They say it with a little shame, as if turning off the news were the moral equivalent of leaving a shopping cart loose in the parking lot. I don’t hear failure. I hear someone trying to preserve a livable day. Most people have bills, children, aging parents, jobs, groceries, medical appointments, and enough trouble without beginning every morning with whatever Washington managed to break overnight.
But government does not turn off when the television does. A name is crossed off a list. A rule is rewritten. A case is dropped. A watchdog is replaced. A contract is steered. A civil servant gets the message.
Pew found that 52 percent of American adults say they are worn out by the amount of news, and six in ten say they have reduced the amount of news they get overall. AP-NORC found that 65 percent of adults have felt the need to limit news about government and politics because of overload, fatigue or similar reasons.¹ ² In an AP story on the same subject, a moderate Republican in California who supported some Trump administration actions said she had stopped paying attention to many of Trump’s fights. “I have other things to do,” she said.³
That may be the quietest political sentence in America. People have other things to do. Power has things to do, too.
Some of those things are easy to miss because they sound procedural, which is Washington’s preferred sleeping pill. Reuters reported that Trump fired 17 inspectors general in January 2025; inspectors general look for waste, fraud and abuse. Reuters also reported that the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, created after Watergate to police corruption by public officials, lost much of its authority and shrank from more than 30 attorneys to five.⁴ ⁵
Those stories do not have the drama of an indictment or a campaign rally. They sound like paperwork. That is exactly why they matter. Paperwork is sometimes the name democracy gives to friction against theft.