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Andrew DelPonte, a teenager in Maryland, started his days listening to NPR. Brandon Wilson, a professor in California, drove his long commute home blaring MSNBC on SiriusXM. And Michelle Mullins, who works on corporate food loss and waste in Arkansas, fell asleep most nights watching CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

That is, until Nov. 6. Since the election, they’ve had it with the news.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> won reelection with 312 electoral votes, but the <a href="https://www.cookpolitical.com/vote-tracker/2024/electoral-college" target=_blank>popular vote</a> shows a closer outcome between him and Vice President <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/kamala-harris/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Kamala Harris</a>. Among the 74.5 million people who did vote for her (with current tabulations coming within about 1.5 percentage points of all votes), some now treat the news like the plague. For the sake of sanity and self-preservation, they’re turning it off and tuning out.

No more push alerts. No more news podcasts. No more cable broadcasts.

For Wilson, “I pretty much stopped on a dime.” He consumed a lot of news about the election, but stopped with the MSNBC broadcasts the day after Trump’s win. It was the Monday-morning quarterbacking he couldn’t stand; he felt it was too early to nitpick about how Harris had run her campaign, and he found “the finger-pointing and bashing of the Democratic Party” to be counterproductive. (It’s worth noting that liberal-leaning MSNBC saw a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/business/media/msnbc-fox-news-ratings-election.html" target=_blank>big drop-off</a> in audience the week after the election, whereas Fox News saw a big jump.)

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“We’re all absorbing a lot about what this win is going to mean, and the last thing I need is a lot of things that raise my blood pressure,” says Wilson, 53. “Like blaming the candidate for some obvious problems with the electorate, like misinformation and disinformation.”

This all feels very different from 2016. Back then, Trump shocked everybody, himself included: A businessman turned reality TV star with no political experience and, well, a lot of baggage, had become president. The nation — plot twist! — had officially entered unprecedented territory. How would it go? Each new, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/12/02/a-guide-to-all-the-ways-trumps-transition-is-like-a-reality-show/" target=_blank>seemingly unbelievable development</a> generated breathless coverage, and enormous ratings. Digital audiences grew. News outlets signed up legions of new subscribers who wanted to follow every detail of the transition and Trump’s ascent. In the media industry, it was referred to as “the Trump bump.”

Back then, Mullins, 49, felt “disbelief” at Trump’s win — and a need to pay very close attention to “what kind of outrageous things he is going to do.”

But now? She’s skipping her regular news podcasts and listening to more audiobooks, because this feels like the sequel to a horror movie she has already lived through. “I just don’t even want to know what kind of outrageous thing he’s going to do,” she says. “I’m resigned to, ‘He’s going to do outrageous things, and we’ll deal with it when he’s gone.’”

DelPonte, 19, was also very plugged in during the lead-up to the election. He read all 920-some pages of Project 2025, the conservative playbook for a new Trump administration, to understand what could happen next. But now? “I don’t need to hear the day-to-day preparations about what they’re doing to strip away rights for millions of Americans every day,” he says.

So he has turned off his Apple News alerts and quit the NPR broadcasts. Continuing to expose himself to all that news would make him “a glutton for punishment.”

That seems logical. If Elon Musk acting as a sort of co-president, mass deportations starting on Day 1 and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/20/trump-project-2025-second-administration/" target=_blank>Project 2025 authors becoming Cabinet officials</a> are your definition of a national nightmare, taking a break from the news makes perfect sense.

But this behavior actually runs counter to how people tend to react to something they consider a “tragedy,” says Roxane Cohen Silver, professor of psychological science and public health at the University of California at Irvine. When an event happens that distresses people, those people consume more information about it. The pull to bad news is so profound that we do this even though it’s physically bad for us. <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1316265110" target=_blank>In one study</a>, Silver found that people who saw a lot of images of the Boston Marathon bombing in the days after were more distressed than people who were at the actual bombing.

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Perhaps the pull to the news is about control. “Clinicians talk about when people are anxious about something, they seek out information to sort of monitor their environment so they don’t encounter what they’re scared of,” Silver says. It’s sort of like being terrified of snakes, then being vigilant about snakes on your walks.

