Stop Watching the News (2019)
josephcwells.com
josephcwells.com
This seems like the author is explicitly arguing for the tragedy of the commons. Yes, any one individual getting 'wound up' doesn't accomplish much, but the public 'at large' getting wound up can and does effect real change sometimes.
Like, it's very easy to point to a variety of topics, about which there was sufficient public outrage from a news story to cause some change. For example, the recent killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger in Georgia. Before the public outrage that followed the release of the video, the killers had not even so much as been arrested.
If the author here had gotten his way, nobody would've seen the video, nobody would've been outraged, and nothing would've happened after Ahmed was murdered. Am I supposed to believe that this is an improvement?
And this is where the "conversation" piece may come in with a 21st century twist. Enough folks highlighted it as the "most important thing" to make it widely known via retweets and likes.
You could also look at something covered more by regular news sources, like how the GOP's attempted repeal of Obamacare was blocked by public response once it became clear how many people would lose health insurance coverage. Suddenly, the repeal that was reasonably popular overall (and very popular on the right) was much less so. Would the repeal having quietly passed through Congress because nobody was paying attention to national news have been an improvement?
The author's argument is one in favor of selfishness: being a well-informed citizen of your state or country does not benefit you personally, so why bother? I actually think that the logic does hold, it's just that the implication of everyone listening to his advice is that the country becomes less informed as a whole, which sounds really, REALLY bad to me. People's average level of political and current event knowledge already seems dreadfully low, someone pushing to make it lower yet...why?
I don't think that the author point at all. He is arguing that the news in their modern form have mostly become a form of entertainment.
I will hasard that someone who would forever stop following the news but actually engaged in any form of local actions connected to their outrage of choice even in the most sporadical of manners would have a disproportionally larger impact on society than a well informed individual. Heck, any kind of local engagement, be it the knitting club or kids soccer, will probably have a larger impact. The news is thankfully not the only source of news.
> But to what end?
> Aside from feeling bad for the victims –and worrying the same thing might happen to you – you’re powerless to make a positive impact. Hearing the news is merely a distraction.
> “But,” you might argue, “everything on the news doesn’t revolve around tragedies. I need to know what’s going on in the world!”
> Do you really?
> When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”?
> I’ll answer for you: probably never.
> If that’s the case, what’re you actually getting from the news? Aggravated? Wound up? Certainly not informed about anything important.
> Most of the time, watching the news is as useful as watching The Jersey Shore. You’re watching it to turn off your brain and mainline outrage.
He's not arguing about something that's not "real news"; an enormous tragedy occurring somewhere, like a tsunami killing many people, obviously qualifies as real news. He's arguing that it leading to "just outrage", just sentiment, is not productive. But that's only true if you look at it in an individual sense, of being productive in your own life. If you look at it being productive in aggregate, in society as a whole, the reasoning doesn't work anymore.
Now, you could make the argument that the author is unaware of the many thousands of times that outrage in its various forms -- like protests, or riots, or revolutions -- has led to significant changes; perhaps he is simply astoundingly ignorant of essentially all history, and thus doesn't know that outrage can do things like, say, get America to leave the Vietnam war, or get a President to resign from office, to use two well-known examples. But I'm not sure that's a more charitable or plausible take.
That's where we disagree and I think I see the root of our disagreement. Reading your last paragraph, you seem to link news consumption and actual actions like protests, riots and revolution. I don't think this link exists. Most of those are actually started by activists and stem from local engagement (unionism, political organizations). It is very removed from news consumption which is not the only way of being informed.
Public outrage is one check on societal institutions. The police are a check on general lawlessness and disorder, and the fact that sometimes they kill someone they really shouldn't have doesn't make us think, "well just get rid of the police then altogether I suppose". Why would we get rid of public outrage, just because sometimes it's wrong?
Public outrage is what makes journalism function as the fourth estate, after all. Investigative journalism of national-level issues in particular: what would the point of all of it be, if nobody read or cared? Thus, the author's argument is also an argument for investigate journalism of any non-'local' issue to cease to exist. Does this sound like a good idea?
As I mentioned in another comment thread, I don't think the author objects (and I certainly don't object) to in-depth investigations of national or global issues. That's a vanishingly small portion of what the news as instantiated today does.
