Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
raptitude.com
raptitude.com
We went quite a few years without ever seeing cable. My kids would stream shows and consume other media on-demand, but any advertising was minimal and fairly non-intrusive. And then they were watching a kids show at a hotel once and the ads came on and the effect it had on them was crazy. They suddenly desperately needed all the toys in the commercials and were repeating catch phrases from ads after only seeing them a couple of times. The contrast in their behavior was insane. And they HAD to keep watching it like I hadn't seen before. I spent a week off-grid with my parents a while back and it was great. We came home and my Mom put on the news suddenly everything was terrible and she was angry, but she had to keep watching.
Just awful for mental health if you can't separate yourself from it.
In and of itself, I don't. Unfortunately, the local politicians toe the party line and ape the Big City / Big State politicians, the Cuomos and the Garcettis of the world.
Suppose you could paint it at some level as "know thy enemy" (pardon the abrasiveness of the wording) because those states are something of a test bed for what to expect from the local folks, but a year or so down the line whether that's "You must wear a mask and cannot let your child use that swing set," or "policies that demoralize the police and undermine anything resembling a reasonable standard of rule-of-law, or "we must tear down statues of elder statesmen ("divisive", old, racist White men) while erecting statues of individuals that praised and sought to emulate the Haitian revolution and its genocidal outcomes."
With that said, I can't stand that all of my local options routinely shove rage-bait National stories in your face. There is no true "local only" coverage.
Perhaps of these issues the only one that could be construed as a non-serious issue is the topic of statues. At the same time, I find it rather queer that when I take a stroll through the local park I am confronted with the statue of a man who wanted to kill everyone with my skin tone in a time where we are supposed to be seeking some sort of harmony.
IMO people ought to put down social media, put down the national news, and pick up their local newspaper. Read about their own mayor, city council, whatever. And maybe even get involved -- depending on the size of your city, an ordinary individual can actually get involved at a meaningful level.
Love 'em or hate 'em, the Republican Party appears to understand this very well. They made state and local government a priority because they know that is where politics begins. Their success at the national level is disproportionate to the size of their voting bloc because they know how to play the game.
Anyone who opposes their ideals needs to remember that, and get involved locally.
Whether the President should or should not is irrelevant. The salient fact is that if the presidential election results for 2016 were different, then abortion access for millions or tens of millions of women would not be on the chopping block.
> Their success at the national level is disproportionate to the size of their voting bloc because they know how to play the game.
This is a trivial fact when the game is designed such that certain voting blocs in certain arbitrarily drawn boundaries have more voting power than other same size or bigger voting blocs in other arbitrarily drawn boundaries. Unless you live in a place that can be flipped to your candidate or party, there is not much to do locally.
The president nominating a justice that decided to allow the Texas abortion law to remain in effect while it is being challenged has a bigger impact than the state senator who drafted the law?
Of course, the President has more power overall, but your ability to have any impact in that election is infinitesimal if you're in a swing state and non-existent otherwise. The fact Congressional districts are gerrymandered is all the more reason to vote for state legislatures. Even in local districts that are dominated by a single party, the real election occurs during the primaries. Chances are, if you get to know the candidates, there's going to be one you prefer.
People seem to forget that the purpose of democracy is to give a chance to make sure your own interests are heard, not to give you an opportunity to impose your will on the rest of the country. Our government isn't designed for the latter. You'd need a more authoritarian structure to do that. Trying to do so in a democracy just results in politicians who are more interested in virtue signaling absolutist positions than drafting policy that genuinely benefits their constituents.
The rest of your comment is agreeable, but does not address the jist of mine which is that the President can and does have an effect on people’s every day lives in a noticeable way, hence people paying attention to them in the news.
> People seem to forget that the purpose of democracy is to give a chance to make sure your own interests are heard, not to give you an opportunity to impose your will on the rest of the country
As an aside, this is what the pro abortion choice position is. The people who want an abortion can get one, and the people who do not, do not get one. The abortion anti choice bloc wants to impose their will the rest of the country/state/city/whatever.
It didn't have to be this way. They could have left it to the states or local jurisdictions, and moved to a state with policies they agreed with. They could have (tried to) pass a Constitutional Amendment making it a clear and obvious Constitutional Right instead of a weird interpretation. Instead, they did this.
Living in a Democracy requires us to consider the opinions of our fellow citizens and try our best to accommodate them, rather than steamrolling them.
Consider the position of a Pro-Life activist. They will think that all abortion is murder, that the ruling is a grotesque twisting of the Constitution, and fight every inch of the way on every nominee. Does this sound like the way we were meant to resolve contentious issues? You may disagree with them, but they are also our fellow citizens, and will not be happy about steamrolling their positions.
Consider also the position of a Gun Rights activist. They will be outraged at how the courts have ignored attacks on an actual enumerated Constitutional Right, and fight every nominee on those terms, not particularly caring whether they are also likely to be anti-Abortion.
Maybe it's best if we resist using the Supreme Court to decide everything and try to pass clear Amendments for what's really important and broadly agreed upon. Though this goes back to how dysfunctional and useless Congress has become in their prescribed role.
The majority of americans believe in abortion by a non trivial margin. The reason it's not guaranteed is precisely because the united states is not a democracy, but a democratic republic, giving significantly more political power to some voters based on where they live.
That great, then you should have no trouble passing an actual Constitutional Amendment recognizing that right in a way that can't be interpreted away. I'll just sit here and wait while you go and do that.
> The reason it's not guaranteed is precisely because the united states is not a democracy, but a democratic republic, giving significantly more political power to some voters based on where they live.
You omit an awful lot of history in order to sound snarky. In reality, we started with a loose confederation of independent states. Some skillful negotiators tried to convince them all to unite into one nation. Naturally, the more rural states with smaller populations were concerned that their opinions and needs would be steamrolled by the more populous states, so to bring them all aboard, those negotiators biased a few things towards them a little bit. Everyone, including those more urban states, signed onto it, and everyone lived happily ever after*.
Now, making those states' concerns appear rather prescient, quite a lot of modern urban progressives seem to want to renege on that promise, primarily because they think they can get away with it, and they hate those people anyways.
Would be easy in a democracy
Ergo the solution is rural voters count for much more than urban voters.
> Naturally, the more rural states with smaller populations were concerned that their opinions and needs would be steamrolled by the more populous states
What happened to respecting the wishes of fellow citizens? Why are these specific citizens more important because they live in a different plot of land?
> Now, making those states' concerns appear rather prescient, quite a lot of modern urban progressives seem to want to renege on that promise, primarily because they think they can get away with it, and they hate those people anyways.
Maybe its because the concept of losing a national election with millions more votes than the other side is bullshit? There are many divides in beliefs between people in the country. Geographical ones seem like the least interesting.
Actually the Supreme Court that decided Roe vs Wade was mostly appointed by republicans.
Can't help but think of this when I start forming an opinion about what Dr. Seuss should do with his old books, etc. All kinds of trivial issue the news and social media prompts me to think about. Why do I care? Especially since I'm not going to do anything about it. There are more important causes to fight for, and I don't have the time to take action for trivial things. If I'm not going to act, and cannot influence the situation, why bother even forming an opinion?
For a while there Cuomo was being talked about very seriously as the heir apparent to the Democrat presidential nomination. I agree with OP that "civic duty" is a silly reason for watching the news, but when it comes to voting to give people massive amount of power, that really does matter.
Now that Cuomo is out, I agree, for those of us not in NY his actions are less consequential.
The trap set by news is implying that something could possibly impact you when it probably wont.
I’m glad you acknowledge the larger picture.
Feels like meaningless dreck to fill the gaps between ads.
The Economist remains a good rag, and Wired is surprisingly good, albeit full of ads. But for true, long-form, thoughtful discussions I look to YouTube and podcasts these days.
I'm older enough to remember local news before all the stations were bought up, and it was exactly the same. Nonstop horrible garbage.
Classic "kid stuck in the well" stories, a local news staple, go back to at least the 1940s.
Here is a powerful public official who was lauded by the media for his response to COVID, while simultaneously implementing terrible public health policies in old age homes that led to thousands of deaths, who then fudged his COVID reports to the CDC, and passed legislation that shielded executives that managed old age homes from liability for following those terrible public health policies. Other representatives tried to draw attention to these problems but couldn't get traction because Cuomo was a media darling in how he stood up to Trump.
Cuomo's public image was further bolstered by his brother at CNN, and with all this free publicity Andrew signed a multimillion dollar deal to write a book about his career.
But his incompetence and fraud wasn't enough to trigger a fall from grace, it took several sexual harassment complaints.
So as a health check on your democratic republic, I'd be a little worried given the multiple failures up and down the line: failure of the executive to implement sensible policies and report data accurately, failure of the press to check their claims, provide coverage free of conflicts of interest and otherwise keep them executive branches in line, failure of the justice department to prosecute blatant misconduct.
They're written for other lawyers, so they're well composed, often without excessive hyperbole. The writing is far higher quality than typical journalism. They're actually informational in terms of describing the mechanisms behind power in our society.
In terms of focus, if something is truly important there will always be a legal analysis. Celebrity fluff and nonsense about talking heads doesn't make the cut. Meaningful conflict and hard questions do.
Popehat is usually quite good, especially when there's some kind of nonsense narrative going around. Good debunking explainers https://www.popehat.com/
Volokh conspiracy has very good analysis of current events as well: https://reason.com/volokh/ (was at WaPo, was independent before that. I haven't read it in a while)
There's a lot of other really great stuff around as well, like the lw blog collection: https://www.lw.com/blogs
Sometimes it's "yes, this is actually quite big"; other times it's "this is a breathless depiction of something that happens 20 times a day and is entirely normal procedure".
- SCOTUSBlog
- Law 360
- Bloomberg Law
- ABA Journal News
- Courthouse News
The primary benefit to using legal sources for your news is that the legal news cycle does not match up with the 24 hour news cycle. For example, right now we're talking about SCOTUS's 2022-2023 case docket, and that doesn't even start until October. Also because lawyers like to cover their butts/believe in getting everything in writing, a lot of their back and forth is available to the public, which lets you get better context for arguments.
If you're talking about political news, no. Some of the most hyperbolic, partisan, and bizarrely flawed takes on Trump, and the US political situation over the last 5 years, have come from lawyers. It's been embarrassing.
But I'm sure we could find bits of embarrassment anywhere we look!
The incessant talking heads are such obvious brainwashers, whenever I get tricked into watching some in a clip or at a bar/taqueria it's utterly offensive and patronizing manipulative trash. I can't imagine how broken people are who constantly consume the stuff.
[0] youtube-dl is a godsend for maintaining this without totally disconnecting from contemporary culture
I wish there were automation scripts one could leave running that literally just expanded ones bubble back to objective normalcy.
I would say for starters that they live in a much more frightening world than you and I live in. And that is very unfortunate.
What worked well for me was getting a print subscription to the Economist. They definitely have a bias (particularly in their editorials), but it's mostly of the "free trade" variety, which is pretty easy to account for. On the other hand, their world coverage, particularly Africa and Middle East, is leaps and bounds better than anything you'll get online for free.
Plus the print medium is well suited for the wind-down time before bed, when I'm trying to disengage from screens. As a bonus, there's an exactly 0% chance you get click-baited into reading something inflammatory when you're consuming news on a piece of paper. Sadly they recently force-bundled print with digital, so you're stuck paying ~$80/year if you sign up during one of the frequent sales. $1.50/week is still well worth the cost of admission for me.
FWIW I have a subscription to a major news paper + local to avoid the filter bubble. The major is a little conservative leaning and local a little liberal.
Print and digital sub to the Economist and then "banned" myself from reading 24hr/live news sites.
Has been interesting to see how many real life conversations I've been in ~18m in where I've been (anecdotally) better informed, or able to add colour (the recent events in Ukraine are a good example) that friends have totally missed hooked up to the daily drip. Interested to see if you find this also?
I'm a huge fan of the more objective attitude of charts and figures, and a clear subjective opinion, often explicitly stated as "we think...".
What's actually really surprising to me is how "not behind" my information normally is. I work my way through an issue over breakfasts and evenings in the course of the week, so my information is typically 2-9 days stale. It almost never matters.
Vs online journalism doesn't seem to have the skill, or make the effort, to effectively set the news of the day in a well-summarized background.
Historically, when The Economist was founded, libertarianism would have been associated with French anarchism. The core, consistent theme of libertarianism is that individual rights trump arbitrary interference by a collective. The various forms of anarchism are sort of natural "extreme" forms of libertarianism. Intellectually, libertarianism starts with a negative claim that except in extraordinary cases, the collective has no right to interfere with individuals. This remains true today. Core items (legalization of prostitution, drugs, elimination of many taxes) begin with the pretext that the collective has no right to regulate individual behavior in these domains.
Classical liberalism emerged in Britain (Locke, Smith, Mill, etc.). It has roots in a blend of English utilitarianism and enlightenment-era attempt to root the form of government in reason. "Rights" in classical liberalism are important, but they aren't necessarily more foundational than well-being. Anarchism is seem as trivially untenable (Hobbes' "nature red of tooth and claw"). Liberalism tries to identify a core set of functions (security, laws and their enforcement, public infrastructure) and a set of mechanisms (constitutions, elections, courts, etc.) to implement them, and has a very enlightenment-era emphasis on building institutions that are robust to "bad" actors. It does cleave towards a minimalist view of government, and does elevate rights like freedom of speech, but these are seen as intrinsically grey and are framed much more in terms of limiting the power of government institutions to ensure that they remain true to their mission/function.
I don't think that's flame bait, or super controversial.
Do the words mean something else to you?
Your own words "They represent the classical liberal position, which is not Libertarian, and never has been" make it seems like there is a clear cut difference between classical liberal and (modern) libertarian. Which is simply not true and unnecessarily divisive and seeking for flame war.
It is the mainstream view that classical liberal and libertarian are mostly equivalent in the modern context. The clear cut differentiation between classical liberal and libertarian is your own personal opinion. It is ok to have your own personal opinion, but it is exaggeration to state it as if it is the objective fact.
We're talking about the classification of a 170-year-old journal that operates out of the UK. I don't think the suggestion that libertarianism (particularly American libertarianism) is largely irrelevant when discussing The Economist is surprising, or shocking, or even terribly controversial. The suggestion that it would start a flame war is particularly odd as far as the content of the suggestion was concerned, although the tone of the comment you were responding to was a little blustery.
I'm sure a lot of the staff of The Economist and a lot of libertarians hold, say, Milton Friedman in high regard.
The clear cut distinction between classical liberalism and libertarianism, however, is not merely my own personal opinion. Although the intellectual landscape is complex and variegated, there's a fundamental difference in how the two lines of thinking argue, and what they accept as first principals. Classical liberalism is an institutionalist view that derives policy decisions using a utilitarian set of values that balances rights against other measures of well-being and sustainability.
Libertarianism, conversely, uses a first-principals rights-based way of approaching decisions. Just as an example, here's the front page of the Libertarian Party in the United States:
"<The Libertarian Party> is the only political party that respects you as a unique and responsible individual. Our slogan is that we are 'The Party of Principle' because we stand firmly on our principles. Libertarians strongly oppose any government interference in your personal, family, and business decisions. Essentially, we believe all Americans should be free to live their lives and pursue their interests as they see fit as long as they do no harm to another."
This is pretty close to antithetical to classical liberalism. Classical liberalism explicitly seeks to suborn individual rights (which are not enshrined as intrinsically valuable) in a way that doesn't make us worse off than we started. The minimalism is classical liberalism is about outcomes, not about rights.
