“I was a news junkie for a long time,” Jon Shaivitz told me. Was he a cable guy? A lurker on social media? An internet rabbit-hole spelunker? “Yup,” all the above.
For years, Shaivitz woke up and flipped on MSNBC and CNN. The LA-based filmmaker, now 40, remembers his cable news habits during the Covid pandemic especially: “I was glued to the television,” he remembered. Shaivitz wouldn’t miss, say, a Dr. Anthony Fauci appearance on Rachel Maddow’s show. He kept abreast of the clusters of cases, the death counts, and where vaccine development stood. He also caught the morning headlines, and the evening news. On the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, he woke up at 5 a.m. to watch Donald Trump leave the White House at the end of his first term. Back then, he was caught up in the “drama and conflict,” he said; though looking back, he added, “There’s almost no logic to why.”
Now, he’s not following the back-and-forth between the Pentagon and Anthropic. He doesn’t know about what’s going on with Cesar Chavez. He’s not monitoring the situation in the Strait of Hormuz. “I’m not hooked into the day-to-day circus,” he said—though he cops to knowing the general contours, since it’s “almost impossible to cut yourself off from reality.”
Did he consciously decide to cut back? Not really. After years of being plugged in, Shaivitz’s work picked up in the summer of 2023. He shot his first feature film, and got busier, and even though he still worked from home, he stopped turning on the TV in the morning. He logged out of a burner account on X where he’d follow news organizations and journalists. He started to notice a difference. Before, when he was “glued” to the television, it kept him exhausted, and in an endless state of worry. Now, he said, “that anxiety isn’t there.”