Commercial news by definition is looking to shock/sensationalize/rile up. It may not be on a conscious level but it's a race to gather & keep attention - boring stuff won't cut it.
I'm not supporting author's point mind you, I believe education/informedness is the only thing we have approaching a silver bullet. But the amount of internet justice and vigilanteism we have today, a lot of it inspired by various kinds of news - from local cable TV news indicating our suburbian neighbourhoods are a pithole of violence, to politically charged national news, to hilarious reporting on science and medicine... it all outrages and most of it is at best numbing, at worst utterly wrong.
The way I see it, of something as trivial as a fishing video can be reported on so completely and utterly incorrectly, without the slightest regard for even the tiny amount of facts provided alongside the video, then why should i assume anything else is reported correctly?
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
We don't. The outrage isn't even remotely what it ought to be. We see the videos, we perform grief, and then we forget. I don't see where this belief that we're somehow overreacting comes from: every couple of months, one of these murders in broad daylights happens to have the cop fired, only for them to be later rehired elsewhere. If your fear of overreaction reflected even a tenth of reality, they simply wouldn't be wearing, "I can't breathe," shirts.
The 24 hour cable news cycle is toxic, yes, but there are still daily papers and even less frequent periodicals with generally calmer perspectives.
No, “the news”, as in the propaganda emanating from the corporate hegemony machine, does not count. But, checking out entirely is nonetheless the worst thing one can do.
Not to mention, some of his reasoning conflicts with itself. Behold:
> When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”?
> I’ll answer for you: probably never.
> ...
> But it's different from hearing about the tsunami destroying a village thousands of miles away.
Surely the author is aware that people commonly do, in fact, take action and donate money when tragedies -- such as tsunamis -- take place very far away. In some cases, the foreign donations add up to quite a lot! So I'm not sure how he reconciles this in his head, both in the sense of the way he's describing things is factually incorrect, and also that the implication here is that you'd get less people helping with tragedies simply because they occurred somewhere foreign.
There's an easy compromise: it's likely that some people are better off not watching the news. This group might be more sensitive to disruptive news and opinion pieces. It'd do them good to stay away from news.
This is similar to certain food allergies. Peanuts are good stuff, but some people have negative reactions to it. They are better off without peanuts.
Similarly, if your response to news is highly psychologically disruptive, you'd do well to stay away from it. It doesn't have to mean that you are shirking your responsibilities as a citizen. Rather than exhaust yourself by responding to local and temporal events, you could conserve your energies for longer-term projects that help the society at a fundamental level.
My counter-argument is specifically that if you scale up this advice to everyone or even most people, the implications are really awful.
In the book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt talks about how schools were so concerned about Peanut allergies, a lot of places removed peanuts from school lunches and banned them from lunches people brought in. The result? Peanut allergies went up. Kids weren't being exposed to peanuts and it made the situation worse.
He uses it as an analogy to our ability to deal with things psychologically and how any attempt to remove bad/dangerous ideas (he calls this the "What ever doesn't kill you makes you weaker" fallacy) has made it more difficult to deal with controversial ideas and leads to a cultural of "safetyism" (e.g. safe spaces) in University/Academic environments.
Well you need to compare against wasted time on framed narratives, misguided outrage leading to self-defeating policies, etc.
It's like saying poking holes in the ground randomly is a good method for discovering oil because someone lucked out.
>Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit.
-- Daniel Kahneman
I don't think the author is arguing you should NEVER be outraged, just that you should be more selective about your attention.
> Some meta analyses and studies have questioned the size and existence of the ego depletion effect.[3] The ultimate validity of those later studies is not universally agreed.[5] Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisrantis, whose 2010 meta-analysis seemed to support the existence of the ego depletion effect,[5] subsequently performed a pre-registered 23 lab replication study which found no ego-depletion effect.[6]
> ...
