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We are used to thinking of what we call the news as a tool that can help us to vanquish ignorance: we will, thanks to its updates, properly understand what is going on and where importance lies.
我们习惯于把所谓的新闻视为一种可以帮助我们克服无知的工具：由于新闻的更新，我们将能理解正在发生的事情以及事情的重要性所在。
But if we examine the role of this phenomenon with greater scepticism, we may find that it is as responsible for blinding us to ourselves as for introducing us to the complexities of so-called reality.
但如果我们抱着更大的怀疑来审视这一现象的作用，我们可能会发现，它既让我们认识到所谓现实的复杂性，也让我们看不到了自己。
The presence of the news continuously - albeit slyly - encourages us to forget entirely what we actually feel in relation to certain events.
不断出现的新闻暗中促进我们完全遗忘我们对某些事件的真实感受。
The way stories are told invariably promotes one particular set of responses: this is outrageous, he is bad, this is tragic, she is a victim, they are repulsive…
故事讲述的方式总是会催生一组特定的反应：这是无耻的，他真坏，这是悲剧，她是受害者，他们令人厌恶…
These verdicts may seem entirely fair, but only too often, to an extent we are bullied into forgetting, they don’t quite.
这些判决可能看起来完全公平，但通常情况下，在某种程度上，我们被胁迫忘记--这些判决并不完全公平。
We might in our hearts - oddly but authentically - not think that something is such a tragedy after all, we might not really care in the least about something which we have been repeatedly pressed to think is vital.
我们可能在心里感到奇怪，但确实会认为某事不是一场悲剧，我们可能一点也不关心那些我们一再被要求认为是至关重要的事情。
And we might fancy someone we’re definitely meant to hate.
我们可能会喜欢上某个我们注定要恨的人。
The news quietly closes off alternative avenues of investigation and response.
这些新闻悄悄地关闭了调查和回应的其他途径。
At its core, the news is opposed to introspection.
从本质上讲，这些新闻与反省是对立的。
It doesn’t want us to know ourselves better and compulsively disconnects our emotions from their true but often hard-to-grasp targets.
这些消息让我们不能更好地了解自己，并强迫我们将自己的情感与真实但往往很难把握的目标撕裂。
It takes our nascent feelings of anger, for example - and redirects them away from our acquaintances or early care-givers to causes that aren’t remotely for us to bother with.
例如，新闻将我们刚生出的愤怒情绪从我们的熟人或早期照顾者身上转移到我们根本不需要去烦扰的事情上。
It coopts our fears to an ever-changing roster of monsters, and thereby blinds us to what we really need to be vigilant about before it’s too late.
它将我们的恐惧与不断变化的怪物花名册结合在一起，从而使我们在为时已晚之前看不到我们真正需要警惕的东西。
Because of the prestige that we have collectively accorded to the news, the hurried judgements of skittish third rate minds are allowed to determine nothing less than our view of ‘normality’.
由于我们集体给予了新闻声望，那些轻浮的三流头脑匆忙地进行判断，决定了我们对“正常”的看法。
It is almost universally taken to be sensible to ‘catch up on the news’ rather than, as is actually the case, for the most part extremely dangerous and irrelevant.
几乎所有人都认为“紧跟新闻热点”是明智的，而非像实际情况那样，在大多数情况下，其实是充满危险和无关紧要的。
There is almost nothing we really need to know outside of what has happened in our own heads and in the lives of ten or so people who count on us.
除了我们自己以及十几个对我们重要的人的生活中发生的事情之外，我们几乎没有什么是真正需要知道的。
We would surely be made to feel untenably odd if we decided - as really we should - that we were from now on going to check the news only once a week, and the rest of the time devote ourselves to exploring the contents of our soul via meditative reflection.
如果我们决定——我们确实应该这样做——从现在开始，我们每周只看一次新闻，其余的时间通过沉思来探索我们灵魂的内容，我们肯定会感到不可思议的奇怪。
While pretending to inform us about the state of the world, the news has become a formidable instrument of self-forgetting.
在假装告诉我们世界状况的同时，新闻已经成为一种令人敬畏的自我遗忘工具。
