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Comment by 878654Tom | Hacker News Reader

Made the same comment yesterday on another submission but it still fits this discussion.

I suggest people who read a lot of news to read up on Rolf Dobelli's book named Stop Reading the news.

I found it an eye-opener and have since blocked all news websites on every device. Currently 3 weeks without a newspaper and I don't feel I am missing a thing.

The best chapters were the ones were he explained with great examples how irrelevant the news was, how news would make you less creative and feel much smaller than you really are.

Now, he also clearly tries to distinguish news and longreads. If your paper is a daily paper that tries to be very generic... you can skip it. If your paper is a medical journal and your profession is a doctor. Keep reading that medical journal.

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I stopped following the news sometime in 2017 I think, it wasn’t really a conscious decision, I just felt annoyed or saddened by it.

A few years later I was talking to my dad and he was in a state, going on about current events and how bad things are so I told him I stopped following the news years ago and felt better for it.

About six months later he called me to tell me he also stopped after our call and realised he felt much better too.

A big part for me was that it was just a barrage of sad or scary topics which left me feeling helpless, mixed in with some celebrity antics which I didn’t care about.

I keep up with what’s going on in my industry, and science and technology through sites like this, newsletter subscriptions, podcasts, etc. But in general I’m mostly clueless to what is currently happening in the news.

It makes me feel somehow ignorant, but it works for me. If someone brings up a topic from the news I normally just say “Oh I hadn’t heard about that!” rather than explain I don’t follow the news.

And so voters become less informed and so don't know what politician to vote for. How does this help society?

He actually talks about this in his book, democracy already existed before newspapers became big (or even existed). People got informed through books, pamphlets, essays, debates and public gatherings. Now, some articles do inform the people more, one of the big examples is Watergate. But the difference in quality and research between the Watergate articles and the daily news is immense. Most political news-articles are nothing more than copy-pastes from what a politician sends to the writer and newspapers aren't the only medium where investigative journalism can exist. In my home-country a one-man journalist published some big scandals on his blog which showcased some unsavory corruption in one of our cities, all the big newspapers could only report what he already said, they had zero investigation themselves.

The other part is, do daily newspapers really inform you? Do they follow up the promises of candidates? Do they analyze effects of laws? Do they give you a neutral view of the situation?

Democracy can work fine without newspapers, maybe even better. Politicians in my country focus mostly to solve small fires without addressing the problems underneath it as those get them in the news but the big problems with complex solutions don't give them the same return of visibility in the papers versus the work required to fix it.

I probably should have followed up on the sibling comment rather than this.

I think that following a Twitter or TicToc channel is getting much less information than from mass media. Most do even less follow up or question what the source politician says.

Yes books pamphlets discussions are better but social media in general is none of these it is worse than mass media. Yes there are some blogs that do more but that is rare but that is blogs where you write a thousand words which is not normal social media.

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