Obviously that's just a cheap banner page and not representative of libertarianism to everyone. I was surprised to find that it was closer to the original French meaning than I expected (which isn't important, but might be interesting).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_in_the_United_S...
? The 'classical liberal' position is literally the foundation of 'Libertarianism', which is a specifically modern American concept.
Those two have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
The main stances that seem to go against coastal US media I've seen are:
1) Trans rights, particularly with youth transitioning. The Economist seems to have an article every week or two talking about health implications, controversy in female sports, or detransitioning.
2) Free speech. The Economist is very critical of any perceived censorship, and will frequently cover perceived excesses from the left in the US, particularly in higher education.
Generally I do not think the Economist does a great job of visually separating their editorial content from their news content. In many cases visual treatment of a column looks very close to a regular article, and the editorials at the front of each issue look (at a glance) indistinguishable from news stories. Each issue will also have a larger "briefing" on a prominent world issue that definitely blurs the lines between news and opinion. As a reader of many years, I've taken to skipping the editorial content, skimming the briefings, and taking the columns case-by-case. But I can imagine occasional readers having a different experience than I do.
Particularly with NPR, you have to focus on particular shows and stations. There's no central editorial staff for the content that comes from their member stations. For example the Takeaway has quite different editorial standards than All Things Considered or Morning Edition.
The selection of stories tells the tale. Whenever the topic de jour hits, you’ll get a good 7-10 minutes of patter about it every hour for a month.
I’m all for it, and don’t consider them “compromised”, but there’s typically not enough content to support that level of coverage.
If something has elite consensus they will usually support it. This is probably the last place where youd want an ideological blind spot to be, also.
"There's no central editorial staff" - there's no need to have a central staff if you hire the same types of people.
Hear it from former senior NPR Exec. himself [1]
I'm not supporting this man's views at all, other than to point out he gives a fairly clear articulation into how 'bias' doesn't remotely need to have some kind of central authority and that it absolutely exists at NPR.
In fact, for someone who doesn't see the bias in something like NPR, learning to see the bias in an otherwise fairly respectable institution which does have fairly high standards and isn't so interest in flame-bait such as NPR - would be a worthy exercise.
'Culture' is probably the root of all bias in most places, not some 'central committee'. People who don't fit the mood are pushed said, those who have 'the correct opinions' are promoted. It's a perennial feature of human organisations you can see this in corporate culture as well.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0qyeFVf7bg&ab_channel=TheRu...
What I asked were for some concrete examples. Whenever the discussion comes up on bias at NPR (in particular) people tend to hand wave around "subtle, but fairly clear centre left bias."
In my opinion there is a bias, which I would call "radical centrism" (the Sisyphean task of trying to recognize bias and attempt to curtail it), and I could point to few in the past week as a regular listener, but whenever I hear "NPR has a liberal bias" I can't get anyone to give me concrete examples. It's taken as fact.
My overwhelming interpretation of the national NPR broadcasts are two part :
Firstly, the majority of it are human interest stories. They do not devote a majority of their air time to politics. I don't see how the Moth, Fresh Air, This American Life, or the handful of local shows I listen to regularly about local news stories trends anywhere but whichever direction is compelling to a listener.
And secondly, an opinion that I don't like articulating on HN or anywhere that might ruffle feathers is that facts have a liberal bias. You can argue until the cows come up about the role of government in society, but the cardinal direction of "reality" on the political compass is <- that way.
This is a while back, and an extreme example, but the pinnacle for me was the editorial (https://postimg.cc/hhkmfgN3) on the 9th of January 2012 where one could swap every reference it had on defending banks and financiers with references to slavery and slaveholders and the force of the argument would not change one jot. This was because it made absolutely no recourse to the wider context of impacts that the industry might have besides being of benefit to a city. It was just a whirr of rhetoric and really opened my eyes to the biases in play. The magazine's prestige has never quite recovered.
Fun aside, many other cases of journalistic bias are more about very selective reporting and emphasis, see for example the Bolivian election of 2020.
You may have interest in the writings of the Niskanen Center https://www.niskanencenter.org/ They work from a similar position. For example, I was hugely impressed by this essay https://www.niskanencenter.org/what-the-pandemic-revealed/
I don't know a regular publication devoted to this view, unfortunately.
I haven't read that particular essay, but maybe submit it?
They are good in that they are informative and not subtle about the voice of the paper. But it gets a little boring to me if I read it for a few months.
In fact, a good 50% of my feeds are 'World News' feeds from other countries. it's the best way to see alternate points of view I think, and then as a moderately intelligent[1] adult, I can form my own opinion on the current state of affairs.
---
[1] I'm not allowed to call myself 'smart' on HN, I got told off for it on a previous comment ;)
Highly recommend it! And this is coming from someone who despises news, generally.
It’s either to call some phone number or attempt it via live chat. I tried the second option and the representative just went on with the script trying to fatigue me out of it, no matter what I said.
Hopefully the FTCs actions last year will put an end to the kind of cancellation hell you describe. At least for US customers anyway.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/10/ftc-r...
No affiliation, just a very satisfied customer.
I would GLADLY pay for a print subscription, because I greatly prefer physical magazines over digital. But whether it's magazines, satellite radio, or whatever... I'm just not subscribing to anything known for not letting people go.
Never a response.
I’ve actually had this experience with them before but thought they had gotten better, but I guessed I’ve learned.
Their email responsiveness to anything other than a cancellation is pretty good though.
Makes up for being complemented on my English ‘for an immigrant’.
Whenever I’m trying to cancel anything, if there isn’t an obvious and easy way to do so, I just send an email to whatever customer help/etc. mailbox I can find notifying them of the cancellation with 30 days notice. In the mail I tell them that after 30 days I will claw back any payment via my credit card.
I’ve only had to do it twice, and only had to claw back 1 payment, but I’ve never had an issue.
I think that they are pretty clear about their agenda to be honest. E.g. they explained and even gave a name to their stance ("extreme centre"), they openly endorse candidates in many elections worldwide, they often include sentences in articles such as "this paper believes that..." etc.
I don't agree with some of their points, but by making them explicit they also make them easy to filter out IMHO
[0] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/04/...
https://medium.economist.com/why-are-the-economists-writers-...
and previous discussion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
Neoconservatism is more a social theory, i.e. pushback from 60s social liberals.
My point exactly, that's anything but clear and honest! Calling their views, which are objectively right-wing neoliberal capitalist, calling them "centre" or "moderate" is part of an attempt to naturalise (if that makes sense) their worldview into something that is objective, common-sense, and neutral.
AllSides rates them as "Leans left": https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist
They've endorsed Democrats for US President since 2004.
Ad Fontes also rates them slightly left leaning: https://adfontesmedia.com/the-economist-bias-and-reliability...
It's absolutely true that on cultural issues (particularly rights of minorities), the Democratic party and even the Economist is actually left or even far left compared to many world countries.
But on economic matters, the Economist's positions, and indeed Democratic party positions, are indeed far right-wing of what you'll see virtually anywhere else (maybe other 5-eyes countries are getting closer?).
Also, on foreign policy, the media and political parties in the US almost speak with a single voice, which is often, again, far outside mainstream opinion in the rest of the world.
America is a one party system - the War Party. It's just that as per typical American extravagance they've got two of them.
Or, at the very least, it's not deceptive to call themselves "centre" as neoliberals in a country where the majority understand "centre" to mean "neoliberals" (even if they don't actually know what "neoliberals" means.)
They are not exactly Americans, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist
Right: conservative. Policy designed to preserve corporate interests and wealthy elite. Often masquerading as “looking after the middle class” - when really at best they get some trickle down benefits. Selfishly You should be right leaning if you are a significant owner of capital or have a very high chance of that (they will convince you that everyone has this chance).
Left: Progressive (in that it looks to reform the existing structure). Policy design to assist the working class (wage earners). It typically looks to take from corporates/wealthy elite and redistribute. Selfishly You should be left leaning if you don’t own significant capital and derive most of your income from wages.
Unselfishly you should err on the side of the left as it is aiming for a “greater good”.
For once I would argue, it is for the greater good, if "selfish" individual rights are increased - and apart from that, I think using the left right spectrum is not very helpful for anything, but dividing society into tribal thinking.
It’s not an ideology of greater good. I mean it literally in the utilitarian sense: left thinking, focusing on improving the plight of wage earners literally effects more people and is a greater good.
Improving/preserving wealthy elites will naturally benefit fewer people.
These are facts, with evidence. I can go deeper if you find this simplification too blunt. It isn’t overly simplified it. It describes what the left right spectrum means, and yes I’m applied a value judgement, but I can back up my value judgement with facts.
I’m not an extremist in my views though, and I will accept democratic processes, and there is benefit to floating around the spectrum, rather than committing to a single point.
These are facts, with evidence"
You are implying, that it is a fact that right leaning people want to preserve wealthy elites.
But this is not, what I heard from right leaning people as their goals.
"Capitalism, or more specifically inequality created the tribes."
And I believe, tribes existed way before capitalism.
So I believe, that you are indeed quite extremist in your ideology, if you know as a fact, that left is good and right is bad.
There are many, many different contradicting views and concepts on the right as well on the left. To some I agree, to many I do not.
But as an example, the nazis are considered quite right usually. But it is nationalsocialism. The concept of the greater good for the people (of one race). So they are left then?
I rather think the whole left right concept is flawed and not helpful.
Nazis are the very definition of preserving the wealth of a few. It’s just you have seen the words “National Socialism” and assumed that meant left. You’ll find the labels are high jacked quite often. But left and right remain more consistent.
Are you saying that trying to bring more benefit to wage earners is not good?
Could you give an example of right wing policy that wasn’t focused on preserving wealthy elites?
Where does genocide fit into anything I’ve said?
No, I just happen to live in an area (in germany) with lots of nazis and had to engage with their ideology a lot.
There definitely exist anticapitalist, socialist fascist today, as did back then. Those are the ones, that were put down in Nazi germany in 1934 in the Röhm Putsch, so they did not rose to power, but nevertheless exist. They do believe in a socialist aryan society. So the greater good and negating of the individual, but limited to a certain race.
So how do they fit in, in the left = altruistic, right = selfish metric?
They are not individualists. They are willing to sacrifice themself for Volk und Vaterland.
"There are not contradicting views"
And with contradicting I meant in general. The socialist pagan Nazis do not really agree with the capitalist, catholic fascist of spain for example, but both are labeld right.
While anarchosyndicalist do not really share much with stalinist, yet both are labeled left.
If you care about preserving wealth with elites that is right wing… whatever weird political label you give it.
If you care about distributing it to non elites that is left wing.
Stalinists are not “left” they were about wealth and power consolidation.
This is why right and left are useful measures because it sees passes all the bullshit names/political measures and provides a simple scale: are you redistributing wealth (left)? Are you consolidating wealth (right)? Are you doing something in between (centrist)
They are left, because they want to redistribute wealth, from the few rich (jewish) bankers, to the poor (aryan) german masses?
It’s important distinction that at the extremes both left and right don’t look that different. It is essentially use extreme violence to achieve wealth distribution/consolidation. Typically once someone is in control of such power even if they set out/pretended to distribute they pivot to consolidation. I guess this is what is meant by “power corrupts”
But I am not angry, just mildly annoyed, that my point does not get through.
(my point was the left right metric is not helpful - but when applied, you will find not a homogenous group, but right leaning nazis, as well as left leaning nazis, when defining right or left with distributing or conserving wealth. Another common definition would be racist, or not.
But I am out of this semantic debate)
I sometimes think it's useful to consider political ideologies as existing somewhere along a spectrum of collectivist to individualist.
Communism would be far to the collectivist end of the spectrum. Socialism less so.
Most neoliberals wouldn't subscribe to an extreme form of libertarianism as they are predominantly concerned with free market capitalism. But neoliberalism is definitely on the individualist end of the spectrum. An example would be promoting privatisation and discouraging government (collective) ownership.
Personally, I think that a mix of individualism and collectivism is best, and this is indeed what you'll find in many places (including, to a large extent, the US).
From this perspective, you can't call yourself both the "extreme centre" and neoliberal. It would be like calling yourself "extreme centre" and socialist.
The term "extreme centre" is far from new. It was used in 1955 by Geoffrey Crowther, editor at the time, when he said "the extreme centre is the paper's historical position"
[1] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/02/...
Ask a few self-professed conservatives if they agree with the Economist and see what they say.
The Economist has a Prospectus which spells out its ideology.
I'd known of and read the ... newspaper ... for three decades before learning of this and reading it.
PROSPECTUS of a weekly paper, to be published every Saturday, and to be called 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—political events—and parliamentary discussions; and particularly to all such as relate immediately to revenue, commerce, and agriculture; or otherwise affect the material interests of the country. ...
https://www.economist.com/unknown/1843/08/05/prospectus
That is, The Economist is, and always has been, overtly free-trade propaganda. (Though one might argue that the meaning(s) and connotations of that term have evolved since first proposed in 1843.)
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29285722
They generally try to outline both sides of a discussion but are often a little weak in championing a cause that they're not for.
But it's rarely ambiguous where they stand, or why.
National Review is similar to The Atlantic in that their long form pieces meant for print publication are wonderful, and tend to be rather nuanced, whiletheir short pieces meant for immediate internet consumption are heavily biased. They're interesting in that they take a "big tent" approach, and will allow a lont of dissenting voices to appear under their mast head - this was always true but became really rather evident during the 2016 elections.
The Dispatch is made up of authors and editors who didn't like that Trump supporters were allowed under the "Big Tent" of the National Review. It's edited by Jonah Goldberg, and David French, who shows up as a guest writer for the Atlantic every now and then.
That NZ's major left wing party was and is still a big proponent of these policies didn't change that.
Today, it could be argued that neoliberalism has moved the overton window, but many, many people still don't buy it.
Or that they are viewing things entirely through the lens of American culture war dimension of politics (where the Economist might fit in the neutral to left-facing description), rather than the usual left-right economic spectrum, where it is agressively center-right.
It's often a good read nonetheless, but it's not a news site.
Really great, conservative, and academic stuff. Highly regarded by many.
Excellent publications, and whole video series on YouTube are free to watch
His podcasts about the 2008 financial crisis were fantastic.
No, they aren’t, especially the Economist, which is aggressively center-right pro-capitalist.
https://news.yahoo.com/steve-jobs-widow-takes-stake-atlantic... https://www.twitter.com/austerewyatt1/status/146967519091742...
Sometimes I read almost the whole thing, but there are weeks when I skip more than 80% of the contents because of no time. One issue I'll always read cover to cover, though, is the Christmas special.
1) Breadth of coverage. The Economist is much more of a world magazine. When I scan Google News I get basically no Africa coverage. The economist has a section for it.
2) Depth of coverage. The Economist will have journalists reporting on location in places like China and India. They get direct interviews with people who are experiencing the phenomenon being reported on. I rarely if ever see that kind of reporting on Google News, especially not behind a paywall.
3) Better coverage of "slow burn" stories. e.g. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening in Africa right now with infrastructure development. China has its big Belt and Road initiative that's more or less forced western governments to present a viable alternative or get boxed out. The west has bungled the response, and China is now dominant in financing new infrastructure projects throughout Africa. It will likely reap benefits for decades, both in economic and military positioning. There's no one "story" here to make a headline that would bubble up in Google News, but it's a really fascinating ongoing geopolitical saga.
