I can’t count the number of people who have mentioned to me in the last year or so that they just don’t listen to the news anymore.

These are intelligent people, and thoughtful, too; they give back to their communities, they vote in elections, they generally have informed opinions.

But what they do not do is, for the most part, listen to or read the news.

They’ve walked away.

At a Journalism and Women Symposium conference in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, I listened to Sally Buzbee put her finger on why. Buzbee is former executive editor for the Associated Press, former executive editor (and first woman in that role) for The Washington Post, and current Reuters news editor for the United States and Canada.

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“I think the country is very exhausted about politics, so it is very hard for journalists to break through,” she said.

Amen, sister.

To Buzbee, if Americans are walking away from news, journalists have to figure out how to re-engage them. And, she acknowledges, the current atmosphere affects reporters, too, whom she calls “the guts of journalism.”

Sally Buzbee speaking at the Journalism and Women’s Symposium (JAWS)) conference Sept. 6. That’s “JAWS” on the stage behind her.

“The world is massively interested in what is happening with this administration. But sometimes Americans are really turned off. They are really not paying attention to this stuff,” she said. “So we have to figure out how to capture what is happening without being so shrill that no one is reading you. For me right now, Reuter’s matter-of-factness is useful to the world. We are literally not shying away from reporting ... But it’s exhausting, right?”

But in the same breath she also articulated why news reporting is so important, no matter how much is spewing from Washington.

Take the recent U.S. military strike on a Venezuelan ship that killed 11 people. The Administration claims that the boat’s crew were part of a drug cartel. About the only information has come from a social media post from Donald Trump and a tweet from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The reality, Buzbee pointed out, is that we know shockingly little about the U.S. attack on a ship from another country.

“I am keenly aware that nobody trusts me.” - Sally Buzbee

“We know almost nothing about what happened,” she said. “We don’t know who the people are who were killed. We don’t know their nationality. We don’t know what they were doing. We don’t know where they were going. We don’t know what legal authority the U.S. government used [to shoot them]. We don’t know what weapons the U.S. government used. We don’t know who gave the order...

“A government official tweeting out that something happened is the information they want to give us. It is not the information that the public needs to know,” she said. “There is a really strong need for journalism that tries to be very factually based and very accurate and as nonpartisan as it can possibly be. There is a real fight for the accuracy of information across our globe.”

Yet, Buzbee said, “There are people who think that when the government tweets, they are getting the full story.”

Another problem: People don’t believe what they read or view from the media.

“I am keenly aware that nobody trusts me. Nobody says, ‘I believe you, and you are doing the right thing.’ They want us to tell them how we got information. We’ve made progress in being more and more transparent, but we are three steps behind the audiences’ demand for transparency.”

“I don’t personally spend a lot of time on TikTok, but everybody else in the world does, including all the up-and-coming readers. We need to get over ourselves, and understand the way the world is going.”

Yes to all that.

And I, too, feel exhausted with the firehose of news, much of it fear-based and threatening, to come out of Washington. With social media in particular, it feels like the news is everywhere.

One thing I don’t do is listen to a lot of TV news. I prefer reading, because then I can control my intake of news more effectively. I have subscriptions to four newspapers – overkill, maybe – three national newspapers and the local paper at which I worked for more than 17 years, The Day of New London, Conn.

But everyone needs a break. Buzbee said she hikes on weekends. Me? Long walks and weekly karate classes.

We all need to find serenity in our own ways.

In that spirit, what I would say to my friends and anyone who has walked away from news: Take that needed break. Find a way to take the news in small bites. But don’t be so discouraged, so turned off, that you disengage and unplug for too long, or, God forbid, permanently. Because that’s a form of surrender that the extreme right, the conspiracy theorists, the forces of darkness, would love. The more uninformed the citizenry, the more power – our power - they will amass. So we cannot give up.