The News Is Bad for You. Stop Reading It

My own personal method is to assume anything News is actually just marketing trying to fight for my attention. I still scan through the corporate marketing sites to see if there is anything interesting and if sites in multiple countries can vouch for their story. None of them appear to have investigative journalists any more, just reporters on the ground at times.

There is also a lot missing from the news. For example, there is talk of a Russian destroyer 24 miles off the coast of Hawaii and another one 24+ miles off the U.S. Eastern seaboard right now and I can not find a single news story about it, just some youtubers that are into tracking vessels on marinetraffic.com but I can not figure out how they are identifying military vessels. I think that would be interesting but the corporate news sites are silent so maybe it's all fiction and fear porn to get clicks which the corporate media are often guilty of as well. Either way there have been a myriad of occasions where some random youtuber finds something and the news does not pick it up for a week.

That's another thing. There are many Youtubers that have 10x more viewers than the corporate media sites. But most of them just add commentary and do not have investigative journalists. Where did all the investigative journalists go?

I think there are a few blind spots, or weak areas in her arguments, but in general I’m in sympathy with this piece. Surely more now than I would have been a year or two ago, due to the steady decline in the quality of journalism. For example, I used to check the NY Times a couple of times each day; now I might think to take a glance there once or twice a week.

Her final point is spot-on: read source documents, not the imperfectly digested products of poorly educated journalists. The internet makes this far easier than in olden times, and makes, or should make, most of journalism obsolete.

I don't recall who said it, but paraphrased: "To see how useless the news is, read last week's paper."

Further, if you must consume news: avoid watching it in favor of listening to it; avoid listening to it in favor of reading it; avoid reading from institutions in favor of reading from actual individuals.