4) Hitting interesting angles on stories. Last week there was an article about Russian troop buildup around Ukraine, but they wrote it from the angle of civilian surveillance technology. By stitching together private satellite imagery, TikTok and YouTube footage they were able to tell that troops that were ostensibly "withdrawn" had just been redeployed to other positions closer to the front. Using dash-cam footage posted to TikTok they were able to even identify specific armored divisions being moved up to the border. So I got a piece of current news (Russia is lying about its troop deployment), plus a piece of insight (in modern warfare citizens can learn about military movements without it being filtered through government entities).
5) This is not specific to the Economist, but the print format is so much nicer for me than digital. There's no temptation to check my email, or see what's on Hacker News (hah), or get drawn down some random digital rabbit hole.
I find just skimming headlines gives me facts but facts are kind of useless. For example you could tell an alien that the average human drinks 1 cup of milk a day and the alien would have a fact but be completely unable to contextualize it.
Longer form articles help you contextualize it.
Of course, you still have to be careful that take into the account the unintentional bias of the source (i.e. a 3/day milk drinker would tell the alien that people don’t drink enough milk, and they’re not lying… they just see life through their own experiences).
So you really need a combo of regular news media for facts and a variety of longer form sources for contextualization.
Some advice I picked up on HN which works well is to start at the back and make your way to the front.
This trick probably works for other periodicals with a shady-as-hell internet filter bubble "feature."
I think a good exercise is to spend a few weeks using archive.org to read the news from a few years back (or old back issues of The Economist, if you like). It's useful to see how many things people were obsessed over are now forgotten, and how many predictions ended up failing to materialize.
We should also probably be honest with ourselves and admit that reading the news is mostly done for entertainment, and it very well might not be any better than people who spend their time reading celebrity gossip rags.
"To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole."
Good print journalism does go into depth, it does give useful background, and it does teach you about the proximate causes of events. It is not full of pundits trying to score internet points or stoke outrage/fear for views/clicks.
I think there's still value in having an informed population. If you don't have a good understanding of the state of the world it's going to be very difficult to change it in a deliberative and positive way. If you're informed you can make rational decisions on things like giving and voting. I don't know how you can do that otherwise.
I'm not convinced there's a better way of getting an understanding of what's going on in the world than reading a well-curated digest of what's going on in the world. You can certainly go deeper on a subset of the topics via specialized outlets, or long-form books and articles, but good journalism should give you more than the superficial understanding of the issue.
That said, I don't dispute that well-crafted journalism can be stimulating intellectual entertainment. If I didn't enjoy it, I probably wouldn't read it.
Sure, but I don't think it goes on to justify why that distinction is there. Particularly points 2 to 5 seem to work just as well as criticism of written media as TV.
> If you're informed you can make rational decisions on things like giving and voting...I'm not convinced there's a better way of getting an understanding of what's going on in the world than reading a well-curated digest of what's going on in the world.
I used to work a lot on politics at the local level and can't say that's been my experience. Much of the time, the things people's votes have the most impact on are barely covered in the media, or in many cases not covered at all. Including fairly important things, such as when our state party leadership suspended elections for two years and staying on past their terms. Almost zero news coverage.
If you want to be informed and involved in ways that actually impact those around you, I'd say involvement in community organizations is important, reading the news not so much. As his fifth point says, it's easy to pretend you're being an informed citizen by indulging in a media habit when you're doing nothing of the sort.
Another issue is that everyone can see how new organizations they don't like can leave people misinformed, but never consider that news organizations they like can do the same. Again, from what I've seen, misinformation is fairly common. It's not even necessarily done for nefarious purposes. A busy reporter might just have time to look at a press release, while local organizations will have people that often go into much more depth and look at the actual meeting minutes or the exact wording of particular pieces of legislation.
People should think of concrete things they're trying to accomplish, not just vague notions of "being informed." I bet that someone who ignores the news and spends an hour looking at Vote411 and reading about candidates on the web before they fill out a ballot is going to make more informed voting decisions than a news junkie who follows national and international news 24/7, already knows who they're going to vote for at the national level, and completely ignores downballot races (a surprisingly large portion of voters fit this description).
And remember, there is no such thing as “The News”, only “some news”.
When it comes to news, I'm of the opinion that one should strive for diversity of opinion rather than quality. As you noted, all media has a bias so you should see what everyone's biases are. You will never get truth from any single media outfit so cast a wide net.
> What worked well for me was getting a print subscription to the Economist.
Why would you pay for something that has ads? It would be like paying facebook for a facebook account.
Or paying to go to live sports when everything has ads on it.
But peak level of lunacy are the ad-ridden movie trailers on youtube. I can't believe people are actually watching ads in order to watch an ad...
People paid for newspapers for decades, and they've definitely always had ads in them. The advertisers subsidize my news reading, and in this case at least the trade-off seems acceptable.
Everything is moving, animated, etc. Blink was deprecated for a reason, it’s annoying. So is auto play, stickies, overlays, copy/paste interference, etc. The dark patterns make it miserable.
On political issues they're also pretty firmly middle-of-the-road beltway, which is its own little bubble.
I like this youtube channel a lot (Caspian Report): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwnKziETDbHJtx78nIkfYug
It's partly because it delivers fairly objective analysis, but also because it puts heavy emphasis on how geography shapes how countries behave which is a blind spot of the economist/atlantic and the like.
Also see https://rational.app — we are building it. Feedback welcome !!!
I noticed same. While there is some relevance to personalized news they may or may not reflect what I am looking for at this point in time. Hence, I found that showing both (most noteworthy and most personal) actually helps me read the news better.
oh brother, you aren't kidding. I want top news of the day, but all I get is a hundred clickbait versions of two or three things I clicked on once a couple weeks ago.
The next error becomes "If these biased, partisan sources agree then it must be objectively true." Which leads to Raytheon being absolutely above criticism and disagreement with anything they're pushing as in their financial interests as worthy of being totally dismissed as "Being in league and on the payroll of Stalin or Bin Laden or Sadam Hussein or <insert latest evil bastard here>" Rather than being anlyzed on its actual merits or lack therof. In league with the enemy while showing zero evidence of it should be disqualifying as so biased that the source is totally compromised (by sheer idiocy if nothing else).
"Truth and clarity" - this as an ideal IS objectivity. Not some half-baked, half-way position between competing lies which is anything but objectivity.
This post-modern, "there's no such thing as objective reality" and one must take "a position" rather than striving to achieve objectivity is just nonsense and should always have been treated as such and should always be treated as such.
As an example which recently came up in a local (to me, in Seattle) news context: it will soon be legal to ride bikes without a helmet. Unintuitively, this has safety benefits for cyclists. Pointing this out is often met with ridicule. But it’s true, and once known, a person with integrity must reject that intuition.
Striving for objectivity is allowing for ones own bias and acknowledging the validity of facts and arguments that do not support one's own view on the matter. In reporting it is attempting to make one's own view on the matter irrelevant to the content written. Objectivity is removing one's extreme loathing concerning a current or former president to acknowledge facts that show that person in a favourable light and the exact converse. It is not a half way point between two competing arguments among many, many more on the matter. It does not mean if R & D official or semi-official positions agree it must be correct.
It is utterly bizarre how often people don't understand this as a valid point of view or simply want to derail the point for something else they want to argue for.
This is impossible. Part of the determination of what to report is what’s important to even report on in the first place. Omission, or emphasis of stories otherwise reported objectively correctly, is a bias too.
The rest of your comment… I sincerely can’t tell if you’re objecting to anything I said or just generally ranting apropos of nothing above. So I don’t know how to address that.
Yes. A perfect engineering trade-off is impossible. So flipping what. Do you want someone's best work? Do you want someone who is good at the job of engineering design's best work designing a machine you have to trust? Perfection is impossible as you point out.
Objective reality exists. I find those trying to achieve objectivity in their reporting of that objective reality worthwhile. You don't. Good luck.
However, just within the last couple of days I read an article (it was linked here on HN but immediately flagged) called "Why Progressives Hate Black People", published on substack.
Now, the article itself contained quite a lot of interesting factual information about homelessness in the SF Bay area, some of which I was not aware of (and checked out to verify it.
However, the overall framing and the tone throughout the writing was just a completely unnecessary and even misleading hack that tried to prove a point that doesn't really seem particularly relevant to the story, only the agenda of the author.
Contrast this with reporting in an outlet like the NYT. Complain all you want about the NYT's egregious journalistic errors (and there are many), the overwhelming majority of their reportage does seem to me like a good faith effort to inform the reader about something. It may get the details or even the entire story wrong, but it isn't engaging in outright and unnecessary polemicization on the topic. Yes, the writers and editors still had a point of view, and perhaps even a desired conclusion, but don't feel it necessary to bash you over the head with "LOOK AT THIS! LOOK AT THIS! THE HORROR!"
Consequently, even though I continue to not believe in "objective news" or "objective journalism", there is still "hack journalism" and "good faith journalism" (not sure about those terms), and they are not the same.
There is no escaping it: you have to consume plural sources in order to be well-informed, otherwise you're subject to biases. Personally I stick to Reuters/AP + various newspapers.
E.g. they’re critical of the withdrawal from the TPP, the introduction of protectionist tariffs, the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, the half-baked “Build Back Better World” counter to Belt and Road, pretty much all of recent immigration policy, etc.
I’m having a hard time thinking of a recent US foreign policy move they seemed in favor of. Maybe the tougher stance against China?
Or is the bias that they’re too critical of US foreign policy?
Here’s why I’m asking. I find The Economist’s coverage of the US a 7/10 and Turkey a 3/10. Having lived in both for roughly the same time, The Economist’s coverage of the US feels vastly superior to that of Turkey.
Yet, when I talk to my friends here, they say they read it for the international coverage. That always came to me as curious.
If I just read stories from the front page of Google News I’d have no idea who Recep Erdogan was. I definitely wouldn’t have any idea of Turkeys current inflation woes or his constant firing of people who disagree with economic reality.
It particularly nice because its a weekly with a subscription, so they don't have to be as click baitey with the titles and articles.
For reference, I also read Washington Post / New York Time (not great, but some baseline whats going on), The Atlantic, Jacobin, Wired (not very good anymore), and when I have time National Review.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
Then I come on HackerNews sometimes, but have dropped all social media and even my favorite news aggregator site Fark.com.
Mainly the big thing is just not looking at the news on my phone which can be an incredible time sink, and also not looking at comments for news related articles. Even here on HackerNews which I generally consider to be a "wheat, not chaff, comment section" can get pretty low grade on anything with a political slant unfortunately.
My opinion is, if I'm not going to do anything about it except yell at the people near me whether that's near me online, or near me in person, than there's no reason to get flustered about something.
If I'm going to start calling my reps again, and hitting the streets, then it's good to be informed so I can express my view points and understand what I'm fighting for. Otherwise, it's just negative energy. I'm not going to fix the entire world, and having negative emotions about every single negative thing that's happening in a brutal world is... just too much.
Avoidance is good to the extent that you can engage in avoidance but not everything is avoidable. How do you actually build resistance to the stimuli?
more specifically, it all stems from the practice of self-observing how you react to something "virtually", without getting carried away by it.
Doing this for any stimuli, good, bad, scary, exciting, is what it's all about, that way you can notice yourself getting carried away, and instead of going with it, you observe it pass by you.
But this is a practical discipline, you gotta keep doing it until you get good at it and so on...
So being conscious that most forms of video media are trying to sell you something. Nothing is on that screen/audio unless someone put it there. Cynical but there are so many different ways to advertise. One cute one I can not unsee is product placement. Ghostbusters was my first time seeing it. The pop can in the fridge. Always at the right angle to see the label. The funniest one was in a movie called Cobra. He stops in the middle of a scene to drink a beer, in front of all the signage. It was literally a commercial right in the middle of the movie and 'fit' the scene.
One thing I have noticed after removing massive amounts of advertising in my life is that what does get through is much more effective. So you have to be very diligent in not being quick to buy anything. Buying something could be an idea or item. I also usually use a timeout method. Basically I set the 'thing' to the side and revisit it a few days later. It removes most of the urgency that most advertising tries to create.
> The methods they have now are not much better than what they had 50 years ago.
The methods are much, much more refined and quite a bit better. You are being sold to and you may not realize it. Everything you interact with on social media (including reddit) has a good chance of being part of an advertising funnel. Even reviews and unboxings are usually advertisements.
One of the best new tactics is ragebait - when someone talks about how bad/evil something is. This is almost always a lead up to a covert sales pitch.
Marketing is everywhere and it has gotten much, much better in the last 50 years.
100% concur with this. Conventional advertising may have not changed much but conventional advertising is now a much smaller proportion of marketing than it ever was.
Ragebait is not really new. You can see the exact same methods used in 'yellow journalism'. That is not a new term.
You can also read old magazines and see 'reviews'. When they are little more than thinly veiled adverts for that thing. Take the show 'computer chronicles'. Neat show, showed off tons of tech. But it was one giant advert for whatever they were showing off that week.
The only real big change is volume and cost of targeting has dropped to near 0. I could give that realtime A/B testing of campaigns is new.
But... if the commercials can do that to your kids, what about the programming? If ads have the effect that you have observed, does programming that is full of sex and violence have no effect?
The one mitigating factor I can see is the direction of the intended addiction. The ads are designed to make you want the product; the programming is designed to make you want more of the programming (not necessarily to want more sex or more violence). That might make it different from the ads. Still, based on the observed effect of the ads, I'm pretty incredulous of anyone claiming that the programming has no effect...
The relationship between TV viewing and violence/aggression is just as scientifically established as the link between smoking and lung cancer. And we've known about it since the 70s.
See the official position of the AACAP, for one source (there are many sources, this is just from a quick google)
https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam...
Hundreds of studies of the effects of TV violence on children and teenagers have found that children may:
become "immune" or numb to the horror of violence
begin to accept violence as a way to solve problems
imitate the violence they observe on television; and
identify with certain characters, victims and/or victimizers
I want to be somehow informed: I didn't quit all news, I quit trivia. When I can/feel like I browse HN. When I find something relevant I post it there and try to make sense of it. This may mean once a week - but no timeline. I don't really care if it succeeds. It's a way of using my procrastination positively and I hope it helps others tackling this issue.
[0] https://www.slowernews.com | https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews
Also, 68k.news under Links+ or Lynx is heaven.
I think not being exposed to ads, is actually slightly dangerous, since you don’t get used to ignoring them. When I watched television worth ads repeatedly I just automatically shut off my interest when ads were showing more efficiently.
So while I’d like to keep my kids from seeing ads, I’m worried that no ads at all would prevent them from developing the mental muscles to ignore ads.
People from the old internet will recognize Fark, and this book humorously details how news organizations essentially fabricate "news" from non-news items and entertain rather than focusing on just informing.
Immunity, not addiction of course.
That show constantly used variations of the “Your truth” thing, which has always seemed in opposition to “the truth” or just “truth”. It’s one of the shadier expressions out there because it seems so harmless IMO.
It’s easy to see how such an idea can become mainstream when our society is losing a common agreed upon basic understanding.
This is very very visible on reddit, where a term, phrase or expression will become ubiquitous almost overnight. The most recent one I can think of was the acronym 'BIPOC' - and from the circumstances of its use it was clear that a lot of users didn't understand what it meant, and were just using it as a synonym for 'minorities'.
It leads me to conclude that there is much more centralisation of content than you would otherwise expect.
