Thoreau was not a fan of either the mail or the news. Regarding the mail, in chapter Two of Walden, "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," Thoreau wrote, "For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it." He goes on to say that he had only received a couple of letters in his entire life that were worth more than they cost to mail. This lends itself to Thoreau's belief that the exchange of ideas through conversation and debate is essential to a person living a full and examined life.

He believed that newspapers were not only useless but possibly dangerous. He wrote,

If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter-we never need read of another.

This is obviously not an exhaustive list of all the things one may read in a newspaper, but it does give the reader the sense of what Thoreau is trying to say. He continues:

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

This quote, however offensive as it may be in our time, describes Thoreau's view that it is not always easy to discern the truthfulness of news. Everything we read is subject to the bias and ethics of its writer. Reporting the news is often fueled by the desire to make money, making its reliability questionable.

The other part of the news that Thoreau dislikes is the repetitiveness of it. He wrote that once he had read the news, he didn't need to read other versions of it from other sources. Thoreau's musings on the news inform us of his wider belief that life should be lived in the present, and that the lessons learned from the news need not be repeated daily in order to be learned.