For Two Months, I Got My News from Print Newspapers
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I get my news online by scanning CNN, CBS News, Fox News, and BBC. I view ALL news as being biased (online or print) and by looking at several sources I figure that the truth is always somewhere in the middle.
Some other benefits of printed news (even if still biased): the ads in print stay where they are. They don't hover over the article I'm trying to read and force the reader to click 'X'. They don't start playing video clips. They don't have ads switching in and out and moving around. Print also has no way of tracking what I read.
It's also an exercise of learning what ways other people view the world. How can you understand someone that only gets information from one channel if you don't know what that channel is saying?
However, the sheer volume of today's information means that nobody has time for that in most cases.
Frankly, these are all sources which don't disagree with each other very much, fundamentally.
On how they present those facts and the co text the provide for understanding? Quite a bit sometimes.
Also, the amount a story is promoted sends an implicit signal as too how important you should view it, and that's often different for different sources as well.
I don't go through as many sources, but I'll often look to see how Fox News is presenting something compared to WaPo, and there's often quite different presentations. Sometimes I have to search a little deep for what one network considers big breaking news on another network.
It's a more subtle problem than some people think.
No, what he points out is that due to the nature of print news it is not subject to all of the the problems of ‘instant’ news and social media.
It’s never perfect, but it’s clearly more likely to be accurate, with fewer malicious and unsupported details masquerading as facts.
I only get my news from print sources that charge money or have a clear funding model not primarily reliant on advertising: The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, etc. I used to read The Economist as well but there's only so much time I'm willing to allot.
I skip the daily outrage. I skip most editorials and opinion pieces. I can form my own opinions. Sources that report the news breathlessly or with shouting heads are out. Sources that rely primarily on Facebook shares to promote their articles are out.
I add to that mix a healthy dose of historical context.
That said, the truth is not always somewhere in the middle. Maybe it is between polar-opposite propaganda sources, but not between The Guardian and Breitbart.
The BBC is reliant on the support of the UK government, who essentially control it's future.
Serious analysis of the editorial lines of The Guardian and the BBC show pretty consistent pro-corporate pro-establishment bias.
The Guardian's readership revenue exceeds subscriber revenue[0]. BBC is taxpayer-funded. NPR relies on donations.
Serious analysis of the editorial lines of The Guardian and the BBC show pretty consistent pro-corporate pro-establishment bias.
Sure; so does The Economist. This is why I read multiple sources and then use my big animal brain to form my own opinion. :-)
[0] https://digiday.com/media/guardian-u-s-got-profitable-pivoti...
It's difficult to form an opinion about issues that are not presented to you.
In fact applying this system over time will just shift your view of the world toward whichever “side” is willing to tell more extreme lies.
Source A: An abused elephant got revenge on its handlers today, striking back and making a break for freedom.
Source B: Elephant attack! 5 gravely injured, including a mother of 3, as a crazed elephant breaks loose. Authorities still investigating.
Source C: Minister for Elephants grilled over lax elephant regulations. Angry citizens are demanding to know why legislation had not been put in place to prevent this tragedy.
My take away: Something happened, people got hurt, an elephant was involved.
Me at the water cooler: You hear about the elephant thing? Pretty crazy right.
what I do is take the things that are agreed on by most organisations as probably true, and disregard the rest
The "take things that are agreed on by most media organisations as probably true, and disregard the rest" strategy has had profoundly negative effects throughout history, such as in China, the Soviet Bloc before 1991, the USA through the 1960s, and Germany in the 1930s.
I specifically included the water cooler part because that's what Generic News is for me. Conversation fodder and entertainment. I can live with even the filtered down information I take from it being possibly wrong.
What kind of view points might be consistently ignored or misrepresented across multiple apparently differing media outlets?
Herman and Chomsky went into this with their propaganda model: the corporate establishment media will have a pro-corporate pro-establishment viewpoint.
All your sources there are heavily pro-corporate and pro-establishment, by the very fact they are funded by corporations (BBC is a bit different but it is influenced in similar ways)
Our mainstream media sources run (some of) the gamut of right to left, but have a consistent bias on particular matters due to their funding.