> In 2016, a major study (2141 participants) carried out at two dozen labs across the world using a single protocol failed to find any evidence for ego depletion.[3][31] In response, Baumeister argued that his original protocol was rejected by the project coordinators, and after discussion was stalled, he only reluctantly agreed to a task that differed to some degree from the original 1998 studies.[32] Replication difficulties have also emerged for 5 additional protocols (operationalizations) of the basic ego depletion effect.[33]
> A 2010 meta analysis of 198 independent tests found the effect significant with a moderate effect size (d = .6). Even after accounting for possible unpublished failed studies, the analysis concluded that it is extremely unlikely that the effect doesn't exist.[34]
> In 2015, a meta analysis of over 100 studies by Carter and McCullough argued that the 2010 meta-analysis failed to take publication bias into account. They showed statistical evidence for publication bias. When they statistically controlled for publication bias, the effect size estimate was small (d = .2) and not significantly different from zero.[35][36] Michael Inzlicht and colleagues praised Carter's meta analysis, but argued that bias-correction techniques are not precise enough to give a precise control size estimate.[5][37] In response, Cunningham and Baumeister argued that Carter and McCullough analysis contained errors in its data collection and in the various analyses used.[5]
> Ulrich Schimmack (2016) conducted a meta-analysis of published studies and found that most studies could produce significant results only with the help of random sampling error. Based on the low power of studies, one would expect a large number of non-significant results, but these results are missing from published articles. This finding confirms Carter and McCullough's meta-analysis that showed publication bias with a different statistical method. Schimmack's replicability report also identified a small set of studies with adequate power that provided evidence for ego-depletion. These studies are the most promising studies for a replication project to examine whether ego-depletion effects can be replicated consistently across several independent laboratories.[38]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion
Beyond that, how would you be more selective about your outrage if you're skipping the news to begin with?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
The summary is that controversial issues are the ones that go viral. Not the ones that necessarily deserve to go viral. That is the theory of the post I linked -- I do not make any commentary whatsoever about any individual event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
You combine that behavior with social media, especially Twitter, and the symbiotic relationship with the news media. It's a non-stop anger generation machine. Rapidly iterating on these thoughts, packaging and surfacing the most potent, viral version. Any nuance and context long ago removed.
Outside of people being targeted for no reason, this news cycle just polarizes the American public. People have their set of news sources that only push them the news supporting their opinion, and spin the news in their favor, moving peoples opinions further to the extremes - politics stops being about real issues, and there is no room for real debate. In a building I lived in they had CNN constantly playing in the games room, and all they ever seemed to have was talking heads discussing Trump, mostly speculation about Russia at the time - does that really lead to anyone being more informed, or cause any positive action? I don't think this cost is worth the few cases where the public outrage was correct and effective.
I think it would be a huge problem if the general public stopped consuming any national/international news at all, since injustice would go unnoticed unless it affected you directly. And of course with things like COVID it is important to be informed about what is going on. But I think we would all be better off if instead of looking at the news every day, we just looked at the top stories once or twice a week on a set of reputable news sites, and stayed out of the comments.
One thing I will happily grant is that _watching_ the news is a terrible idea. TV twists everything into being frivolous entertainment, regardless of the topic. Newspapers aren't much better. Too short a time horizon, too much blow-by-blow, meaning no time for context and low signal to noise.
I find that weekly and monthly magazines strike a better balance. Authors have time to write up background and provide context, and little blips and false starts get smoothed over by the passage of time.
On the other hand, I can see why being gaslit for a few months would make lots of people neurotic. The sky was really falling for awhile before anybody in power in the US seemed willing to acknowledge it. Personally, I've lost a lot of faith in our public health departments to have the freedom to tell it like it is, or to have the budget to do anything about it. Being in New York City for the last few months probably doesn't help.
In a lot of ways, current-events Twitter is more like cable news than it is like reading a weekly. All hot takes, no time for context. But like you said, for idiosyncratic folks, the "lifestyle" content is going to be much more relevant on Twitter than on CNN.
This happened because of the news, frequently reporting tentative theories and information about worse case scenarios or extremes as if both were given and much more common things.
Just one example: A piece of recent WaPo reporting whose headline very clearly implied that a whole wave of deaths among young children was being caused by "strange symptoms" of COVID.
Then when one actually read the piece, a slow admission that they were talking about only a very small number of cases out of thousands of pediatric COVID cases.