15 minutes per day in the right places and you'll be weeks to months ahead of the general population on major trends that actually matter
I've become very aware of this over the past few months with the Covid debacle because I have in depth knowledge about China. I've seen misinformation spread directly from Chinese state sponsored outlets to Western media. People were mislead right from the start, which made many suspicious and led to them turning to Facebook, Reddit, Telegram & co. And of course there they got the full does, ranging from activists trying to inform people on the truth and to insane conspiracy theories, some of them very likely part of black propaganda disinformation campaigns.
Our media is broken, we have to address this! It's not just enough to turn our backs, this is where opinions are made and it matters a lot. A mislead populace is a dangerous populace. I also disagree with the article that we don't need news media in general and can get knowledge from other sources. Information is power. Some people may not be interested in the news and that's fine. But people who want to actively part-take in democratic processes need to be up to date regarding political and legal developments. The same goes for investors, traders and many other people. Free societies only function with a free flow of information, everyone turning their backs is the authoritarian's wet dream because it means they can do whatever they like without scrutiny.
It was only when in the hotel lobby having breakfast did we see the CNN/FOX alarmist news coverage blaring about a world spiraling out of control.
I thought, why is it always when we're on vacation that the world begins to teeter on the brink of destruction?
And then I remembered what cable news was like before we cut the cord.
When my more liberal friends were ringing in the end of days at Trump's election, my take was "Do you know how many terrible Presidents the United States has had? And how openly corrupt politics was for the first century of our country? And yet, we're still here." This too shall pass, indeed.
It seems like people often see (2), when in reality few groups are farsighted and patient enough to successfully carry that off. In reality what they're seeing is the normal sausage-making of a democracy groping towards a compromise over a point of disagreement, which has always happened.
As for (1), it's the scarier but less common class. Aka the January attacks on the Capitol, if they'd been better orchestrated and had a post-attack plan.
To me, weighing the severity of both is a question of "If this is successful, what will change?" As I told my conservative friends when they harp on an issue du jour: if one school district in New York state is mandating critical race theory education, what will that actually change about our country?
In a democracy, people are doing ignorant / crazy / inept things somewhere constantly. But there's an important distinction to be made between "somewhere" and "sufficiently large or important places."
A single district mandating critical race theory education won't by itself change a lot, but it's part of a broader shift in the zeitgeist's heresies. Does there need to be a shadowy cabal of progressives saying "yes, just as planned" for this to be true and noteworthy? The things you can't say today are different from the things you couldn't say 20 years ago. You don't need to breathlessly follow the news to know this, but you would be a fool to ignore it entirely. Regardless of whether you think these heresies are morally/politically good, every citizen needs to keep up to date on the latest heresies lest they run afoul of those heresies themselves.
Noting that slow shifts in the status quo are rare is rather unhelpful. Of course they're rare. But being familiar with the forest will help you find the right tree. The idea that the truth is a needle in the haystack is just as easily a prescription for consuming more news, not less.
That's not to say that you should. Perhaps your life is such that you've decided you don't need any of this or you don't need to find the true danger in every corner. Even dedicated experts find it hard to find true danger before it arrives knocking at the door. The value of finding true danger before it arrives is also debatable. Vast knowledge and the effort needed to acquire it is not an unalloyed good, it's a cost/benefit trade-off like everything else in life.
Which was a response to the comment I was replying to, regarding distinguishing actual danger from everything else.
Danger, to me, means subversion of democracy and/or individual freedoms. Which means either a minority wilfully shifting the zeitgeist out of proportion with their strength of support or taking away people's freedom to participate in democracy.
It does not include everyone deciding to gradually change their ideals.
If the country as a whole is becoming more racist (to create an example), in terms of population percentage, then that's a structural social issue that needs to be addressed as such. Awareness of current news isn't going to enable one to address or change that.
More importantly, news gives you a mainstream perspective beyond typically dry work conversation or your highly selective filter bubble of personal relationships. What's acceptable to say amongst friends is not necessarily the same as what's acceptable in the mainstream.
You don't want to be the CEO who lost his job in the span of a couple of days because he didn't realize that anti-abortion stances are no longer publicly acceptable in the creative mainstream [1]. Poor guy probably had friends and family who didn't have any problems with his views.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/09/gaming-ceo-ousted-aft...
You have the right to do so, but you also have the possibility of being nailed to the cross (apt metaphor, in this case) for doing so.
So taking the risk is stupid from a personal perspective.
And the difference between "a bad person" becoming President and "half of the country withdrawing from Congress and formally seceding" is several orders of magnitude.
While I somewhat understand your reasoning behind not being concerned, the danger is that there is no guarentee the US will continue to exist forever, and history is full of failed democracies. If you're unwilling to have any concern over the stability of our democracy because it has got this far, then by the time you notice it has failed it will be too late to do anything to fix it.
And in the meantime, bad Presidents have and will continue to do terrible things to people, pretending like it's no big deal is not good. The fact that the US still exists is little consolation to those who were harmed by poor presidential decisions.
We disagree on this. From what I've read, there was amateurish pontificating on throwing out election results, mostly by sub-Presidential aides or advisors.
And most critically, rejected by almost everyone in a position of authority to legally do so.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the most serious legal action taken to deny the results was the Arizona private recount?
Again, your barometer for concern is way too far off. The issue is that such attempts only needs to work one time for the game to be over. If you're always unconcerned about attempts being made because they failed then eventually one will be successful and you won't be able to do anything about it.
To me, that's a bunch of clowns without a plan.
A serious attempt looks like someone sitting down, planning out an attempt likely to succeed, and then enacting that plan in a competent and responsive manner.
Trump lied on national news, shouted from a podium, and inspired a riot.
At the founding of our country, that would have been a Tuesday.
For me to be concerned, I would have needed to see any other person of executive power or branch of government participate in the plot. Or enough members of Congress to actually threaten the normal process.
And if it had been successful, then you know what everyone does? They march on the Capitol and demand the rule of law be adhered to. Coups require consent. Withhold that, and they crumble.
We're lucky but naive to have grown up in a few generations wherein this sort of thing seems totally foreign, uncivilised.
But the 'transition of power' is by far the most destabilising and tricky point in history.
Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Macedonians, Persians, Romans, Chinese etc. etc..
And that's just antiquity.
Over and over again, it's the 'power struggle at the top' that drives most of the big events.
If everyone were to get into the headspace of those events, we'd understand how alluring and corrupting power is and we'd be much more cynical about power grabs.
Any student of history would see the attempts to overthrow the election plainly for what it was.
And FYI that is not a political statement. I don't care for domestic or foreign policy agendas, that's just what it is.
I once spent several years diving deep into news, and one of the lessons I learned was that scanning headlines (or even summaries) is a very good prescription for being misinformed.
There's the obvious selection bias - you only see the headlines they put on top. But it's fairly common that the body of the article undercuts the headline. The headline will be stated definitively, whereas the nuances in the details will make you doubt the certainty of the headline. In a few cases, it would even negate the headline!
And this is from well regarded news sources (NY Times, WaPost, etc), not crappy click bait farms on the Internet.
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” - Mark Twain
I'm a firm believer that one should either dive deep or not read the news. The moderate path leads to the most misinformation.
... probably one of the worst industry practices of all time.
I started subscribing to a fairly large but local newspaper (as in, actual Sunday delivery) and I get a lot of weird looks but it is genuinely a mostly enjoyable experience. I tried to contact the newspaper to see if they could skip sending all of the extra junk adds (separate leaflet thankfully) but their support could literally not comprehend what I was talking about even after multiple reply emails. In their minds the only ads apparently are online.
"That crazy guy who thinks there's a conspiracy to print off ads and put them in his mailbox called again today!"
Unrelated to my original post, but I have been on a quest to purge all the junk from my physical mail. It is a huge PITA, but in almost all cases you can email someone and eventually get them to stop.
The other big ones that cut a lot of junk are DMA choice for catalog opt out (https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php) and the pre screened credit card offer opt out (https://www.optoutprescreen.com/).
It reminds me of a guy who wanted to start a company that would "help" the USPS by allowing customers to filter out junk mail in order to improve overall postal service. Yeah, no. Junk is their core business, just like the news.
You mean cable news right? Broadcast news preceded cable news, when you got your news at 6PM during the prime time news slot or at 11PM during the late night news slot, and was broadcast over radio/TV waves rather than cabled into your house.
As the author notes, when I do pay attention to the news I feel better. Again, political news in particular. I still will watch sports news. I actually feel better when I watch that -- I love seeing sports highlights, and great comebacks -- even when I don't know a single player or team involved. The stakes are so low, but the enjoyment so high.
That's because political news is advertising for the political class. You're meant to feel like there's a crisis so that you:
1. vote for them to do something about it and
2. not begrudge them their tax money.
My Chinese friends have said that the evening news always comes in three parts: 1. Chinese leaders are busy; 2. Chinese people have good lives; 3. People outside China have not-so-good lives
I haven't been able to find a good alternative to the old Google News.
I tried subscribing to one or many newspapers, but they all have too many useless articles inbetween valuable news such that filtering noise takes too much time.
So in the end I still read Google News but I'm getting a sens of negativity and frustration that wasn't there in 2016. And it takes more time to have all the necessary news. Since "Time spent on Google News" is probably an important metric for Google, the situation is not going to improve anytime soon.
Typically it’s like $1-3 and takes a few minutes to read. Much better experience overall.
Written news (real time): https://www.reuters.com/ I mostly read the headline stories, and it's mostly just facts. Just like the founding fathers intended.
Written news (daily): https://join1440.com/ An old-fashioned email subscription! Just facts, it seems. This may be the endgame for some people.
Video news: https://www.newsy.com/ I watched them a bit back when they were new and I was pretty impressed. Just a bunch of short news segments on demand. When the whole "stop the steal" thing was going on I sensed a bit of a leftward bias (like me!), but it was never very thick.
I've cut off my cable/satellite TV. I don't listen to any other news sources. I read BBC's headlines once a day.
Cutting off the "mainstream" media and advertising from my life has done more for my mental health than my gym membership, diet, meditation and fresh air combined. Not to say those things aren't important, but they didn't have nearly the impact that cutting off the constant drama, heightened emotion and propaganda have.
Each person in my group has slightly different sources they subscribe to: YT channels, Twitter, Insta, Reddit, HN. And slightly different topics. And they share stuff in the chat group.
The comparison between childrens' responses to toy ads and adults' responses to cable news is insightful. We all think we're too smart to be fooled, but we're all children at the core.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." (Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science)
Research shows, IIRC the details, that people who think they are smarter are easier to fool. But don't worry, you and I can comfort ourselves that it wouldn't apply to us. :)
Those sites are not going to cover your local news which will have an impact on your life.
Immoral doesn’t even begin to describe this phenomenon.
Commodity Prices and fluctuation, My god they really dont have a clue about commodity.
Tech, Foundry. Repeated mainstream news that follow like an echo chamber. We are now looking at Qualcomm X65 Modem switching to TSMC 6nm. ( In case you are wondering, NO it is not true. )
And Stocks. Using Bottom Up Analysis we figure out Google is paying $15B to Apple when the actual company annual report only state $13.5B in CAC ( Customer Acquisition Cost ) in total. ( Not all CAC goes to Apple, I mean Mozilla has a small trunk of it for example )
I am not sure if it is related, but because of how much BS coming from mainstream news, people are fed up and actually provide insight on Youtube Channel. How is something being done, why it is done this way. They are still high level overview, but they are directionally much closer to the truth than anything else. And it is the same with PodCast.
I now mostly just skim read news on my RSS-Feeds.
The worst thing about all of these is how people trust those number, figures, analysis. This makes online discussions on these topic 95% of times useless. Like I recently said to Dr. Ian Cutress where we agree, most media are only here for attentions and clicks, they are not here to inform their readers. The sad state of things.
I basically wrote a manifesto about it at https://legiblenews.com/about and built a news website that strips away all the insanity and link to source material and Wikipedia articles.
It’s absolutely insane that it came to that, but it did.
I'm currently working on a weekly news digest that people can view on the web or get emailed to them so they can skim the news even less. If there's something you'd like to get out of the news that's not insane please open an issue at https://github.com/legiblenews/community/issues.
Their iOS app leaves a lot to be desired, but that’s a benefit for me. I open it up and can quickly get updates for what’s happening and not be at risk of a advertisement-driven company wanting to take me down a rabbit hole of clickbait.
I bet a number of outlets might be interested in publishing it, or you could DIY on Medium or Substack or something.
I'm glad that HN has been able to provide you with some resources. It's really nice to see the more wholesome side of HN, and I'm actually going to have to bookmark some of these to check out later.
I hear similar stories from people who move abroad and return, I wouldn't simply dismiss them.
2017 is a small step backwards. Most mainstream forums are pretty shit at any point in time.
I think it's strange and sad that I should find the society I've returned to more full of anger and hate and with less compassion than prison.
He gets lumped in with Conservatives because EVERYONE must be lumped in to the left or the right these days.
You can't be in the middle anymore.
His podcasts used (going back a bit before 2017) to be chill conversations ranging from interesting to bonkers depending on the guest. He is consumed by politics now unfortunately, and it just gets tiresome.
As well, there's an unresolved demographic shift from an aged Boomer generation towards Millennials. Unresolved in the sense that assets haven't changed ownership, infrastructure hasn't been revised, and political leadership has done the bare minimum to keep up. So everyone now looks towards politics(or maybe tech) for a piece of the pie, unrest events have risen, and yet political disengagement is also high.
I got on the cryptocurrency train years back, as somewhat of an exit to the madness. It has treated me alright, though it's also a faith.
* The Conversation - https://theconversation.com/us
* Ground News - https://ground.news
* sumi.news - https://sumi.news
* Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
If you find yourself reading too much this can help too
* LeechBlock - https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock
My favorite is Delayed Gratification : A print magazine that writes about events after the fact. Deep dives into a few topics and great infographics
"The world’s first Slow Journalism magazine.
A beautiful quarterly publication which revisits the events of the last three months to offer in-depth, independent journalism in an increasingly frantic world."
I concur that it is worse than it was, but I would say 10-30% worse not "completely different."
It would be nice if there was a little less hate generally.
I think I just feel let down by people the number of people I looked up to being publically hateful. People that are too smart to think that it is ok. I just don't understand how they got there.
I agree with your general thrust, in general but I think you gave up too soon and have too harsh of a take or at least got too unlucky about the sources that you take in.
There are good news sources out there. Go listen to 3 or 4 of The Economist's podacasts or to Left Right and Center. There are real journalists out there. The landscape is worse, yes. But it isn't worse everywhere and where it is better it is truly better.
... and don't spend too much time on HN :-P
You can find the backstory at https://legiblenews.com/about
It consists of fairly in-depth, thoughtful coverage of both domestic and worldwide news topics, as well as a tiny bit of political analysis on Mondays and Fridays. It almost never devolves into the breathless, “the world is about to end”-type coverage found on basically all cable news programs. Judy Woodruff and her team are really great. I dearly miss Gwen Ifill and Jim Lehrer.
The Economist is also a great resource, as has been pointed out by other commenters here. They publish an audio edition of each week’s newspaper, too.
I disagree with the post article that "staying up to date" is some fundamentally bullshit concept. It can help you prioritize what you care about influencing in the world, even if that influence is relatively small.
How often are those priorities changing? Surely nobody needs hourly pings from a news app on their phone to inform what they care about influencing in the world.