Sounds like you're looking for Reuters.
Expressing a commitment to political neutrality is a good move for a news source, because it costs no money and most people want their news sources to be neutral.
I think people want to be able to believe that their news sources are neutral. But I don't think they actually want their news sources to be neutral. That's the genius of what news has become: entertainment that justifies itself by allowing you to feel like you are doing your duty as a citizen by keeping up with current events.
I think that we also agree that people believe news sources are neutral when those news sources aren't neutral.
However, I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "wanting your news sources to be neutral" and "wanting to be able to believe that your news sources are neutral". It's both pedantic and not borne out by any evidence. You're assuming motivations which simply aren't apparent.
Something apropos: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090
The paper you linked concludes that reasoning (when done correctly) works as intended regardless of the motives for reasoning. Given that reasoning (when done correctly) works regardless of the motives for reasoning, when people incorrectly reason that a news source is neutral, it indicates that reasoning was not done correctly, and that their motivations for reasoning aren't a constructive explanation for why they didn't reason correctly (i.e. your point is pedantic).
Further, the article you linked doesn't go so far as to disagree with my point--it doesn't make the mistake you're making, which is to assume that people can't want more than one thing. People can want to base their news source to be neutral AND people can want to feel good (i.e. not feel cognitive dissonance). Even if you were to somehow prove your not-evident point, it doesn't give you a basis to disagree with what I said, unless you can prove that people want to feel good to the exclusion of all other things they want from their news source. The article doesn't say that (i.e. your point is not borne out by evidence, even the evidence that you presented).
In evolutionary psychology, there is a distinction between proximate and ultimate causes. So, the proximate cause for pursuing sex is that orgasms are intensely pleasurable. But the ultimate cause is that pursuing sex leads to better reproductive outcomes, so we evolved the ability to orgasm and, thus, a motivation to pursue sex.
I think you are arguing in terms of proximate causes. Somebody desires a neutral news source so that they feel like they are accurately informed about what is going on in the world. I don't disagree with this. Most people genuinely want a neutral news source. But the weird thing is that they do not actually consume a neutral news source, even though it is trivially easy to figure out that your news source isn't neutral. All you have to do is read the other side's preferred news source.
To explain this seeming paradox, I am arguing in terms of ultimate causes. I think that this failure to reason accurately about the neutrality of news sources comes about, ultimately, because news consumption is not only about informing yourself, but also to a large extent about reaffirming the righteousness of your in-group. And I think that the appearance of neutrality is critical to enabling this self-deception to occur (because a person is much more convincing when they actually believe the position they're arguing for).
Thus my insistence on what you referred as pedantic: people don't actually want to consume a neutral news source, they want to believe that they consume a neutral news source. And not 'want' in the proximate sense that they know that they are deceiving themselves, but 'want' as a shorthand way to describe the ultimate cause for the prevalence of this self-deception.
1. I stated the proximate cause.
2. You disagreed, because you wanted to use "want" to describe ultimate rather than proximate causes.
3. Now you're agreeing with the proximate cause I stated and still insisting on your ultimate cause.
Do you see why this might be considered pedantic? You disagreed with what I said based on a meaning of the word "want", when in fact the way I was using the word "want" is correct?
The problem with ultimate causes is that because they're further away from the effect they're describing, so it's fairly difficult to establish a causal relationship.
Sex and reproduction have a well-developed constructive theory (evolution) around them--the causal relationship is believed to be true because evolution predicts it and also predicts a wide variety of things which we know to be true. But even so, evolution can be difficult to tie to phenomena--for example, it takes a fairly deep understanding of evolution to understand how evolution is compatible with homosexuality.
I can see how your ultimate cause might cause the phenomena we're discussing, but that simply means that the hypothesis is viable and worth testing--it doesn't yet indicate any evidence for your hypothesis. So again I'm still saying: you haven't provided any evidence for what you're saying. You may have evidence for your assertion, but you certainly haven't presented it.
