The news is broken. In the United States, it may feel like our news cycle is designed to make people anxious and depressed. It may feel like journalism exploits our divisions and amplifies our fears more than ever. But how can we fix it?

Amanda Ripley has been a journalist for over 20 years, and she’s diagnosing one of the US’ biggest problems: Our news. Ripley says that adding these 3 considerations back into the equation could save our media.

AMANDA RIPLEY: In the past, we would find the news, and today the news finds us, whether we want to be found or not. You get a text message from a friend with a headline, you'll open Instagram, there it is, you can't escape it. But these days, no national news outlet is trusted by more than half of American adults. And that's a problem, right, which we can see. If we don't have a common sense of reality, then it's very hard to solve problems, even the problems that we could solve. It makes us very, very vulnerable to conflict entrepreneurs and politicians who wanna exploit our division as well as journalists who are exploiting our divisions. So I feel like the news has to evolve. The news has to change in order to be more helpful to people, given everything we know, not just about technology today, but also about psychology, about what humans need to thrive in a complicated, interdependent, globalized world. My name is Amanda Ripley and I am a journalist and a co-founder of Good Conflict and the author, most recently, of "High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out." I've been a journalist for about 20 years. I spent 10 years as a senior writer at Time magazine and I loved the news. I remember going on vacation and working incredibly hard to find a newspaper wherever I was. News was, for me at least, a way to feel connected to other people, to feel more curious, not less, a way to understand what seemed inexplicable. I mean, it's crazy looking back on it, but I actually enjoyed it.

- I wanna welcome you to the first presidential debate. The participants tonight are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

- But I think it was during 2016 where I started to feel like, man, the news was just not functioning.

- Are we fake news, Kellyanne? Is CNN fake news?

- Under no circumstances do you get to speak to me in that manner.

- Don't interrupt me.

- Your ancestors came here legally.

- It didn't seem to be convincing anyone of anything that they didn't already believe, and it felt like any story I might do was either going to make our political and social divisions worse, or, more likely, have no effect at all. I just lacked the energy to do anything after I'd gotten through all of my news consumption for the day. So then I tried dosing it, like, you know, you might with a drug, like I would move my news consumption to the end of the day when I'd kind of given up all hope anyway. And then I eventually went to a therapist and asked her about it. And she said, "Well, I have the solution. Stop consuming news. Like, if it's really leaving you afraid and distressed, it's probably not serving you." But that just didn't feel like an option. We need good conflict in this country, right? Like, there are a lot of fights that we need to have, but we need to have them in a way. It went against a lot of my identity and values. But the thing that really kind of finally forced me to reckon with this was, one by one, I had a series of journalist friends tell me that they were experiencing the same crisis. So at that point I decided, okay, this is probably partly a me problem, but it's also a news problem. We now know that 4 in 10 Americans, according to the Reuters Institute, are actively avoiding contact with the news some or all of the time. 1 in 10 Americans are totally disconnected from the news on purpose all the time. And this is a trend all around the world where more and more people are finding the news so repetitive and dispiriting and untrustworthy, that they are actively avoiding it. When the Reuters Institute asked people why they avoid the news all around the world, 43% cited politics or COVID, 36% cited the negative effect that the news had on their mood, 29% said they were worn out by the amount of news, 29% said news is untrustworthy or biased, 17% said the news leads to arguments that they'd rather avoid, and 16% said there's nothing that can be done with the information they're getting. A lot of the challenges that we're dealing with are because the political polarization has accelerated that decline in trust.

- Voters are both energized and polarized right now with voters in both parties seeing the other side as an existential threat to the country. Take a look.

- There is something diabolical about intractable conflict, which is what we are in, in the United States and many other countries. What happens is news outlets tend to pull to extremes, just like highly partisan voters. And so the more outraged and disgusted journalists become on one side, the more they lose the trust and interest of people and readers and audiences on the other side. So if you are left frightened and despondent by the news, then, of course, you're gonna try to find news sources that make you feel better or at least make you feel morally superior. But even on the left, trust is not that high. As of 2022, according to the Reuters Institute, only 39% of Democrats say that they really trust the news some or all of the time. Whereas on the right, it's more like 14%. It's hard to know whom to trust. And the less trust there is, the less trustworthy a lot of new sources become. And that leads to more and more distortions, which leads to less and less trust. So it's a bit of a negative feedback loop. The other change, of course, is that now people can find the news that confirms their worldview really easily.

- How are you supporting this transgenderism stuff and you're a Christian?

- Communism has actually seen successes.

- The Democrats will use a crisis to dictate control over people.

- Today, because of the way news travels, there is this ego drive and this competitive pressure to break the news first. So in an attention economy like we're in, we get information from people who are not even journalists. Well, if you're in a mad scramble all the time to be first, then you're going to lose quality, you're going to lose fact checking, you're going to lose the ability to put things in perspective. And that's not just because of the time pressure, but also because of the competitive pressure and the lack of resources that a lot of newsrooms are dealing with today, especially in the print news world. So in an attention economy like we're in, that means that you are just hammered all the time with fear and threat and outrage. And we are not equipped to be constantly bombarded with the most terrifying, disturbing news from all around the globe all the time. Let me give you an example. The other day, I happened across a list of the cognitive biases that lead to depression and anxiety. Things like all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, catastrophizing, minimizing the positive. Every single thing on this list is something that journalism does as a convention all the time, just as a habit. That is what we do. And it really shook me up because I was thinking, "Wow, it's like we're creating content in order to leave people depressed and anxious." In fact, that's not the intention, right? But that is the effect. And since we now know that consuming a lot of news does lead to depression and anxiety, it does beg the question, isn't there a better way? I do think that you can cover what is happening in the world in a rigorous, serious, clear-eyed way, without catastrophizing and minimizing the positive and overgeneralizing. That is possible. I've done it. I've seen other people do it to great effect. But it requires a very different mindset about what is the news and how we should deliver it. I think it boils down to three things that are missing from the news: hope, agency, and dignity. These are things that sound fluffy, nice to have, but we actually know now from neuroscience and psychology that humans need these things in order to get up in the morning, in order to have a democracy, in order to raise children. We need them like we need water. It's funny to me as a journalist, we never really talked about dignity or hope or agency, but dignity in particular. And I'll never forget, I heard Shamil Idriss from an organization called Search for Common Ground that works in conflict zones, war zones all around the world. And he said everywhere he goes, one thing is the same, that humans need a sense of dignity, which is a sense that you matter. No matter what else happens, no matter how unfair the world is, each person matters. What does that look like in journalism, right? I think it looks like following up on stories of mayhem and disaster and not just parachuting in on the worst day. Asking people what they wanna know, how we can help them as journalists. WBEZ's Curious City program in Chicago asks people and has for years this beautiful question, which is, what do you wanna know about your city that we could help you find out? That gives people respect and it says, "We are here to serve and to link arms with you. We are not here to tell you what to think and to convince you that you're wrong or right. We are here to be helpful to you and to listen to you deeply." People need to know that even if they personally can't fix a big social problem, it is possible, collectively, to make a difference. And we know from three decades of research into the science of hope, that hope is actually a muscle, it's a skill that you develop. It's not a thing that either exists in a given situation or not. It is something that helps us make better decisions and make the world a better place. It is something that you do.