This is just one example, and considering how many users of social media don't even bother to read news pieces, instead simply sharing them among their friends because the titles sounded scary, it's irresponsible nonsense for a major news outlet to phrase its headlines with so much hyperbole.
Even then, what was anybody really able to do to prepare? The best you could have done was to have gotten your shopping in during mid to late February before the panic buying started. And even then, most goods weren't that hard to come by. The other thing would have been having a good emergency fund, to prepare for the economic turmoil and potential job losses. But that's something you would have needed to prepare for much, much earlier, and should be something everyone does, regardless of their news intake.
> I find that weekly and monthly magazines strike a better balance
I agree on this. Do you have any recommendations for good monthly magazines that do this well?
I have to disagree, or maybe we have a different idea of what is mainstream. The New York Times front page was making a big stink about the coronavirus in Wuhan as early as mid-January. By mid-February they were already quoting experts in European countries telling people to be prepared for a pandemic.
> Even then, what was anybody really able to do to prepare?
For me, more critical than stocking up on anything, was just more time to adjust to the new reality and grieve for what would be lost. I cancelled a number of trips ahead of time, and correctly called that our office wouldn't reopen in two weeks as it had originally been planned to do. I think it's just made the adjustment easier.
> Do you have any recommendations for good monthly magazines that do this well?
The Economist is solid, and in the last few years they added professionally recorded audio versions of their content available in tandem with the digital edition that drops every Thursday. It's like a podcast, except fact checked and with a good sense of perspective. I put it on when I'm cooking or cleaning. I'm also a fan of the Financial Times's Big Read (their weekly magazine stories) and they too put those out in audio form.
When I have more time, I like reading Harpers, the Atlantic, and the NY Times magazine.
Fair, maybe it's the fact that the media is constantly catastrophizing everything that I didn't pay attention to coverage like that. I did start paying attention as soon as I started hearing the warning bells from a bunch of experts in mid February.
Thanks for the recommendation of The Economist. I wish they had a monthly option, looks like they only do weekly? I've had so much trouble finding a good news source or magazine that has a monthly edition / subscription. Guess there's not much money in that.
I agree about local newspapers. We should worry more about what's going on close to us versus Washington.
They've done good work at times, but it's still TV.
1) involvement in local politics (say, with a party or with advocacy groups),
2) voting in local politics,
3) involvement in state or national politics,
...
1,000) voting in state or national elections.
You're arguably a better citizen if you ignore everything past your county or metro area entirely but get really involved in the local stuff—internal party activity, commission meetings, GOTV, activism, that kind of thing, maybe even run for office—compared with your average only-votes-every-two-years-at-best-but-reads-the-NYT folks. Caring about Federal politics, unless you get really involved, only makes sense as entertainment or out of some kind of categorical-imperative obligation.
Turn off notifications about "breaking news" on your phone, declutter your inbox by unsubscribing to newsletters from media outlets, and unfollow news co's on social media (hint: using Twitter's keyword filter is a peach for this). Completely and utterly disengage. I've done this for the past year or so and have completely mellowed out and gotten a lot more done.
The funny part? Nothing has really changed in the world, even with a pandemic tossed in. Barring opinion pieces and in-depth journalism, it's all a machine designed to keep you angry, helpless, and unthinking.
He's saying that people's very-common argument that "it's important to know everything happening in the world" is bunk, and voracious consumption of news is not useful and is harmful. You can get 99% of utility from news with just a few objective headlines and summaries, once a week tops.
> I’ll answer for you: probably never.
The article is dated "July 29" so I'll assume 2019.
We have a pretty huge counterexample right now: the pandemic has led to a lot of critical information needing to be conveyed to everyone very rapidly. For example, people need to be aware that they cannot leave home, or that they should wear masks when doing so, etc.
Often, the government doesn't have a reliable way to reach the entire population quickly. For example, in the UK, the government sent a letter to every household outlining coronavirus guidance. This letter takes a few days to reach everyone.
The news can be leveraged by the government to relay important messages to the population without any effort.
Read slow news. The article mentions local news which I agree with wholeheartedly. The Economist comes out once a month. There's balanced coverage and no clickbait. There's no homepage to constantly refresh or articles designed to induce outrage. You know that they are funded by subscriptions and not from selling your data.