Even if you have evidence for this: how is insisting on an ultimate cause a response to my original point? I said that "Expressing a commitment to political neutrality is a good move for a news source, because it costs no money and most people want their news sources to be neutral." The point being that we shouldn't trust that news sources are neutral or even trying to be neutral simply because they express a commitment to neutrality. Even if you're right, your jumping in to disagree with completely irrelevant information was, frankly, rude.
I'm not sure at this point whether I believe you intended to talk about ultimate versus proximal causes, or if you're just smart and managed to come up with that after the fact as a way to not have to admit you were wrong. Either way, I'm not going to respond to further comments on this thread.
> I think we're arguing past each other and I think that is my fault.
I'm sorry that I caused you to feel like I was being disingenuous (or however you would describe your emotions), but I was truly just trying to reconcile and understand our disagreement.
Also, the speaking about evolutionary forces in anthropomorphic terms like 'want', etc. is pretty common. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins at one point goes into a lengthy digression of why this is a useful way to talk about evolutionary processes and what exactly is and isn't meant by this manner of speaking. Realizing that me doing this was the primary source of our disagreement was what prompted my last comment.
But anyway, I agree that this conversation is getting long in the tooth.
Good day to you!
Of course it can be discussed what the political leanings of the outcomes actually are.
To put it another way: it's very possible to interpret fairness and impartiality in creative ways. And some NPR member stations make a habit of this.
Pre David Kelly they used to take their commitment more seriously.
Pretty much all of them have some form of an “expressed commitment to political neutrality”, even Fox News did until fairly recently..
Of course, whether there is any substantive backing to the expressed commitment is a whole different question.
For example, political views from someone who insists that global warming isn't happening are out-of-frame as being factually incorrect. That means a number of right-wing sites are gone, as the insistence that there is no global warming is more of a right-wing conceit than left-wing.
The alternative is not ignoring anyone, regardless of how lunatic they are, which means you admit known nutcases like whale.to and Natural News into your news diet, and that will give you a very warped view of the world.
People who have a restricted media diet are pretty easy to surprise just by relaying objective information nobody really disputes that their news sources didn't deem newsworthy.
Natural news et al may not be worth paying attention to but foreign propaganda outfits (e.g. Russia today) can sometimes be quite informative if read skeptically, even if only to add context.
Possibly also how sentiments like "facts have a liberal bias" or "liberals live in a fantasy" come about and ring true. The set of facts you use to judge who/what is 'in-frame' are essential to your understanding of the world. Someone else who treats those facts as optional ("Sure they don't believe in global warming, but they understand the issues with immigration") clearly has a poor understanding of "how the world works".
Imagine my shock to see the top post pointing to RealClearInvestigations analyzing the role of “PROMISE” discipline policies on Cruz’s ability to pull off his attack even after over 40 run-ins with the police.
Then again, the next half dozen link to articles about; a man allegedly attacking immigrants after yelling “Get out of my country”, Gary Cohen resignation, successful teacher strike gaining a 5% raise, Stormy Daniels sues Trump, and Kellyanne Conway violating ethics rules.
Plus they solicit ideas from readers in addition to content from journalists.
[0](https://spidr.today/)
Maybe they're applying a "not too far left or right" filter or a "popularity" filter in order to keep from having so many takes on a given story that it's overwhelming?
This is a point I first realised in 2004 immediately following the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Indonesia and the Indian Ocean. As traditional media outlets struggled (some more successfully than others) to both present the current status and new developments, Wikipedia offered a digest of the best current state of knowledge, and, via its changelogs, what had been recently changed (generally: added, occasionally removed).
This is a pattern that's followed through, say, the 2010 Tohoku quake + tsunami + nuclear core meltdown, several long-running financial and business stories, Russian campaign interference, the Oroville Dam crisis, etc. Pretty much any story that runs more than 1-3 days and has complex elements.
I'm very well aware that Wikipedia is not perfect, is subject to influence, and is not itself a primary source. There is the odd outlet or journalist which exceeds Wikipedia (Brad Plumer, formerly of Vox and now of The New York Times, for example, has the best article I've seen, hands, down, on Oroville, though that was and remains a one-point-in-time effort, Wikipedia continues to update its article. Plumer, is, by the way, and absolutely excellent journalist, and as before, I am not his mother....).