I think there has been a major change there in the last x years?
They seem to do the same story over and over now. And the lens has shifted pretty far left.
I've laughed at a few things when it's just ridiculous. Sadly I did stop listening.
Anyone have any listening data from media markets like NY or Boston or SF (ie, leftwing) to see if this new format / approach is resonating with folks? I've been actually wondering what the 5 year story would look like now just given how into NPR I was and now how I don't listen.
I'm left but I like a touch of perspective or at least to be able to hear the other side of an issue.
I find it pretty common in all areas I hold some expertise in.
To me this quote underlines the importance of reading news from varied sources rather than not reading it at all. I mean clearly 99.99% of news I ignore, but if I think it's important I'll read about it from multiple papers because the one I primarily read - the FT will have its own viewpoint.
I’ve come to the conclusion if you really want to under the nuances of a current affair, you simply won’t get it from the news. You’ll get the super simplified, “tie it in a nice bow”, “here are the bad guys and here are the good guys view”.
They simply don’t have the time or resources for more than that.
The only TV news worth watching that I've seen.
>I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole. There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic.
It is indeed a good idea to avoid TV news.
My suggestion: Go to a news stand instead and grab a copy of The Economist. One who does that will learn much about the world. About countries one rarely hear about in other media outlets. About advances in science and technology.
In my opinion, time spent reading The Economist is not wasted.
Well that’s my 2¢ anyway ¯\＿(ツ)＿/¯
Citations Needed has a decent episode on the publication and its history: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-98-the-refined-so...
The book discussed could be interesting though. I might pick up a copy!
But sure, the publication is in favour of capitalism. Is that really so controversial though? I thought it was pretty obvious that The Economist is neither Social Democrat, nor socialist or communist. On the other hand, a Social Democrat could probably agree with much that’s written there.
Most people know that at an intellectual level, of course. But it's all too easy to read something like an Economist article and come away thinking "oh, I learned a lot / have a decent understanding of this issue". A lot of that comes down to the editorial style and self-assured tone of the writing. It helps to remember that even something like the Economist is largely written by people in their mid-20s with no particular expertise, and edited by people who may be older and wiser but also cover many different topics.
To play Devil's advocate, why is it useful to spend time learning about these types of things -- world politics, economics, even current scientific developments? Is it mainly because it's interesting (so that it's primarily entertainment)? Or is it to better yourself in some way? I think a lot of people implicitly think that this type of knowledge falls into the "bettering yourself" category, but I wonder if it's mostly for entertainment. Of course, if you are actively involved in international politics, then things look different, but I'm mainly talking about the "everyperson".
I bring this up because I go through phases where I get really into world "happenings" as described above, but then after a while I feel as though I have gained little or nothing, except emotional responses and opinions about these things, which causes no noticeable positive effect in my day-to-day life (and in fact, often affects my mental state negatively, given the amount of fear-mongering in media). Instead, I have the suspicion that all of that time would have been better spent focusing on things local: myself, friendships, family, hobbies.
It tends to give an overview of geopolitical events that do have some meaning. For instance, your entire idea of the Philippines may be that it's a US ally, has a lot of beaches and happy people. The Economist (or something similar) may then clue you in that no, actually, the country is on the edge of falling to dictatorship and in bed with China. That info is slanted, and may not be useful for you taking any substantive action; but on the other hand, it gives you a starting point if, say, you ever had a Filipino coworker. It also tells you something about the broader world, such as the fact that a lot of democracies are starting to look fragile enough that you might want to consider learning enough to decide whether that could actually be a local problem. (This isn't a screed, just an example; the Philippines may be fine and your local democracy may be strong!)
If you already knew a decent amount about the situation -- well, maybe just skip that particular article, or give it a quick skim and move on. Maybe look at the Economist as a sampler, rather than something to read cover to cover. It also has stuff like the Technology Quarterly, which actually covers a much broader range of tech concepts than, say, HN.
However, there is also voting.
Partly for entertainment. But mostly because our world is hyperconnected. A looming war in Eastern Europe, combined with supply-chain shortages, apparently has a giant effect on stock prices. So, in order to understand why my pension is at risk, what I can do to secure it, or whether I should wait with buying a new car or house, , I need to know about 1) Russian Geopolitics, 2) Natural-Gas usage, 3) Supply-chains of, mostly, computer-chips, 4) inflation and then, 5, how all this ties together.
We live in a hyperconnected world where every butterfly has profound effects on my daily life. For me, that means I try to avoid reading about every butterfly or wing-flapping (i.e. the daily news) but I try to learn as much as possible about underlying mechanisms and issues.
I was in the original wave of "cord cutters," it's been 20+ years. I have also spent many of those years abroad. My exposure to TV news is around 1-2 hours per year, in various countries.
When I visit my family back at home there is normal American news on the TV. I can only last a few seconds before I have to leave the room because the news is presented as if the audience consists of people with a 5th grade education. It is beyond insulting. I never felt this until I left TV's influence for a few years. This phenomenon is extremely exaggerated in the USA.
The point isn't to find good sources of news. I think the point is that most news, no matter how good it is, is largely pointless.
I'll pick up the economist if something in it interests me. Otherwise I largely ignore all news.
Adding friction to your news consumption makes it feel higher quality, but is of course actually totally independent of that.
And that, btw, is the reason to stay informed: to come to accurate conclusions that inform your political opinions. Because at some point, decisions need to be made about things, and your vote is part of that process. Not just your own vote, either, but the votes of anyone else you can communicate with.
Of course, for many, the emotional impact is all that happens, which forms the basis of all propaganda and advertising.
I personally would extend this article in today's world to be more like "scan the headlines every 2-3 days and go read books instead". That way you know "what" is largely happening, e.g. geopolitics, floods, murder trial, but you don't waste time consuming a few thousand words of garbage from somebody who knows no more than you do.
A friend of mine started doing this way before me and a take of his was that any sufficiently big news will make its way through to you via social circles anyway, use people who don't value their time as your filter.
TLDR: Dont watch news, read it.
For starters, being informed makes for more interesting conversations with others. It means that you get to reflect on what you stand for, and grow as an individual with an opinion.
News is also the gateway for deeper information. If you stick to just the news, that's one thing, but if you then go deeper into the topic (what is the relationship between Ukraine and Russia?) then you get invaluable context. Without following current events, how would you know what is an important topic to follow?
Finally (but not lastly), news makes you informed when it comes time to vote at the municipal, state, and federal level. If you don't follow the developments in your community, your vote is at best useless, at worst it's harming the democratic process.
Edit: I should be clear on what I mean by news. In the traditional sense, it's reporting on facts, checking sources, and providing two sides to every story. Opinions and partisan "news" are not that.
> News is also the gateway for deeper information.
When the news you watch makes you feel informed on a topic but is actually misleading or omits major nuance, it hinders motivation to seek deeper information.
Your conversations with others are only more interesting because you're engaging with people who are themselves very interested in discussing the opinions of others.
My friends are not like this. And the ones that are, I try to avoid endlessly musing about some complex foreign policy which no one has enough accurate information to have an opinion about.
It's all good, but it's a hobby when it doesn't affect your community.
> But you're not truly informed, at best you know the opinions of others. Or more typically, you're informed as to what media outlet publishes to get eyeballs for advertising revenue.
I do disagree that you're not truly informed. If you're coming at News from this point of view, you're essentially lumping all publications, from the Economist to OANN to RT to Huffpo to War Room together. This is a naive approach and leads to the rise of partisan publications and channels that distort reality.
What is your reading list and hours per week spent?
If you are regularly reading several publications like the economist and keeping tabs on diverse set of news outlets, then you might be able to see the forest. But that takes significant time, and I don't know anyone who does that or has the time to in between working and taking care of themselves/family - which is why I view it as more of a niche hobby nowadays.
> What is your reading list and hours per week spent?
It's a combination of local (municipal, state) and national/international news. Local is easy and tends to be very factual. If you're in the US, there are a lot of smaller publication that report on local events related to your city or state.
For international news, something like r/worldnews is a good start.
National news is the trickiest one because it tends to be the most partisan and requires reading from multiple sources. I also ignore it the most for that reason (US national politics are a shitshow: no one cares about the house and senate, and over indexes on the president, which should have very limited power compared to congress).
I read about 10/12 hours per week.
Their coverage on local political candidates is considered the gold standard in the area. If you want to run, you will show up for the Stranger's inquisition, and god help you if you start spewing platitudes. Their elections board has no interest in being polite to you, even if they like you.
My wife is heavily involved in local politics, so we know what's going on via that gossip network. The truth is that the forces in place change very slowly. The homeless problem in Seattle? Same systemic problems it's been for a long time. Who's driving the zoning decisions in Bellevue? Same couple of developers who have a chokehold on downtown. Puget Sound Energy's ongoing poor engineering and amazing propoganda? Completely rational actors with a fixed playbook. I could write a briefing on these topics that would still be good in six months or a year.
For topics that require action on your part? By the time the news is covering it, the decisions have been made. Crazy racists running for Bellevue school board? You hear about them in the news when someone has already FOIA'd their emails and found a news outlet to publish them. Action happens via local groups, either your political party or cells of Indivisible or PTSA's or specialized action groups like CENSE. If you want to know what's going on, you need to subscribe to the newsletters of these groups.
For more local news, I have found a decent strategy. This may sound weird, but I've joined local Facebook communities in my area to track the sources of the articles their members share. If you ignore the pro-/anti- rhetoric in the comment sections, you may find that some of the publications are actually legitimate sources of information about the latest happenings in the community. It doesn't have to be a scandal all the time (it often isn't). Instead, I read about new Covid regulations, about the struggles and successes of local business, about new legislation being tabled by the state government, about elections and their candidates, etc.
Most news is surprisingly human and humble. Opinions and partisan publications have made news out to be this incendiary thing whereas, in reality, it's just a bunch of people trying to live their lives and make decisions in a world of little certainty.
No matter how many different sources about trees you read or watch, you will never see the forest without visiting it yourself.
you only have so much mental energy. i think it’s important to adopt a JIT attitude and be able to learn and filter things when you need them, not as a matter of day to day activities.
being informed most definitely does not make for more interesting conversations. everyone is biased + critical thinking is severely lacking. nowadays i feel like any conversation quickly devolves into a us-vs-them and “politics”
Election time is when candidates (or some of them) pump out propaganda against their opponents. Negative ads about what some candidate said 15 years ago. Who wins in that race? Often the one who has the most marketing money.
Not just ads though; the propaganda could be part of The News as well if there is a coalition in the media that thinks of the candidate as a threat.
(And it was either CNN or MSNBC (the news as the article in question defines it) that said that they covered Trump so much (free press in his case because he fed off the notoriety) because he was good for ratings.)
I’ve seen perfectly reasonable candidates lose in part because their more corporate-friendly opponents were better funded by private interests.
I’ve begun to think that an intentionally random vote might be better for the venerable “democratic process”.
If your idea of political news is opinionated partisan coverage during elections, then you're doing it wrong.
But that’s the news. That’s what “following the news” means. The American media covers each federal election for, what, two years? Who except people who follow politics as a hobby will remember whatever “the news” was before that? (Sure, in more local elections things are bound to be better than that.)
And you already have to be savvy in order to distinguish the partisan coverage from things that are more substantial—you don’t know what you don’t know.
Whatever you are talking about is not on the topic of The News.
Yeah, good luck with that. Even what appears to be purely factual reporting is subject to bias in the form of what gets factually reported and what is simply ignored. Several good examples of this were documented in "Manufacturing Consent."
Opinion and national bias often creep in to so-called factual reporting by 'expert analysis.' You really have to go to primary sources and evaluate them for yourself. Putin giving a speech is easier to evaluate than a talking head from the Brookings Institute who somehow ended up as their 'Russia Expert' because he studied abroad there 15 years ago for a semester.
When was the last time you saw, on an American news outlet, a foreign spokesman or leader giving a direct statement? Other than showing them walk across the stage to shake the American president's hand or, in Saddam's case him waving a shotgun in the air on very old b-footage, I can't recall an instance of that. You only get 'expert analysis'. That's by design. It's actually possible to get a wider exposure to foreign primary sources on TikTok than CNN. This was especially true at the beginning of COVID, when the consensus in Washington was deeply confused on what the messaging should be, and now on Russia where I can see clips of Putin laying out his case with subtitles.
Watching/reading/consuming modern news is too stress-inducing (as it is designed to be) just to have something to chat about or become more well-informed about issues that in large part have no bearing on me.
I pay attention to issues that are important to me at scopes that matter - state and municipal. Everything else is noise.
Let's not project. I was a news junkie for years, and the news itself was not stress inducing.
This APA survey shows that:
> While most adults (95 percent) say they follow the news regularly, 56 percent say that doing so causes them stress
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/11/lowest-point
It begs the question of whether it is better to be uninformed or misinformed. Consuming mainstream media in the US will misinform you. Not consuming any media will leave you uninformed. If I had to pick I'd rather have an electorate of uninformed than an electorate of misinformed.
You can dismiss all news as being misinformation, but even the shadiest outlets report some semblance of facts. It's the cause of the news that's often up for debate.
> What does it matter if I am uninformed on those two topics?
You have to consider how you spend your time. Not reading on the happenings in your city, state, and country is a choice that you make every time you do something different. Is what you sacrifice by being up to date on the latest happenings more important? Then do that. You would be in the majority.
> What does it matter if I am uninformed on most topics?
For the same reason we teach history in school.
Profoundly disagree. An uninformed voter may vote poorly. A misinformed voter will unequivocally vote poorly. I'll take my chances with the uninformed to not create a dystopian mess.
For me it was the dead family members before it was reported. Victims have victim shit to do. They aren't watching the news for updates.
I think this is a great example. Why should anyone outside of Texas even care about the power outages and waste time "informing themselves" about it.
Or they may the citizens of a democratic polity being called upon to evaluate competing energy policy alternatives where the facts of the Texas case have potential bearing.
Or, well, lots of other possibilities.
I would add that the news does a terrible job of serving and educating those interests.
Channeling from Thomas Jefferson[1] (emphasis mine):
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
His proposed solution is:
"Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy."
[1] https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...
If "interesting" is talking about the latest outrage that everyone will forget in a week, sure. If on the other hand you find "interesting" to be debate on the philosophical principles of private ownership or the moral relativism of a state's relationship to vulnerable populations, ya ain't gettin that from the news.
> It means that you get to reflect on what you stand for, and grow as an individual with an opinion.
You can do that without the news. And having an opinion is like having an asshole: everyone has one, and you should probably keep it to yourself.
> Without following current events, how would you know what is an important topic to follow?
There is no objective importance other than what will directly affect your life. The news is mostly national and international information, which rarely ever directly impacts you (unless it is "impacting" your amygdala). Local and state actions are much more likely to impact you, but I doubt you follow local or state news, if it's even covered at all by journalists as more than "here's all the local crime to scare you and keep you tuning in".
> news makes you informed when it comes time to vote
The news rarely (if ever) lays out out all the positions, track records, or experience of candidates in local and state elections. But they do parrot talking points and promote the candidates with the most money and influence.
> it's reporting on facts, checking sources
Right, but which facts? Local restaurant inspections is probably useful since it has the potential to impact my daily life. Reporting on some kid who fell down a well in some country on the other side of the planet probably isn't, since the situation will not affect me in any tangible way. Not to downplay the event, of course. To those involved it's very important, but telling me does nothing except make me feel bad.