I think that's the biggest point. Services that make money by selling your data or by serving you ads should not be trusted by default.
Is this talking about TV news? If so, I might agree. TV oversimplifies and goes for the sensational and emotional. Plus, they have hours and hours to fill even if there's no content. These days TV news is almost completely a time waster.
But other kinds of news? Disagreed. Especially world and national news. Those are the most interesting. If you keep yourself focused on community news -- which are both relevant and at the same time the most inane -- you stay parochial, which is ok if you don't mind it, but I do. I find the world and world news interesting and relevant. My immediate community is not that interesting.
Also, the news is not only about taking action (though there is that, too). I can't possibly take action about a nuclear disaster in Japan or a famine in Africa, but I want to know about them. I want to know about world's events as they happen, not only in a documentary years later.
This guy Joseph Well runs some kind of writing course, right? Because I'm unimpressed with his essays...
As someone who deals with anxiety, I don't find world news interesting and relevant. I find it panic and anxiety inducing, and it's rarely ever actionable. Local news is generally much more useful and actionable for my daily life.
I still find it important to stay informed of general world events, but I just can't mentally follow it on a daily or even weekly basis anymore.
What I find annoying are blanket statements like "don't follow the news". Says who? Who is this guy to tell me what is reasonable to consider interesting, and whether following world news is something I do "to worry"?
News (particularly in the US) is so caught up in Politics that no one ever knows what anyone's policies are any more.
My favourite part of this article is:
There is voting, of course, but to become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election. There’s no need to have to suffer through the daily back-and-forth of allegations and counter-allegations, of scurrilous lies and their refutations. Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics.
This guy must be loads of fun at dinner parties ;)... i'd say stopping at "i don't know enough about it." would be the perfectly fine thing to say.
There's nothing wrong with saying "I have no interest in participating in the outrage circus with you". The whole point is that that cycle is not fun, dinner party or not.
In the case you describe, you're passing judgement on the other person.
People who pass judgement on other people are unlikely to be much fun to talk to at dinner parties.
I do listen to my local public radio statio. I'm in Boston and WGBH, is pretty good.
They even have a radio talk show (worst title: Boston Public Radio) which has news, events and other discussions. Lots of local (which was more relevent when there where events to discover...) I don't always listen, but it can be pretty funny when people call in.
At the same time, the recipe for click-bait has been perfected, and that's bled over into TV news as well. Sensationalism and outrage sell.
It also seems like there's a strong culture that being first is far more important than being correct, and so even when there is news I might care about, it's hard to get actual details: It's early and inaccurate information, or worse, just various "talking heads" going on for hours speculating but not really adding anything useful.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/media/2013/...
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
https://www.docdroid.net/4wgVecr/why-speculate-michael-crich...
If you just define news as "whatever has caught everyone's attention on the national or global stage", I still think there is value to be derived in staying at least somewhat upto I still think there is value in being relatively up to date.
My biggest reason would simply be whether you like it or not, Americans live in a democracy (for the most part) that is dominated mostly by nation-wide politics, so if you're going to be an informed citizen trying to keep politicians accountable (whatever that may mean to you) on whatever issues have their attention. I don't necessarily like this, but I think this is a necessary evil to a degree.
On a more personal note, I still find value in consuming some news because it provides me perspectives of how other people live. Part of that is simply giving me more context to my role in the surrounding world. Another part of it is simply making me aware of a injustices and other tragedies people face that I otherwise never know about. I feel like the news simply helps keep me grounded to the world beyond my immediate vicinity and relative comfortable lifestyle.
While I can not do much to fix many of these massive problems I can still do something; donate money, organize a goods drive, or even continue the chain and keep spreading awareness to someone else.
Asking your friends what you should vote for builds organization.
Having heated debates about how your friends are wrong after reading the news destroys organization.
Btw. I don't live like this at all. Just some thoughts I had recently.
That's the most basic theory of any regulated system: air conditioning needs a thermometer. A driver needs to keep their eyes open to stay on the road. Any such system is a feedback loop of actuators (wheels / politicians), sensors, and some sense-making equipment in between.