So this is an entirely different phenomenon, but one Silver has observed among those around her. “How is it that people are potentially able to shut off the news in the aftermath of the election?” she wonders aloud. If this is indeed happening, “what is unique about this circumstance?”

Perhaps it is just that: control. Or the lack of it.

“I’ll see some crazy future Cabinet appointment, and I’m like, ‘I have no control over any of this. There’s nothing I can do about this,’” says Drew Stanecki, 36, a nonprofit worker who lives in Virginia.

He woke up on Nov. 6, stunned — not that Trump had won, because he read the news closely in the lead-up and knew that that could very well happen, but that Trump’s win had been so quick and decisive. That morning, he picked up his 1-year-old daughter, crying, and it hit him: “I couldn’t believe what just happened, and I knew I needed to take a step away. I can’t process it, and I didn’t want to.”

So he immediately turned off the notification alerts on his Washington Post and New York Times apps. During Trump’s first term, he read so much news that he had to institute a “no-Washington-Post-after-7-p.m.” rule so he could sleep at night.

Now he doesn’t want anything pushed to him. Every so often, he logs on to see the latest, but the same feeling returns. “It feels inevitable, and I have to focus on what I can control, which is taking care of my family and checking in on my friends.”

DelPonte relates. “I’m putting my energy into redecorating my room.” He just went to a furniture auction and is creating a wreath for his door. “I was maybe so overinformed going into this election that now I just need to take a step back,” DelPonte says. “Things I think I have control over is what is helpful right now.”

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It’s not clear how widespread this “turn off the news” movement is. For one, there is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/08/01/news-avoid-depressing/" target=_blank>general news fatigue</a> that predated the election. And it’s too early to tell whether news publishers are seeing drop-offs in their audiences. While many saw their post-election-week ratings and audiences <a href="https://digiday.com/media/news-publishers-didnt-sustain-a-traffic-bump-in-the-2024-presidential-election-week-like-they-did-in-2020/" target=_blank>down in 2024 compared with 2020</a>, that could pick back up as the transition progresses and Trump takes office.

Silver is surveying thousands of people about their feelings about the election — she has been following them for years — and expects to learn next month whether people are widely turning off the news and, if so, why. For now, she has theories and questions. Perhaps heavy news consumers are the ones tuning out the most now. Maybe people who were stressed about the uncertainty of the election no longer need to monitor the news because they now have certainty. Or could there be a general we’ve lived through this before malaise?

But if people are doing this in droves, “it would be adaptive, and psychologically beneficial, to cut back consuming media in the aftermath of the election” if they’ve found the results distressing, Silver says.

Look at that: Humans doing something psychologically beneficial for a change.

Kate Bulson, 46, calls it “cocooning.” Before the election, this contract editor in Delaware spent an hour a day watching or reading the news. Days after, she cut it all out. Instead, she’s finding refuge in vinyl records and books — yes, physical books — to avoid the lure of doomscrolling. She makes sure what she is reading is a careful, serious piece of work. She still visits The Post’s website — for its advice columns, not its politics — and skims her local paper. “It’s less nationally focused. It’s more of, ‘This business is going up down my street,’ so I’ll go take a look at that.”

Stanecki says his mental health has improved as he has focused more on ways he can be productive in his immediate surroundings. Although, he did dip his toes back into paying attention to national politics by volunteering to help get a popular-vote-for-president bill passed.

He signed up and, in return, received a 1,200-page book in the mail extolling the virtues of the popular vote. The thing is the size of a phone book, collecting dust in his house, offering no clear direction on what to do next.

“I’m taking a general break and living in a smaller world for the next few months,” he says. “And that’s okay.”

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University of Maryland, Bachelor of Arts degrees in journalism and history

Post Reports 

Elahe Izadi is a staff writer covering media and also co-hosts daily flagship podcast "Post Reports." She joined The Post in 2014 as a general assignment reporter, and has covered pop culture, Congress, demographics and breaking news. 

Elahe Izadi

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