> and providing two sides to every story. Opinions and partisan "news" are not that.
The thing is, though, not every news story or societal issue has two sides. Some have more, some have fewer. Trying to find someone to provide an opposing viewpoint on an issue that reasonably shouldn't have one means that every time the news does that in the name of giving equal time it has to go further into the fringe to find some wingnut who will provide it, legitimizing and amplifying their viewpoint instead of dismissing it. Repeat that a few times over a couple of decades and you start to see the televised discourse we 'enjoy' today.
Depends on the crowd. In my experience, that's true with only 10% of the people I know. Most of them are more interested in having an opinion than understanding what is going.
When I expand the circle to the population in general, it probably drops to about 2% of the population.
> If you stick to just the news, that's one thing, but if you then go deeper into the topic (what is the relationship between Ukraine and Russia?) then you get invaluable context.
As a former news junkie, I agree - with the caveat that to get to what I call the minimum threshold of deep understanding will take many, many hours.[1] You have to seek out many different interpretations, sources, etc. It's a very active thing. If you spend merely an hour a day on the news, you won't get there (or perhaps you'll only get "there" for a topic or two).
At that point, you start doing a cost-benefit analysis, as I had to. And then you realize that in the universe of things you could be doing, there are plenty of things that give you a better cost/benefit ratio.
> In the traditional sense, it's reporting on facts, checking sources, and providing two sides to every story
Strong disagree. For many (most?) issues, if you can itemize only two sides to the story, you have a very narrow picture of what is going on.
[1] No, definitely just reading the Economist will not do. The quest for reducing news sources to just 1-2 quality sources is a flawed one, and you'll always have a skewed view of the world that way.
Unfortunately, the mad scramble for eyeballs for advertising dollars coupled a particularly virulent set of political objectives has completely decimated news, morphing it into nothing but a massive reality distortion field designed to keep you completely uninformed, pissed off, powerless, and addicted.
Point 3 is spot on, most of the commentators have no idea about what going to happen. At best their guesses a marginally better than my own. Once you realise this, watching debates between journalist and political commentators becomes pointless. I simply don’t see the point in some expert trying guess when Russia will attack Ukraine for instance. Tell me when they attack. Just report whats happening, not what might happen, because your going to get it wrong.
Out of an hour of news, there was sports coverage in one quarter, local news in another with weather, national and then international news.
Each segment had, after commercials, 12 to 13 minutes max.
There wasn't time for all the speculation, and endless drone on about what if, and blah blah.
24 hours news half destroyed news first, then the internet finished it off.
But it’s hard, you need way more sources and accept to broadcast without footage, you can’t filter and spin the messages as much, you don’t have a “voice” and become more of a firehose, it’s less entertaining overall, and you can’t have that on tv.
there's a reason why trust in media is decline
https://www.pewresearch.org/2022/01/05/trust-in-america-do-a...
Ironically, BuzzfeedNews is pretty good.
Remember when BuzzFeedNews was peddling such fake news garbage that Robert Mueller's team had to call them out on their bullshit [0]? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/north-america-donald-trump-robert...
And as was mentioned, it's no small irony that Buzzfeed's investigative journalism, while a limited part of their impact, is pretty good.
If someone is painted as an enemy, and the information you're given makes their actions or motivations seem irrational, you're likely not being given all relevant information.
In the same vein as this article, I've also quit Twitter a year ago and it's been great. Pretty much the same effects also.
I had the unluckiness to be born in a country torched by war. I am still finding out the info about the war, that you won't be able to read anywhere. I am aware that it is not easy for someone that grew up and lives in totally different world to learn and understand all the complexities... But at least take everything with a grain of salt.
Also for the record, given the lies being created, it’s quite obviously rational what they’re doing, but it doesn’t make the lies not lies.
[0]: https://wisdomofcrowds.live/email/725986a1-fc00-4962-a1dc-c3...
I had had family stationed there years before so the name popped out at me, as they'd described it previously as "open and accepting of westerners" (relatively speaking, I guess).
Anyway, this "center of terrorism" thing was front page news across the board for a solid week, maybe two, then poof, it went away. Nobody even remembers it now.
I don't really know what to make of it. What would I, Normy McYaBasic, do with the above information in any case?
At one point in my news addiction, I decided to stop following it on a daily basis but instead "catch up" on all the previous month's news once a month.
So when the new month began, I scrolled and caught up on all the news feeds in my RSS reader. And you'd then see this pattern: Breaking news story. Lots of follow up stories that day and the next few days. If you compare the information content at the tail end of these stories vs the early stories, you'll realize how much junk is in the early stories: Wrong information and filler information. By the end of the saga, it's mostly accurate - there's not much information churn.
So when I would read day to day, I'd read all those articles, and have my knowledge slowly get updated/amended as each day passes. Why go through that much trouble? Just wait towards the end. You'll get more information from reading 2-3 articles at the tail end than the 20-30 you may read throughout.
Anecdotal data point here, but I experienced more than just an improvement in mood. I had a completely unexpected blossoming of immense amounts of creativity.
About three weeks into my total news cut off, I started to feel sober in a way that is similar to discovering sobriety during December holiday weeks with family after non stop drinking for months in College.
Unlike the author in the linked article, I did a complete cut off from all "news-like" sources: TV news, Youtube channels, social media, reddit, podcasts that talk about current events, blogs and newsletters that discuss news - all of it.
When conversations started to become awkward (about 6 months after being completely cut off and I could no longer infer/derive the common assumptions underlying a conversation in a group), I subscribed to The Economist, directed their Espresso newsletter to Feedbin and started reading that about every other day. I found that a handful of bullet points about what's going on in the world per week is sufficient for me to keep up with any conversation I find myself in.
If there are any other news abstainers here, I'd love to hear your life hacks and tricks that you use to navigate the world.
No tips to offer. I find it impossible to avoid hearing about most news between wife and family.
Apart from the obvious things such as covid, there are a lot of things going on all the time that may influence your voting decisions (not just in the run up, but the entire time someone is in office), purchasing decisions, where you go on vacation, who you want to work for, how you get to work today etc.
I guess if that is fine for you, then please feel free to carry on and go book your vacation to the Ukraine, drive a Volkswagen, work for facebook, use too much water during a drought season, have your garden furniture blow through your windows when that storm rolls in, have a BBQ during a high-risk fire season, don't use condoms, and then just flat out are late to work today because you didn't know about the strike/accident/whatever on your usual route. Good luck.
By all means, quit twitter or facebook or whatever but at least read the headlines from major journalistic outlets. Something might happen that deeply matters to you and you won't know about it otherwise.
News does not always only happen to other people.
These could all be researched at the time of purchase though. There's nothing in the daily news about VW or Ukraine that can't be learned more efficiently by doing some research just before purchasing a vehicle or vacation.
There's nothing wrong with keeping tabs on the latest headlines, I personally do so and am fine with it, but there's nothing essential about it either. A person who never reads the news will still find out about something like Covid from a hundred other sources in short order.
> use too much water during a drought season, have your garden furniture blow through your windows when that storm rolls in, have a BBQ during a high-risk fire season
If you’re going to check if there’s a drought every time you use water - congratulations, you’re reading the news!
I live in a drought stricken region and everybody here is well aware of it, regardless of their news habits, because they learn about it from many other sources.
As one example, the water district regularly sends out fliers telling people there is a drought, making suggestions on how to conserve water, adding restrictions on water use, and more. These messages are far more ubiqutous and effective than current news articles.
To completely quit news is not a good idea, unless you want to live under a rock, metaphorically speaking.
Fact of the matter is, day-to-day events affect each one of us who live in a modern society. You don't want to be the guy who has no mask and 0 preparation for a pandemic when it hits. You don't want to be the guy who keeps buying/using a product when there's news circulating that it could be unsafe.
The author mentioned reading a 5000-word report, which is great if you're into that sort of things. But the mass majority of people have jobs to work, kids to take of, important things to do. They don't have time to spend hours every day reading deep into all the issues going on in the world.
Most people just want to stay up to date with the latest events, so they can plan their lives better.
Of course you can get addicted to news and let it negatively affect you. But the alternative of having no idea what's going on in the world until it's on your doorstep is not a good idea either.
A balance is good. Stuff like limiting yourself to spending 15 minutes in the morning during breakfast quickly going over important news, and making a commitment to not waste more time reading news for the rest of the day.
So you should read the news, which right up until it hits is telling you that worrying about it is hysterical and maybe a little bit racist?
Not only that, but there are many things where paradoxically I'm better informed than people "watching the news". You see, there is being informed and there is actually spending your mental resources on problems you don't have or you have 0 say in them.
to debunk some of the things you brought up: - you don't decide to go to Ukraine and you book your vacation without at any point learning about this (you will learn about this from the booking agency, you will learn about this at the airport, you will learn about this from people around you). The odds of you landing in Ukraine are 0 unless you really want to go there.
- if you drive a a VW you may not be in a position to stop driving it. Choosing your car based on a scandal screams privilege. You may choose to pick your next car based on it, but again: you will learn about this no matter way. Other car manufacturers will tell you, people around you will tell you about how crappy VW is when you bring it up (are you going to buy it solo without talking with anyone?).
- work for Facebook: it's cool to hate Facebook and I have personally stopped using it eons ago. But not suspecting that some of the things that they are doing aren't exactly heavenly and ending up working there? again, the odds are zero
- use to much water? how can you be in a drought season and not see the drought. Also: everyone likes capitalism until the fish from the lake is depleted. If you can afford to use the water and pay for it, why not? The pricing should be tiered in such a way that there is a strong incentive against you using the water - we should not expect people to just do the right thing. this rarely work s without economic incentives.
- BBQ in during fire season? I think there are legal and economic things in place that should prevent this. - using condoms? really? really? you're gonna put the equal sign between the news and basic sex ed. really?
Oh yeah, you'll definitely find out eventually, but timing matters. This whole debacle started a fair amount of time before Putin gave the order to invade and most travelers book holidays further in advance. In that time, you could have cancelled and rescheduled your commitments around this news, but instead you'll spend most of that time clueless.
> how can you be in a drought season and not see the drought
Uh, are you saying that if I live in a nice little house or apartment unit in a Californian city, I can just see the drought by looking outside? Perhaps if you live near farmland, but the effects of drought have never been noticeable to me in the urban jungle. Even if they are, how the govt responds to drought is not obvious. It's not always just a tiered pricing change. California, as just one example, will apply restrictions on when and how you use sprinklers.
> BBQ in during fire season? I think there are legal and economic things in place that should prevent this
...like what? By the time there are legal consequences, isn't it too late?
I agree with your central thesis that you shouldn't spend time worrying about problems that you don't have, but making that distinction isn't straightforward and your stated counterpoints are muddled themselves.
>Uh, are you saying that if I live in a nice little house or apartment unit in a Californian city
My point was that if there is a drought and we need to save water this will be highly visible. The water company will tell you, the bill you pay should be higher, etc
> By the time there are legal consequences, isn't it too late? nope. breaking the law always involves a reward and a risk. The risk/punishment is not properly calibrated for the consequences but there is no reason why it shouldn't be.
> The water company will tell you, the bill you pay should be higher, etc
My water usage varies across months, I am hardly unique in saying that I don't keep a close tab on the water price breakdown. Many people auto-pay their electronic bills and don't check in very often until something goes very wrong (like the water gets shut off). These are the kinds of important items that show up very prominently in local headlines though.
> breaking the law always involves a reward and a risk.
That's not what I'm saying. By the time you realize that you're actually breaking the law, you're already being punished. Suppose there's a law that punishes BBQs during fire season. If I'm not aware of this BBQ law in advance (eg. via the news), by the time I'm fined or arrested for unknowingly hosting a big BBQ, it's too late for me to figure out that it's illegal.
As others have said, there are other ways to obtain this information but news feeds will highlight noteworthy issues. Do you repeatedly poll the health dept website for the latest guidance? That's one way to keep up to date on Covid restrictions, but generally it's even more inconvenient to poll everything that matters.
It doesn't. You can read a newspaper and get that exact info without the doomsaying that comes with TV.
1. I've found the news to be the worst way to get information about covid. My state health department website and other sites like it have given me much better details.
2. Yeah, I need to know if there are things that might block my route when driving. Google Maps does a better job of that than any local news that I've seen.
3. Plenty of people drive Volkswagens and are perfectly happy with them. They didn't let the news tell them how awful they were for this practice. For that matter, they didn't let the news tell them how awful Musk is or how wonderful some other execs in the industry are either. And you know what? They are just fine for that.
Most of your other points don't seem to have much to do with the news being talked about. I don't think the article was telling you not to check the weather.
The way I describe it is that all you can ever hope for with "following the news" is eventual consistency with some representative subset of world events. I don't know what's happening as it happens, and I don't know everything that's happened, so I'm (by the requirements of reality) both behind and only updated on some events.
I'm just happy being far longer on the "eventual" window and having a somewhat lower amount of representative content.
What I've also learned is that almost everything actually important will filter to me some way or another. It's absolutely impossible to live under a rock if you interact with other people, because they'll ask you about XYZ event. And, often, enjoy updating you if you've not heard about it!
I also agree with the "Read three books" observation - I'd rather someone recommend three books on an interesting topic to me than link me to some hour long video. The books take longer, but I'm likely to have at least some familiarity with the topic, from a few different points, with the books. YouTube will make people think they've got some understanding, when it's largely missing.
I'm sure it's been pointed out before, but the news is also a horrible way to actually understand the world around you. What gets discussed is the most novel/stimulating things that happened--if you attempt to fit a model of the world to these data points, you end up completely wrong. If I am interested in a topic (immigration trends in a country, covid statistics, what's happening with electric car subsidies, etc.) I just seek out the necessary information myself.
You know what I really want? A version of 'the news' that is done quarterly and is just sampling of what's happening in the lives of 100 random people. Who are they, some basic statistics about then, and what's affecting their lives written up in few paragraphs for each person. Just an unbiased sample of the 'real world' from people outside my bubble.
Said an avid follower of Hacker News ? :-)
Honestly, I have never felt better being disconnected from it all. It really frees up the brain to ponder on things I can actually control in my life.
I've experienced this too and it's so depressing. HLN (CNN2) made my father racist again to the point of dropping casual N-bombs :/
Best I can do - if particularly interested in a current event and there's no video footage - is sample wide range of news sources and see if there's any common strand of truth between the lies.
But more often than not, I don't care anymore.
I would, however, like a way to be informed of breaking news. I tried a few apps but their idea of "breaking" news often involved celebrity gossip. I really only want to know if its MAJOR: war breaks out, aliens land and make contact, fusion is finally perfected and we're all no longer required to labor 40 hours a week.
My current solution is basically: if something major happens my wife tells me about it.
The Miriam-Webster definition of "News" is literally "A report of recent events". A report of events a decade prior is not "News" anymore and of course likely to be irrelevant. To visit a decade old front page of any paper expecting it to be directly applicable somehow to your life today is bizarre logic to me.
If you look back at the news from a particular day and see now that reading it didn't convey information you've used since, then that is a good indication that the news you're reading now probably won't convey anything you find useful going forward.
99.9% of news isn't relevant or actionable for most people.
If I can't answer the question "how will this inform a decision I have to make?" the news is purely entertainment. If entertainment doesn't make your life better, don't consume it.
There is no value in having an "informed opinion" about topics that don't change your life.
This is what news is supposed to be though! To expect otherwise is the problem. Just because something isn't immediately actionable or entertaining that day in some measurable outcome is a poor test of "value" too, and would eliminate many other things people consider of "value".