Wikimedia's expansion into journalism is a fascinating development.
Of course, that's my own estimation of how well informed I was, so that might be far from accurate.
I'm glad I know about yesterday's resignation of one of Trump's economic aides, but I don't spend valuable minutes trying to find everyone's opinions about its consequences.
For instance:
https://twitter.com/ananavarro/status/971209163115253760
This week: Nunberg subpoenaed, couldn’t stop blabbing; Kellyanne said to have violated ethics law; Carson realized HUD’s complicated; Cohn quit, over tariffs not anti-Semitism; Guy from UAE who knows stuff, cooperating w/Mueller; Trump tweeted there’s no chaos; It’s only Tuesday.
... and she wrote that before the news broke about the porn star suing Trump about their hush agreement/money inked in the weeks before the election.
I subscribed to the Washington Post via Amazon for national coverage, and I also get my local paper for their coverage of things like city council meetings, which actually make a lot more differences in our day to day lives than a lot of national issues.
Realistically, any one of us could ignore most news and be fine, but I feel that it's part of our job as citizens to be informed and aware. I also feel that it's worth kicking in some money to the people doing the journalism that's uncovering important stuff.
Look at the Roy Moore stuff that got uncovered, for instance. That was the election right there.
A lot of events have been discussed, fewer of them have had significant impact yet, or have well-understood impact yet.
There is something about how much info you can consume weekly vs. daily. That's a separate question though.
If you consider all of that ‘news’ rather than mostly rumor and spectacle, then you probably fit in with the social media news crowd.
I personally don’t see anything on that list that’s worthy of being called News, and certainly not anything I’d need to read about the day it happened. The closets might be the Mueller thing, but even that is technically hearsay until mueller’s next report comes out - then it’s news.
Last time I swore off excess media consumption (about a decade ago) I kept on with The Economist and found I was 'drinking the Kool Aid' after a while.
These days I do a daily scan of all the none-too-tabloidy newspapers (UK-based here), and on a weekly-or-so basis take in the likes of The Spectator, National Review and Foreign Affairs.
- edit:
I'm not going to lie - I could probably do with another breather - I'm unsure how much value I get from scouring all this crap.
(Though it's quarterly rather than weekly, of course)
Recently I bought both and compared them. I found the writing quality in the newstatesman to be more variable, with a few Excellent and a few utterly awful articles. The Spectator is overall of good quality but nothing really stood out.
I conducted a study of the relative mentions of an arbitrarily selected set of high-informational indicators (the Foreign Policy list of top 100 global thinkers), and looked for references to those amongst numerous online domains (and TLDs), including several mainstream and alternative media sources.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
(Scroll down past the social media listing.)
The Economist and The Financial Times both rate excellently amongst mainstream publications. Each has a very distinct pro-business, pro-banking, and overt pro-free-trade[1] agenda (though not unquestioningly so), though the quality is generally good.
Amongst the more highly-rating alternatives were (in no particular order):
1. Mother Jones
2. The Christian Science Monitor
3. The Nation
4. Jacobin Magazine. (Probably the most directly ideologically opposed publication.)
5. Alternet, The Real News, and Truthdig, each of which has a diverse though sometimes questionable set of contributors.
Selecting from amongst these might be useful.
My survey, of about 100 distinct domains, is not complete and has various methodological issues, but should be a good guide.
________________________________
Notes:
1. See The Economist's own Prospectus:
THE ECONOMIST, which will contain — First.—ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day....
- Portability: I did most of my reading on public transit. Hauling around a huge packet to read definitely made me feel like an old person.
- Quanitity: It was really tough disposing of the quantity of paper. If you skipped a day for whatever reason, the papers could really start piling up. I tried to end weekend service (the massive advertising packets that contained no news), and sales basically laughed me away.
- Lack of news: So much of the paper was throwaway lifestyle stuff.
- Pricing: It starts out cheap, but afterward they kind of lock you in.
