PhronesisStaying informed is a legitimate civic and epistemic practice. In its calibrated form, the person consults reliable sources at appropriate intervals, forms an accurate picture of the world, and returns to present functioning without residual dread. Compulsive news-checking is formally reconceptualised here within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_ CNC in the landscape of information-seeking behaviour, structurally distinct from the healthy ground state S^0_ CIP — Calibrated Informed Presence — which is the capacity to remain adequately informed about the world without chronically monitoring it for imminent catastrophe.
The compulsive news-checker is not a passive consumer of algorithmic content (the subject of Paper \#703, which treated doomscrolling as passive consumption) but an active agent driven by the need to monitor specific threats, to know now, and to maintain continuous situational awareness as a form of psychological control. The central paradox formalised in this paper — the Monitoring Paradox — is that compulsive checking, designed to manage perceived threat and reduce uncertainty, amplifies threat salience, maintains a state of chronic hypervigilance, and generates ambient dread without improving actual safety or the agent's capacity to respond to what is monitored.
Three sustaining mechanisms are identified and formally characterised: (1) news-as-early-warning-system, in which monitoring is experienced as preparedness and the felt equivalence of information with protection renders non-checking feel like reckless exposure to undetected harm; (2) information-as-control-substitute, in which knowing about events one cannot influence is pursued as a proxy for the control that is unavailable, converting epistemic vigilance into an illusory agency ritual; and (3) threat-salience amplification through repetitive exposure, in which each check re-activates the threat representation, raises its subjective probability, and deepens the ambient-dread basin.
A formal model in terms of perceived threat T(t), check rate C(t), and response capacity R(t) demonstrates that C amplifies T without increasing R, producing a widening gap between felt danger and functional agency. Nine propositions formalise these dynamics, the structure of the ambient-dread basin, and the return paths through calibrated checking schedules, threat-appraisal retraining, and the restoration of S^0_ CIP.