Yes, I know it feels insignificant to cast a ballot once every four years, as one of hundreds of millions. But that election carries a lot of power and recognising and getting over the collective action problem inherent in democracy is sort-of among the duties of being a citizen, as opposed to a mere consumer.
If you really want to make a difference, spend five more minutes each day with your kid. Or checking in with someone in your life that's going through hard times.
they are but that's not actually participating in politics. Participating in politics can mean joining a party yourself, joining a city council. Running for a local office. Participating in a local activist campaign, and so on.
The author's thesis declares news unecessary on the basis that it has no influence on your life. That's only true if you're already detached from public life or citizenship to begin with. The word 'idiot' actually literally translates to 'private person'. In ancient Greece it used to be an epiphet for a person not participating in public life. That's essentially what the author is encouraging, literal idiocy, when the task should be to rekindle participation.
By my estimate, those would also have an infinitesimal chance of significantly changing the world, compared to just staying home and pushing my kid on a swing.
If that makes me an "idiot", so be it.
(And if it makes you feel any better, that should make it easier for you to push politics in your direction.)
News doesn’t teach you much about how the world and things work because it focuses on exceptions.
Here is a good piece about it from the Correspondent who run their news platform on the same thought.
https://thecorrespondent.com/22/the-problem-with-real-news-a...
Once I stopped going on r/popular or r/all my mood when using the site improved drastically
I try to strike a balance in terms of being informed of what's going on, and the amount of time/energy invested into gathering that information.
Being informed is important to me, especially as I'm not a sports guy. It's something common to connect with others over and makes for decent casual conversation, and in bringing up current topics it's a good way to probe others to understand their points of view or how they think/feel about matters.
It also generally provides a jumping-off point into deeper conversations/topics that otherwise might never happen.
And so while I tune out where possible, I do keep a subscription to the Economist, read the daily espresso in the morning and try to get through as much of the weekly as possible (although, I will admit, usually skipping the US section these days - it has become fundamentally uninteresting).
So to me, unlike the author, Aaron S et al., it doesn't feel utterly pointless, but it's certainly not far from the periphery of being.
Just the same, it's no less than healthy to unplug... as beautifully put by one of the Nelson boys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPrPtDoaB3s
"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers." — Nassim Taleb
I don't want to focus on the constant back and forth of political rivalries, because it usually doesn't affect me directly, and why would I cause myself discomfort by indulging in stories I have no control over.
That GE stock is down 1% at 2pm isn't useful unless you are an professional active trader. But the stock's trend line and the company's financials could, over a few days, point to a story you can take action on.
We didn't evolve to receive this level of information flow. Our brains think it's all relevant.
My strategy is to read a summary of sorts on Sundays, a paper copy of The Economist. It's not all encompassing and sometimes has a bit of bias, but it's the only weekly I've found that comprehensively sums up the stream of events that happened rather that generally line up in some sort of context. I've found that useful.
As I see it the problem is the junk-news. It presents as news but there's little substance, it doesn't make you more informed, it makes you angry, upset, and most-importantly (to the new station), engaged.
Matt Taibbi's new book, Hate Inc does a great job of illustrating how the "junk news" (and he doesn't just go after the Right) industry is rotting our brains:
https://www.amazon.com/Hate-Inc-Todays-Despise-Another/dp/19...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...
Among other things, it helped me understand why I was seeing and reading what media outlets were producing at the time, before and since then. Until I read this article I didn't understand how we got to the level of disconnect that is so clearly evidenced by US media. Well worth reading for anyone who cares enough to try and understand where this is coming from.
TV was bad enough, but now the internet is everywhere. It is time for a universal time management and distraction mitigation API that gives control back to the user. This API should connect to most major digital services, and it should work on most devices. We cannot rely on media companies or digital platforms to become less distracting, since their profits are on the line. We should create an API for them to plug into and say "your turn." If they refuse to play nice, go to the government and ask for laws to make it mandatory. Human beings have not evolved to deal with all this noise. Hard controls are necessary.
As a by-product, you'd realize that you can only consume so much news in a day, and would automatically optimize for the best quality.