Yeah, my promo discount just ended so instead of ~$20/mo it's costing me $40/mo - but I value having a condensed, well curated collection of relevant news articles so the cost is easily justified for me.
I've heard a lot of people complain about these proprietary digital reading apps for various magazines, papers etc
There's some annoying hiccups with the NYTimes replica edition that bug me, if you pull up the text-view of an article that's on the front page and continued elsewhere you'll often get just the continuation instead of the full article (I don't know who to blame here, it's not deal-breaking but it is annoying) - but in general scrolling and paging around feels good, the app always downloads content to your device so offline viewing is there 100% of the time and the interface is workable. One other little nuisance is you can't link your NYTimes replica edition account to your existing PressReader account, so you have to manage them separately and sign into both (which the app allows, fortunately).
Overall, would recommend, but give it a try before you commit to spending any money.
If you have family members that you share (or would like to share) your NYTimes.com membership with getting a Sunday print subscription may also be an option. It's 2x the cost of the replica edition subscription (as well as an All-Access digital subscription which comes with 2 accounts) without promotional pricing but you get 2 additional NYTimes.com memberships, access to the crossword online and of course the Sunday print delivered to you if that's your thing.
[0]: https://account.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/accountingregistr...
They all get their political and current news sections from bigger newspapers (mantle).
What they do themselves is obituaries, local sports (especially children and youths, because parents just love to read their children's name – which means that often all the players are named) and local news.
The first is for old people, the second for young parents, and the last is the only potentially interesting thing, but since they don't do real investigations (especially into the precious ad buyers) or reporting of local (social) issues, just quick "we met person x, asked ten questions, took a photo and wrote ten paragraphs", and it's very few pages, I don't see the sense in buying it.
It was really tough disposing of the quantity of paper.
It's quite fast to browse compared to online articles. You can skim a page and quickly see which articles are interesting. And uyou may read things you wouldn't have read online, as it's easy to glance past a headline and read a paragraph of an unfamiliar story.
Same with both Harper's and Lapham's Quarterly, which I really should read some day. Them now being two years old.
Online is better for clipping/saving/forwarding/referencing.
For example, I have digital-only subscriptions to a couple of papers, but I prefer to do an initial scan of the print editions.
tl;dr: Focus on what matters.
Sounds like you also run the risk of making Dunning–Kruger as a lifestyle choice.
I'm not a robot and I don't hate humans. ;-) However, I feel like those kind of stories can trick you into making illogical decisions. I.e. "think of the children" argument for some new policy. It is a trend in news that I dislike. I think they are trying to make the news more engaging but I think it is leading to poorer decision making.
I started reading the news in print because it was less stressful and I needed to train myself not to open the news each time I fired up a browser. The online papers put the opinion and doomsday headlines all over the place and I just needed to read a refined source of news that had time to be digested before it was published.
The Washington Post has been a surprisingly good source of news over the last year as well. I prefer it over the NYT at this point and wish I could get it in print where I live.
Aside from the many far leaning online sources, my general rule of thumb is just to avoid anything that is linked to TV. When CNN figures out how to rewind to 1990, I might change my mind. But print allowed me to take a moment and digest the news. Online was almost always in a state of panic, especially over the last year.
As for pricing, my local paper charges more for a digital subscription that to deliver a paper to my house. Subscription models are messed up.
It's because print advertising is still more effective than digital. We've been hearing for more than a decade that this will change any day now, but it hasn't happened yet. And the more people use ad blockers, the longer it will remain true.
However, I find the print edition is a much better experience than the digital platforms. Mostly because I can simply ignore the mostly awful editorial section or things that are buried in eg Style, whereas on the site and app those pieces are mixed-in with the news, giving the appearance of bias. Also, there are often pieces which appear on page A6 of the newspaper which are buried on the website, so you get a very different view of the news with the actual paper.
UK: Guardian
UK: The Independent
CA: The Globe and Mail (generally centrist), The National Post (generally right of center).
