-old topics."

Some people have to read the news daily, such as businesspeople who have to know what the market is doing, or lawyers who have to keep abreast of the latest cases and statutes. But for most of us, in most aspects of our lives, the news as it is reported today is largely irrelevant. No one, not even college students under pressure from their professors, should feel guilty for not being up-to-the-minute on every political skirmish in Washington or every celebrity divorce.

Perhaps instead of reading the news every day, we should worship God, or try to develop relationships within our own local communities, or even read books. "What if we neglected the celebrity gossip, political rehash, distant natural disasters and plane crashes and started cultivating our own neighborhoods?" Sommerville asks rhetorically. I doubt if anyone in the news industry has a good answer.