Continuing my previous single example, financial news can affect anyone who owns a home or has retirement savings, whether they want to admit it or not, the scope is vastly beyond financial professionals and day traders. If I know interest rates are likely due to rise in March (I do! Thanks news!), I can take steps to lock a low rate now for any debts I have, like a mortgage...
Where do you think the value of news comes from, if not helping people take better actions to navigate their lives?
>Continuing my previous single example, financial news can affect anyone who owns a home or has retirement savings, Whether they want to admit it or not, the scope is vastly beyond financial professionals and day traders.
My point is that information doesn't matter even if it will or could affect you, unless you will take some action based on it. If someone realistically thinks they might sell their family home or cash out their retirement, then by all means, pay close attention to financial news. If not, they would be better off ignoring it entirely.
All of these things can be actionable, and all of them require paying attention to a news source of some kind to take that action in time. That is the value! And yes, it means very often I have to flick through a paper that doesn't entertain or inform me at all, but that has always been the reality of the news.
There are even really positive things that enter my life too, it's not all misery; news of exhibitions or bands coming to town that I love for one. There are huge interests and hobbies I have only discovered because I read about them in a news article - there can be a "discovery cost" for many people to reading no news at all too. "Value" is a tricky concept and benefits are often indirect.
100% agree. As I said, many things can have an impact on you, but that doesn't mean they are worth paying attention to proactively unless you are even slightly likely to do something about them.
>All of these things can be actionable, and all of them require paying attention to a news source of some kind to take that action in time.
Again, 100% agree, assuming you might actually take action. I think most people are not honest with themselves about what might actually lead to action.
My point is not that news cant be actionable, but that for most people it rarely is. People would be better served if they curate their news consumption based on what may actually be relevant and likely to lead to action, and gasp perhaps spend some more time actually taking actions.
If you feel you already do that, then great. Based on my experience, the vast majority of people don't. They spend dozens of hours following local elections for states they will never visit, building "informed opinions" about protests while never attending one themselves. They track stocks they don't own and will never buy and read crime exposes for locations they will never visit.
I’ve already gotten vaccinated thrice and still contracted covid. When can I stop being harassed about what I’m already doing??
If you actually want to make a difference consider putting more into getting engaged locally, whatever that means for you. National and global scale issues are really easy to fall into a despair/paralysis cycle with.
1. I never had a TV
2. I've read print newspapers (local, international) every day for a decade
3. I've read online news (local, intl) every day for more than a decade
4. I've never was active (neither reading the feed nor posting something) on any social network except Tumblr for visual inspiration
5. Today I read just one single online hyperlocal news portal, beside tech news (Hacker News + newsletters)
The takeaways:
a. Less anxiety.
News are, well, inaccurate since Pulitzer / yellow journalism. Their major function is to keep you on a constant stress level. Which is good on tech news, hyperlocal news -- where you can act, but not good on national and international level -- where you are just a simple spectator.
b. Less biased. I know that I know nothing, so I'm listening everybody and trying to make sense what's happening around.
I’m not completely in the dark. I still scan headlines a few minutes of the day, but I have switched completely to RSS feeds. I use the NetNewsWire app on my iPhone, and I have feeds from all the major news networks.
This way I’m in complete control of my intake, and I get a completely text based experience (my settings default to ‘reader’ mode once I click through to the article website). I get to just read, and not be bothered with all the other ads & nonsense on news sites.
It’s really nice to consume news on my own terms, and not what the Google news algorithm wants me to see. Or not consume it at all and be happy :) Taking a step away from obsessively reading articles everyday can go along way from disconnecting from the ‘propaganda machine’, and thinking for yourself, instead of getting sucked into whatever ‘narrative of the day’ is.
- stop reading any form of "push news" (so, no Google News, Apple News etc) - whenever you feel the urge to read something, save to read-later service (I use Instapaper) - print subscription to Economist
You realize you never needed to "keep up to the minute", and it's okay to find out about things a day or two later
Local news is another matter.
the nation was basically united in wanting to invade Iraq/Afghanistan all because the talking heads on TV manufactured that consent. it wasn't a "party lines" or "oh that was just FOX News" kind of thing—the news stations were a united front in getting us to believe in something absolutely ridiculous, and we accepted it at face value because we were scared and confused following 9/11. we now know it was all bullshit that resulted in the further unnecessary loss of life, American and otherwise, yet millions of Americans still "trust" these "news" programs implicitly—it's The News, why would you question it?
now these same news stations with overly-polished talking heads—including "former" intelligence agency regulars—and pharmaceutical advertising money (most Americans never bat an eye at the pharma ads on TV and how creepy and weird they are, or are even aware that they're illegal in most of the rest of the world) claim to be the Arbiters of Truth and The Best, Perhaps Only Way To Stay Informed, and we eat it right up. my dad thinks he's consuming a "balanced news diet" by watching the nightly news from every station. it's insanity. turn it off and don't look back. they call it programming for a reason.
This is just to say that quitting everything might be close to impossible considering that in some cases we even get news reports via unsolicited SMS messages but we can still reduce input and have a more focused, calmer state of mind.
I currently prefer The Atlantic and The Economist for this purpose, but there are many choices.
So, yes cutting all that BS our is going to make you feel better because in two weeks no one is going to care that $celebrity had $life_event.
There's no objectivity especially with political news (barf) and world event news (things that try to control your life).
Ive posted this same sentiment many times here on hacker news about the garbage media .. always gets voted down. But im passionate about living and enjoying life far from it .. think for myself and for me my relationships with people are most important not some dumb for profit news cycle that's manipulated bias trash. Such will never come between me and someone i care about! They can believe that garbage they fill their head with but i only very briefly give my opinion on it and move the topic to something positive/fulfilling!
I am avid reader of tech, entertainment and some local news cause that's fluff vs brainwashing/try to control how I enjoy the time Im here on earth.
I had enough negativity in my life as it was, and it just felt like every media outlet overwhelmingly pursued negative stories - war, famine, corruption, FUD etc. I dwelt on such stories, fretting about what might happen. And it frustrated me greatly that I could do nothing about any of these events - technically I live in a democracy, but it counts for little if both main parties are 2 sides of the same coin, and the others have zero chance.
So, I took the drastic step of stopping watching and reading news. I still inadvertently come across some small snippit from time to time, and events that directly impact me, like covid, are apparent without 24-hour death toll coverage.
It's been great - I feel "unburdened", and definitely happier.
I guess in that respect I've long quit the news. I'm honestly surprised some people still watch TV news, I've cut the cord a long time ago personally.
I tend to go to axios, New York times, Atlantic, Reason, etc., and not on a daily basis, since long form news doesn't get published as often. Been doing that for a while.
Axios is my favorite for keeping up with daily news, no opinion pieces, just reporting on events and a quick summary of why it could matter in a digestible form.
Just by glancing at a news article the agenda of spreading fear for clicks/views becomes so obvious.
1) This blog post is from 2016 and yet it is the hot story and discussion today on HN. The main argument is that following news is pointless and we are better off not doing so. 2) It has been upvoted and commented on 600+ times today, right as Russia is invading the sovereign nation of Ukraine. This is objectively news worth following. Russia has lost the debate across most of the mainstream english speaking internet regarding this invasion. 3) Russia is the main party that benefits at this time from convincing people to ignore the news.
However, re Russia and Co, if you’re not living in the directly affected areas – and I hope you are not – or required to deploy there, remember this: Before this century, no population in history was ever instantaneously aware, in real-time, of hostilities happening around the world. If staying informed by the moment is important to you or you think it will help you muster an appropriate policy recommendation for your local government representative, go for it.
But if not, consider that you’re spiking your adrenals by basically live-streaming blow-by-blow intelligence on s**t happening, keeping your body + psyche in fight/flight/freeze mode. Be aware and of course, if you’re a student of history, yes the developments are fascinating but claim/retain your agency in all this. You control yourself, your outlook, and your immediate environment. Asserting your creativity, enterprising nature, and sensuality in such an atmosphere is not denying that it’s disturbing – it’s good for your morale and those around you.
> [Source] https://mysticmedusa.com/an-astrological-pep-talk/
For me as an on-the-side investor, relevant news can mean gain or loss. Conflicts like the Ukraine-Russian one can affect the price of oil and gas significantly, not just in the short term. We’ve also seen how much global logistics was affected by the event of Evergreen blocking the Sue canal. There are countless examples like that.
The second important aspect of news for me is the sentiment and conversation surround it. I want to understand what other people are thinking, what do they feel and how they are trying to explain and substantiate their thinking/believe. It’s not always intellectually enriching but sometimes it can be even enlightening, especially when it proved I was wrong or mistaken. Completely unaware of current news would not allow me to converse with people like that.
Nevertheless, I also see that most media today are trying to polarize people more than ever with the results that people are increasingly driven by belief and ideology instead of facts and logics. I afraid the classic news and reporting is an endangered species and reading news today will likely endanger your (not just mental) health.
Well, that was never more than barely following the news, and arguably closer to following distractions from the news.
I quit, and now other than a 5 minute scan of the BBC News Website occasionally, I am news free. I know the important stuff, such as the ending of Covid restrictions in the UK and the invasion of provinces in Ukraine, but I don't dive deeply into the articles, or do any wider reading.
The reason for my switching off from the news, is that there is bugger all I can do about it, other than voting once every five years, or becoming an activist.
I don't have the time or energy to campaign as an activist on issues I care about. I have a family to look after and a job to maintain. My priorities are selfish.
Voting for me, is a waste of time (although I always do vote). I live in a Tory county, and my vote counts for nothing without proportional representation (which I voted for, but did not happen).
What's the point of digesting news. I learn stuff that mostly has little impact on my life, and when it does have an impact, there's nothing I can do about it.
My quality of life is certainly better since I cut back on digesting the news, in any form, other than this site.
1. Reading/viewing multiple source, from different countries.
2. Reading against the text, using claims from one biased source to contrarily interpret another source, but also holding those claims in suspicion, allowing for the second source to potentially disprove or at least recast what the first source wanted you to know.
3. Watching for things like subtext, timing of stories, _absence_ of coverage, distribution of sources etc.
4. Often, reading languages other than the one you're most fluent in - at least to some extent.
5. Getting used to the most significant and controversial stories being a mess of not just conflicting coverage, but personal and collective accusations which are often at least half-true even if they are a distraction, having to live with how some authors combine conspiracy-theorism or zealotry on some points with decent journalistic work on others...
---
Bottom line: It's frustrating, it's time consuming, it draws you away from your social surrounding who either know nothing about things or are repeating shallow slogans they heard in some mainstream news show.
This is important.
I haven't watched cable news in years (maybe a decade now?) but still check in with long form journalism for in-depth exploration of a topic.
I think this right here is a source of all of the evil mentioned in the article:
https://fs.blog/narrative-fallacy/
I'm not always above creating narratives and cherry-picking information that feeds those narratives because, end of the day, Im human just like everybody else. But being aware of this and learning how to better catch yourself as you're doing it does make a massive difference. It also damned near forces you to try and look for information closer to the source.
(Try reading news sources in another language from another country and watch what happens. Ideally you wouldnt use Google Translate)
Now that shit is popping off in Europe there is an uptick in NSA/CIA/America bad posts with anti-free press sprinkled on top. Every post about events unfolding in Europe were flagged and didn't even reach the front page here until the last few days.
In the Jeff Geerling post Dang revealed that there are groups of inauthentic actors on this site.
Given the ease of targeting sites for manipulation, HN is probably prominent enough to be worth some psyops effort, though nothing on the scale of the major social media platforms. So, it wouldn't be unexpected though I haven't noticed it, particularly.
> Now that shit is popping off in Europe there is an uptick in NSA/CIA/America bad posts with anti-free press sprinkled on top. Every post about events unfolding in Europe were flagged and didn't even reach the front page here until the last few days.
There's a fairly normal thing here that well-covered potential political events, even fairly extreme ones that don't offer particularly novel discussion opportunities, tend to get down voted along with routine political events. But at a certain level of significance of actual rather than potential events, there's often a phase transition where the down voting is less aggressive (sometimes, there may also be, usually limited, mod intervention to allow some discussion.) So, I’m not convinced that that is particularly suspicious in this case, though the particular content bias may (or may not) reflect some influence of “inauthentic actors”.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... Rolf Dobelli's book this is from is excellent too
You can easily get lost in the weeds with something as detailed as Stratfor's reports though; sometimes you need to step back 10,000 ft to recalibrate.
With that proper definition as a filter, a fairly high percentage of US mainstream media news is in fact fake news. This higher revenue fluff is used intentionally to marginalize things that qualify as legit news. Yet somehow these members of The Fourth Estate are shameless enough to cry about "threats to democracy."
The problem is, we don't hear the news admit their definition of news is technically nonsense. Not one of them is willing to police the others. It's hypersonic bullshit that repetition has normalized.
As for journalism...this is a solid filter. It's a handy bullshit detector.
When I stopped watching TV/reading any news at all I noticed one thing: I'm less distracted.
Once you realize that media outlets make tremendous amounts of money by selling you their narrative and like any business they're just trying to be as profitable as possible, everything changes.
Nowadays I might read an article or two from people I subscribe to on substack or something more independent, but still I don't feel like it's something that I need at all.
In particular, I question the need for giant journalistic institutions like the New York Times or Fox News or any other. If anything happens anywhere I tune to the local news first, because I'd rather read that then the NYT copy/pasta from that, along with some quote from some friend-of-a-former-professor expert.
That said, the news fills a valuable function even if you don't read it. When Alzheimer's gets cured, I will likely learn about it from a headline.
I am torn on this issue, partially because I don't want to let my past deeply unhealthy relationship with reading about current events affect how I view it vis a vie society.
"Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world."
That's why it's called "news", it's living, recent information that is in the making, being talked about and discussed. Everything else is great but it's something different and likely is encapsulated by an echo chamber.
Nothing against reading up books about politics for instance but it's at best complementary to news. At worst - not being a political scientist - you might select the "wrong" book and find yourself wasting time how people describe obscure views.
But yes, in general I agree of course. Watching/reading too much news can be draining. But really, our current democracy is built on the fact that people consume news from at least one mainstream news outlet. How else do you know who to vote for?
What I really hate about news is how you jump on a topic without context. The perfect example of that is the Iraq war of course, Ukraine now is such an issue. 99.9% of people barley know where the Ukraine or the Crimea was. You can't just jump into a topic without context think its a great way to get information.
And that is even before you consider that a lot of the time a simple party line is adopted and endlessly repeated. Not even because of some conspiracy simply because its easier to report on what everybody is reporting.
If you for example understood the Syria conflict only based on typical news, and I include even 'reputable' news papers your overall understanding would still be problematic. Much better to spend your time reading a history book on Syria and AQ in Iraq.
I came back and looked at the week old news stories they featured. I'd forgotten about all of them and they'd all had zero impact on my life in any way.
Which, outside of the weather forecast, is true for any given week since forever.
Then I watched a Ricky Gervais interview where he compares tweets to graffiti. Einstein and a total idiot would tweet in the same font.
Now when I see a tweet I strongly disagree with, I get zero emotional involvement. It’s wonderful, but now Twitter seems almost pointless. Perhaps that is wonderful as well.
The disappearance of MH 370 was on literally non-stop on CNN in particular, and we'd walk out of the hotel lobby to see the same group of people repeating that basically nothing had changed but oh my god maybe this personage or another will have something soon, walking back in the evening past the same thing, for days.