PK: Dawn, The Daily Times
IN: Times of India
SG: Straights Times
AU: Sydney Morning Herald
Spiegel Online (not the real Spiegel, but they obviously share many articles with the mothership): http://www.spiegel.de/international/
Reading news that doesn't affect you or you do something about it is a waste of time.
This was also my experience of similar experiments and introspections.
I adore the Times http://thetimes.co.uk although it requires a subscription.
Their editor despises group think so you will always find dissenting and differing viewpoints as well as excellent reporting to the standard you'd expect of one of the oldest still published Newspapers in the world.
Crucial to this was my decision to quit Twitter. I became significantly less anxious after leaving. It's impossible to avoid the constant bombardment of 'news' on that service.
The Washington Post just emailed an alert about the FL legislature's passage of SB 7026, the gun bill in response to the Douglas HS shooting:
"Defying NRA, Florida legislature passes new rules to impose waiting period, raise purchasing age for long guns
The Florida House bill imposes a three-day waiting period for most purchases of long guns and raises the minimum age for purchasing those weapons to 21... The response to the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 dead signaled a major shift for a state known as a legal laboratory for gun rights activists. It could become a blueprint for other states looking at new measures to address mass shootings."
Now, that spin would have you believe that this was a major Democrat victory and an NRA defeat.
In reality, the bill was watered down to near-meaninglessness and actually passed with Republican support and over Democrat opposition. All but 3 Democrat senators opposed it. 31 of 41 Democrat House members opposed it. None of that critical detail enters the WP narrative at all.
For well over a decade I read the Economist cover to cover, every week, during my commute. At some point I started working from home and dropped the habit, and took up reading the NYT on-app when my commute resumed. The NYT apps all suck, IMO, because they do not reflect the print paper. The WSJ, however, has the print paper in digital form and I like it much better, but do not care for their spin and analysis. I found the Economist's take on the news to be somewhere between these two local New York papers and preferred it, but the digital version for whatever reason left me nonplussed.
I wonder if there is a US news weekly akin to the Economist, with a good mix of news and analysis, with a well defined bias/opinion so that you're not left guessing what their perspective/slant is.
Not really. There used to be the weekly news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report). Time is still hanging in there. But it's a pale shadow of its former self and was never either as deep or as broad as the Economist is.
My ideal news source would: 1. Not be speculative. I want to know what happened and what it meant/means, not what it might mean, or what might happen next. 2. Not involve PR people. I already know exactly what they're going to say, and why they're going to say it, they've brought me no value. Bring me either the newsmaker themselves, or someone who has at least the _possibility_ of being neutral-ish. 3. Never auto-play anything or force me to dismiss an add. Yay print on that front. :-)
It seemed to me that he was the only person besides Sanders and a few others who addressed the issues that people cared about and being a socially liberal and fiscally conservative who actually liked Obama and Clinton a lot, it really surprised me how little I agreed with the Hillary campaign and the issues she ran on.
I realized that if I felt so different from I would normally have considered my political position maybe a lot of other things I took for granted claimed by the normal media I followed, maybe I wasn't being feed the whole story.
So I stopped relying on the news both online, tv and newspapers on anything other than the most basic description of the events and instead started digging into the "other side" i.e. the alt-right and conservative issues in general.
I had heard about Milo, Ben Shapiro, Breitbart and other people was was described as right-wing and never had really looked into what they were saying.
So I started digging in started to listen to what they actually had to say and to by big surprise I realized that I was actually agreeing with a lot of the things they said and that they certaintly weren't the evil racist right wing people they were being portrayed as. In fact they were actually often hated by the real right-wing. One of the most informative things was to listen to Dave Rubins Show which invites a lot of different people in and actually hear them out and make their cases.
I have never been much of a political ideologist and always found that I agreed/disagreed with a lot of different people with a lot of different political backgrounds and never really could find my political shelf now I realize that it's because I never really questioned just how big the bias of most newspapers, tv-news and online media really is.
My advice is drop the online news, the paper news and the TV news, start actually learning about the issues that you care about from the people who have thought about it most which I can assure you isn't the modern journalists.