If this clip showed just one set of news stations (all NBC stations) saying the same line, that would be one thing (they're just getting phrases to include from higher up) but it's tons of different networks.
Sure they could just be cutting up and reporting the same AP article they licensed or a press release (Occam's Razor) but it's also likely this particular narrative is pushed, at best, by advertisers wanting a specific message, and at worst, by the government or the CIA. It has happened before (Operation Mockingbird and COINTELPRO). It's silly to think it's not happening now.
I’ll answer for you: probably never."
This is what happens to a depoliticized population. When Trump announced the strike on the Iranian General, we were out on the streets within a few days to protest the possibility of a new war. Not taking action is a symptom of helplessness, apathy, or simply being overwhelmed by life. Alternatively, it can be because you passively support what is happening. You can combat the former ills by being part of a political organization that cares about these issues.
That said, I would recommend against TV. There's something about TV that just switches off the mind. The worst journalism is on TV, though it can be useful for monitoring live ongoing events.
stopped watching the news 15 years ago. this one mostly gets this right. stop watching the news. if something so important happens that you should know about it, other people will tell you about it.
also, you can direct your attention to things that do a good job to give you a signal to noise ratios: hackernews and very specific subreddits work wonders.
I find PBS, Propublica, and other similar organizations to rely less on entertainment and fluff, and to report more on what matters to actual human beings who aren't their sponsors.
https://www.alaindebotton.com/news-users-manual/
It talks about how to responsibly consume news in these modern times
Group sourced news take is better than the drivel journalists write.
So one day, I just stopped and my life has become immeasurably better. I do now have to awkwardly say "oh, no I hadn't heard about that" when someone talks to me about some insignificant world event, but it doesn't matter to me. Of course, you still hear about the major things, but I try not to concern myself with things that Trump says or does. It doesn't add to my life in any way, it only detracts from it.
Would definitely ask yourself the question, does keeping up to date with the news really add to your life? And that's all the author is really suggesting.
Years ago I stopped watching satire news too. I use to love Colbert and Stewart, but I also realized I was laughing at .. genocide. I thought that such a format might make people more aware and such news more palatable, but I came to believe that it just makes us numb and dumb to some of the harsher realities of the time we occupy.
If you do have to listen to something, I suggest the No Agenda Podcast (one of the oldest podcasts in existence) and the Corbet Report. Even then, take them in limited doses.
I think Colorado has the best NPR affiliate of all time -- they go by CPR. Really popular, even among younger people. Highest quality news and radio... I wonder if any other states/cities have similar quality public radio?
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/wipedoffthemap/
I use to listen to Democracy Now back then too, but I really don't think either news source as really held up over the years. They're both very polarized, and the quality of their content has gone down as well.
Long gone are the days when there were legally binding rules for fairness and honesty in order to retain your license and maintain your business. Long gone are the days when the public owned its airwaves and the businesses that were granted their access were required to produce honest news in order to maintain their licenses. You can thank Reagan and Clinton for these changes and of course, the fleecing of American by Congress over the last 30+ years. (Insert Boomers suck comment here)
The PBS Newshour is the only televised news that is fact based and still run with integrity. If you're going to watch the news, watch PBS.
Well I did read about covid early on an nearly bought masks in preparation (didnt do it because WHO said it’s fine).
I read a lot about the UK government so I can tell when to buy and when to sell british pounds. Doom and gloom on the guardian or dailymail? It’ll go down. Good (fake or exaggerated) news on the dailymail? It’ll go up.
But indeed most news are just a distraction. And most news websites are a load of BS with titles meant to drive page traffic up.
Rest in peace Schwartz.
I doubt this would be true for NYT, WaPo, etc., but I am indeed too lazy to look.
For those too young to remember what reasonable journalism used to look like, Reuters and AP are probably the closest, in the MSM.
How is that a good thing? "Far right" and "far left" are both perfectly fine terms to describe certain political ideologies and movements.
Or, to put it another way, if half of the electorate holds fairly similar views, they cannot reasonably be described as "far right" (or "far left", for that matter). The "far" end would be maybe one percent, not fifty.
In any case, I appreciate journalists that simply describe the situation, and allow me to decide for myself what I think about it. Hard to remember now, but that's how it actually used to be.