It's really no wonder people came up with insane conspiracies about it, because for like two solid weeks multiple TV channels were going on about it as if the world had ended.
I do agree with the sentiment that cable news is essentially reality TV (with less fun). Reading a New Yorker interview and debating it with friends is certainly healthier than zoning out in front of an endless stream of anger.
Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN Worldwide, shaped his career around entertainment not journalism. And he was hired to punch up the news from NBC by Warnermedia, CNN's parent. It just goes to show that the media companies treat news as entertainment. I think we need to be aware of that and be careful how we consume it.
This sounds true, but is it really? Just looking at today's headlines, I now know that the IRS will be using Login.gov instead of ID.me [1], which will be rather useful so that I know not to sign up for ID.me and to instead sign up for Login.gov.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/02/22/1082283039/the-irs-is-allowin...
The news can be useful for finding out about new trends, specially in technology. Bitcoin was in the news, like Business Insider, as early as 2012. Simeone who reads the news could have acted on that and made a fortune. Many other examples. Imagine reading the news in 2017 about the iPhone and buying Apple stock. Or about the Google IPO in 2004 and buying Google stock. The news cannot tell you what to do, but it can make you at lest aware of something.
If anyone was interested the website is available here : https://todayheadlines.live/?locale=en-US
>“Being concerned” makes us feel like we’re doing something when we’re not<
is what really drove it home for me. I can do more to improve the world if I am in a good mood and improving myself than I can if I walk around angry that X is happening somewhere.
CNN and Fox are so far apart they practically touch.
gopher://magical.fish
I miss the Teletext the way it was long ago. It had resumed news for everything, no bias, no bullshit.
It's the only unbiased, non-sensational, and informative source I have come across.
It's basically impossible to get the facts of what's going on by reading a CBC article about the Freedom Convoy, but Wikipedia does an incredible job of breaking it all down. [0]
What I've found is that the news I really need to know about reaches me anyway.
Most of the time, at least up until now, the news has not impacted me in any way that I would act on—I’m just an apathetic citizen like many others.
Truly curse these interesting times that we are living through.
This article isn't new though. Similar articles have been posted in HN since 2010s.
I hope I never relapse.
To me this is the money quote:
> Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world.
There is a big opportunity cost to following the news! If you spend those X minutes a day educating yourself instead, you will be a far more informed citizen. You will also start seeing what ignorant garbage much of the news really is.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cpml2v678pxt
Which is a great way to see all the points of view (in the UK) on one page.
I still scan the headlines from various sources and selectively choose how/when/why I choose to dig deeper into anything. And no, I'm not using any crackpot sources or echo chambers. I prefer more "raw" news reporting; before any spin or sensationalism gets inflicted upon it.
The world was also smaller back then. With eight billion people, you can't track everything of importance on the world stage anymore. You need to pick and choose.
Once you step outside and look with fresh eyes it really is quite terrifying.
What's really needed are sources of reliable information about events, particularly about events that impact directly or indirectly on your own personal situation. Usually the written form of news is more information-dense.
Understanding those events, however, does require a degree of background knowledge that 'news' will never provide; for that you need to at least read books in the subject.
Television and radio news, it's always going to be more entertainment than information, due to its audio-visual format.
However, crappy sources of information that distrort reality in order to serve the interests of a government's reelection campaign, a corporate business strategy, etc. - that's what most what is labelled 'news' today consists of. Hence the news consumer has to act as a filter, seeking the nuggets of information gold in a sewer of manufactured garbage.
There are however ways to help with the filtering although authoritarian and heirarchical societies seem to prefer to generate a dumbed-down population incapable of discerning truth from falsehood, because such a population is easier to manipulate by a small group of ruling elites. Which is what you might call the cynical view of the current status quo.
I’ll ask Siri to read me the news and listen to the five minute overview which is all I need to make sure WWIII hasn’t broken out.
I’d still like to subscribe to a physical weekly. But not sure there are any good ones without a heavy slant in Canada.
I stopped consuming all political, health, and global news the day after January 6th 2021. Pretty much anything that was on CNN/Fox or that half hour after the local news. I never watched local news really anyway, so I couldn’t quit something I didn’t already do in that regard.
I just assumed that if there were news outlets fooling humans into doing something like THAT on January 6th in the USA, then whatever I was watching was bound to fool me into doing something outrageous too, and it was time to stop.
I first started to consider stopping my news consumption after a certain someone was banned from Twitter. The weight I felt lifted off of me when I didn’t hear that noise anymore was immense. I figured it could only get better.
It did.
Just like this article says, within a month, you feel so much better about everything.
The world around you starts to feel normal. Things just are what they are.
Being informed didn’t help me or anyone else. Being concerned didn’t make the world a better place.
If something horrible is going to happen, I guess I’ll just be the last to know. And that’s totally fine with me.
I hope millions engage in cancelling the news. It could just be what sets things straight in this world.
My concern is that CNN may also be “fooling” me in other ways, but in the same way other outlets have fooled others.
Meaning, they have an agenda, they paint a picture of the world through their own lense, and I won’t be a pawn in their game.
News are just a business like any other, and I have never needed their services.
24-hour news is all about reacting first, thinking never.
Daily publications are better, but there's still not a lot of time to formulate thought.
Weekly publications allow things to breathe a bit more. Allows some context to be established, some thought to be had before taking fingers to keyboard.
If you are not into games or memes you discard it as nonimportant. That is same thing if you dont watch news.
Its like a joke you didnt hear and some people are referencing it.
No big deal.
Electric Light Orchestra - Here Is the News (Official Video) in 1981
A lot of what I read makes me read Wikipedia, for verification and context.
News are not just the latest events, they also remind people about the current state of world's history, and invites people to learn some actual facts.
Things You Notice When You Quit the News - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153539 - Dec 2016 (487 comments)
- yes! just stop saying "we are there for you and we support you" - well no you are at home on a phone typing things to make yourself feel better and useful.
Firstly, the Cable news stations (CNN, Fox News) aren't news programs - despite the name - they are talk shows. It's Maury for politics.
The broadcast news, that's news. But it's not without its problems. Whenever I would over hear my mom watching it - it's so shocking how it's done. some of my gripes, based on what little I've seen over the past few years:
- The tone of the newscaster has changed - they don't sound like they're just reporting it - there's emotion or gravitas in their voice that make what they're saying authoritative.
- When they cover politics - especially elections - it's always a fluff piece about the big two candidates. When the democratic primaries for the 2016 election were happening - they'd barely mention anyone but Hillary. You'd have 10 minutes of Hillary, 1 minute of Bernie and 0 minutes of everyone else. Same in 2020, but add Biden. It's no wonder my mom had no idea the other candidates even existed. (and don't get me started on how the candidates make up issues just to debate them - so tricky - pick a hot button topic that is important, but may not be important right now - I think we know the big ones)
- Fear mongering - this goes with the first one I listed. Instead of simply reporting that tragedy happened and giving the facts, they'd just keep the emotional level up. It's a bait and switch. You get drawn in by it and then vote for whoever is going to "fix" everything. The morality of it is, in my opinion, similar to what psychic does - play on the emotion of someones tragedy for money.
And I say all this as someone who doesn't follow the news or politics very closely.
the whole article is outstanding but this excerpt alone sums it up quite nicely
It's brain rotting and emotional content that should be socially treated like a drug, keeping viewers addicted to drama and outage.
Here's what I suggest: subscribe to The Washington Post. Once a day, scan through the homepage and read through any articles that catch your interest. When you hit the bottom of the home page, you are done. Depending on how much you are interested in, this could take five minutes or twenty. You will get a reasonable overview of the most important topics primarily focused on the US.
that implies no bias on the part of WAPO.
> You will get a reasonable overview of the most important topics primarily focused on the US.
and youll most certainly be positively or negatively affected by that news daily. which seems pointless to me? why worry about US and iran going to war if 2 weeks later its no longer relevant? Or about how good spiderman is doing in its first week? or whether tiktok is spying on its users?
these things fade almost immediately from public conscious. Staying "informed" daily seems like a waste of time imo.
No news source is completely unbiased, WaPo included. But WaPo is an outstanding journalistic outlet with a long history of accurate reporting and worthy of being a singular news source if you had to pick one.
"Knowing" about Ukraine does absolutely nothing - you know 'everything' and I know nothing we still have the exact same amount of impact on the situation -> Zero.
Meanwhile you can spend the same time talking to your neighbors about what's happening in the community and actually have real impact. "Oh Tom is sick? Let me bring over some food for him"
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/world/europe/ukraine-jews...
https://editorial01.shutterstock.com/wm-preview-1500/7301783...
Ignorance is bliss, and 'eternal vigilance' is the thing necessary in order to keep our system going.
If we could all be 'reasonably informed' - so many problems would be avoided.
'Good' countries fail from within, and Tyrants come to power on a wave of populism which is ultimately based on misinformation.
We really do need to pay attention, but the issue becomes much more difficult in an era wherein main stream outlets have jacked up their bias, where Twitter advocates saucy, false and vindictive statements, where the Internet has enabled every Yahoo (pun intended) to have a soapbox and provided very little facility to wade through the morass to find reasonable voices. Often the reasonable voices aren't actually reasonable. A lot of intellectual voices over-state the issues. It's really, really, hard.
Instead of 'disassociating' entirely from the news, one could chose to 'disassociate from any political ideal' and just read from a variety of sources, and less often. Sometimes the high brow places (i.e. FP or FT) have less audacious triggering. Some high quality outlets that have known biases are not a good place to spend a lot of time. Check the headlines from state propaganda. Read the English news from other countries occasionally - this is quite refreshing because the foreign perspective tends to entirely deconstruct the local rubbish back and forth by not giving it much credence.
Get out of a political headset and don't over consume, but pay attention. It's kind of like voting, it matters collectively.
Here's just a few observations off the top of my head.
* Fox News and CNN often get compared as being the opposites of each other, but there's one big difference in journalistic integrity that I can see. With Fox, you know who the straight news people are and who the opinion people are. With CNN, the line is blurred beyond any recognition.
* Particularly when it came to Trump, many news headlines during the last 6 years or so have been literal mind-reading about his mental state, thoughts, and goals, and I'm not even joking a little. If you start paying attention to this, you'll notice that so much of the news literally involves mind-reading.
* Paying attention to the advertisements made during the news is also critical because all humans have bias. Every other ad is for some damn pill, cream, or suppository from Big Pharma. Any news report involving health should be viewed through this lens as news agencies know who butters their bread.
Quit the 24-hour news cycle? Sure. Quit doomscrolling on Facebook or Twitter? Yeah, most definitely quite good for you.
But, "quit the news" as in "remain uninformed"? No way! The invention of the press enabled modern democracy, and no matter what you think of that, all the alternatives so far have pretty decisively turned out to be worse.
So, here's my take: consume the news, but in moderation. And, like consuming alcohol in moderation (which I also wholeheartedly condone), I can't tell you exactly how to do it, just that I've seen it done successfully.
For me, it's a (dead-tree) subscription to The Economist. World events, long-form analysis, some light fare, all with a mild(ish) libertarian touch, delivered to my doormat every week.
A time-saver it is not: a single copy of the (weekly) newspaper takes at least eight hours to digest, often longer. But I don't feel compelled to hit 'refresh' (the newspaper is what it is for the next week), and there is no way to embarrass myself by hitting 'reply': a Letter To The Editor takes some careful consideration, which is great.
Most actual local news IME comes from local Facebook pages/groups and, rarely, Nextdoor.
The only news site you need.
Come next election, i will never watch TV/the news, again. There is no need for it. I solicit news from my friends when i feel like i want to consume it (hardly ever). I instead spend time out in my community and neighbourhood doing what i can to improve the direct situation around me for which i have control.
If you spend your evening reviewing all the death and destruction and uncertaintity around the world, you will live a very lonely life.
I travelled the world pre-covid and nothing gives a worse picture of what the world really is then "the news"
Everyone has their bailiwick of expertise. Mine happens to be northeast Asian matters, having lived there decades after growing up in the US, speaking and reading the three main languages (albeit to different degrees of proficiency), and teaching university Asian history classes, half in English, half in the local language.
The problem is that only very, very rarely did I ever read or hear something in the English-language news about China, Japan, or Korea that I found enlightening or even mostly fair. It was all superficial pablum, often highly misleading.
So, I can only conclude the same might be said for other topics about which I am generally clueless.
Obvious counterpoint: Trump, who appointed awful judges and secretaries, and denied disaster relief aid, was sworn in to office a month after this was published
As a child this seemed unreasonable and unfair, right up there with not having pizza as often as I wanted, or other similar not-actually-traumatizing problems. Then I became aware of how much time my peers spent staring at TVs, filling their mental spheres with the ephemeral details of forgettable TV entertainment. And none of them were reading anything.
I was very happy we didn't have one.
Later in life I got a TV to watch rental movies. That was great.
Then I tried cable for two years and lived with the dreck for a while. Everything was clearly designed to communicate to stupid people! Even the history and science programs are ridiculously dumbed down.
But the worst by far was the "news". The faux partisan battles that turned into real partisan battles with two (not always equally) incoherent sides. The same people banding together on each side (there are almost always exactly two sides!) of every issue.
BUT worse than the news was the advertising. People are so used to it they don't see it for what it blatantly is. Completely bizarre communication techniques doing only one thing: Brainwashing! Repetition of nonsense phrases, ridiculously happy/sad people, products shown in painfully contrived situations, ...
The problem with news and advertising isn't just that they are misleading, or that they are dumbed down, or that they are designed to be emotionally addictive.
The worst problem is that exposing ourselves to constantly repetitive irrationality creates thinking grooves in our minds. It dumbs us down both in terms of how we think, but even worse, all the higher forms of thinking we never develop, that we are channelled away from.
I quit cable after two years. That was enough for a lifetime lesson. Movies, quality TV series, there are actually enjoyable inspiring things to watch.
But I live a life almost completely devoid of any commercials, and no video news, talks shows, etc., at all.
And by reading I am far more "informed" and more importantly, have a greater, constantly growing "understanding" of people, power, the practical (people) side of economics, etc.
--
I don't think it is a coincidence that the massive societal and personal problems associated with video news and a partially egregious scrapbooking web site are both associated with content produced to coerce us to watch advertising we would otherwise never choose to expose ourselves too.
It is all a toxic brew. Avoid all advertising in you life. You will avoid 99% of the junk and be a much better version of yourself.
I have threatened to drop a friendship when a friend kept sending me stupid baiting political memes. He finally understood me: It is not that it was specifically stupid or wrong, it is that I don't tolerate mental poison like that. Not even from a friend.
As far as I can tell the only balance is to read the news with deep skepticism, more as a way to know “what people are talking about” than what really happened.
— Denzel Washington,
This is because all the mainstream news sources, even those that appear to be in opposition, are working in tandem. CNN, Fox, BBC, RT, Al Jazeera, etc and papers WaPo, NYT, Guardian, Daily Mail, etc are all providing positions on the same narrative. Using this sources - as if they are stating truth - seems crazy to me. They are all propaganda.
The apparent variety of left or right wing perspective gives the illusion of there being something there, that you have a balanced opinion on. This is by design. Its _all_ propaganda. Its soap opera for the middle classes. It does not relate to the live you experience.
The backdrop to it is that people live such virtual lives, sitting at screens, not engaged with nature and real-life, the virtual has become a de facto reality.