Most times there was nothing in them I cared about or hadn't heard about. Why should I pay for a sports section when I don't care about sports? Why should I pay for an arts section in the NY Times that is all about plays and events that are only playing in New York which is several hundred miles away?
I'd be happy if it were simply restricted to one section which I could then discard with no regrets.
Your criticism of the Times's culture coverage is one I share. I've strongly suggested that at the least a regional substitute be offered such that local offerings elsewhere within the US -- say, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle -- be offered print subscribers in those areas.
The Times is close to being a reasonable alternative to any local publication, though this also poses concerns....
I think that's the real reason only old people read the paper these days. Content doesn't matter as much as packaging sometimes.
https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper
Not perfect, but it can definitely help eliminate some of the noise.
The online world can be (and quite often is) an extraordinarily bad information source, and compounds numerous limited-attention dynamics.
At the same time, both print and broadcast media sources seem to be markedly worse, even the "best" of these. I find numerous national broadcasters (BBC, CBC, Australian ABC, PBS, NPR) almost completely unlistenable, despite decades of previous exposure. I'm not sure if they're getting markedly worse, or my own discernment has changed, though I suspect bits of both.
Some print sources are reasonably good, and The Economist, the Financial Times, and The New York Times are better than most. Many other print sources are execrably bad: Time Magazine, Newsweek, and the print dailies of most major U.S. cities, or papers such as USA Today. They are irrelevant, uninformative, distracting, and information-poor. They're not notably prone to yellow-journalism incitement, which is almost worse: they're both bad AND uninteresting. Print is no guarantee of quality, only of delay.
My preferred sources:
Long-form media programmes. On the Media (WNYC), Fresh Air (WHHY), The World (WBUR), and Paul Kennedy's Ideas (CBC) are my regular beat. With the exception of The World (a news magazine), each typically offers longer-form presentation, with 1-4 segments per hour, or roughly 10-15 minutes of treatment on a topic, minimum. Many are weekly, which required discarding a great deal of information that doesn't fit the hour. Each is pre-recorded, which is to say, well edited.
That last point is a particular disappointment with the BBC and NPR news magazines particularly: as they've shifted from a generally pre-recorded (sometimes by several days, though often by only a few hours or even minutes) format to live, the glitches of live broadcast have imposed themselves rudely and distractingly. I particularly noted this during the Boston Marathon bombing coverage in which the BBC attempted to have live, on-the-street coverage of the manhunt, which ended up mostly being an on-the-air troubleshooting of low-quality audio conveying low-density information (largely zero or none). The product of the 1990s may have sacrificed a slight bit of timeliness, but was vastly more relevant, prepared, and polished.
OTM's look at the alt-right and racism, this past week, was a particularly excellent instance and an exemplar of the class.
Books. There are materials which are simply best obtained from domain experts who've had months, or years, or decades to digest and present a concept. Oddly enough, there's a counterpoint to haw fast-moving present events are in that the timeless and ageless themes seem more important.
Wikipedia. For long-developing and complex stories, it is vastly superior in information delivery to a daily broadcast or print format, or even a weekly digest.
Selected online sources. Hewing to high-quality, and away from anything in the least sensationalistic. I add crap sources to my router's blocklist with impunity.
Disconnecting. Mostly I actively go out of my way to avoid ongoing distraction. I'm managing to remain reasonably informed, though that may of course be my own confirmation biases showing.
Just more of the inevitable pushback from a dying industry's attempts to keep itself relevant. (also, why the downvotes, this is obvious propaganda)
The author explicitly rejects the claim you are imputing to him: "You don't have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news."
The whole article, as I understood it, was about the deeper understanding you can gain about a situation if you take things slow, in batches, instead of seeking to read and post shallow reactions quickly.
This isn't really pushed until the very end of the article, and it's not nearly as long as the rest. It feels very much like an inclusion mostly to appear unbiased.
>A more accurate summary, provided in the article, is "Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social."
I agree with this sentiment overall. Though, that is a quote the author of the column is echoing from someone else. Doesn't change that it's good advice, of course.
I like the fact that these two things share the same syntax.