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> When was the last time you read a news article in any "major" news source, of the kind that typically appears on Google News, about a subject you know well and you thought, "This demonstrates an accurate understanding of even the big picture elements of the story"?

Most of the time? Maybe I don't know what you mean.

Most of the news that appears via AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, etc. is largely factually accurate. Especially when you're looking at their core competencies of covering domestic US politics, basic foreign affairs, and domestic economics/business. E.g. they've been doing accurate jobs on factual reporting about the recent battles for house majority leader, events unfolding in Israel, and events unfolding in Ukraine. Sometimes you might be bothered with their "present both sides and don't take a stance" but it's still largely factual, accurate reporting about what is happening and what public figures are saying.

If by "big picture" you mean analysis, however, that's not exactly news. Analysis is necessarily opinionated -- declaring that a public figure is lying, that another public figure ought to do X. That's not what Google News is for -- that's what publications like the Economist, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Vox, or New York Magazine are for. (Or pick your own preferred set.)

But you need both. 24 hour political and international news is very necessary for a lot of people in decision-making positions, and for people affected by a lot of these events. If it's unhealthy for you personally, then you shouldn't consume it however. For example, I read tons about politics and economics, but I don't look at crime reports stuff at all. (And Google News doesn't show it to me either, since the "For You" tab is really good at learning your preferences.)

It’s entirely possible to be 100% factually accurate while still presenting a slanted view of the world. The stories they choose to cover or not cover can paint a picture all on their own, not to mention which angles of which stories they focus on, which facts they choose to present in the first paragraph vs further down the article etc.

I’m not saying they (Reuters, NYT, WaPo) don’t do much better fact checking than most outlets but there’s still a wide gulf between “no outright falsehoods” and “truly unbiased coverage”.

I’m not entirely sure the latter even exists.

Of course, and I entirely agree. But that's not what the commenter I was responding to was complaining about -- they were complaining about large, big-picture inaccuracies occurring in most news articles.

And that just doesn't seem to be correct, by and large. But you're absolutely right that choosing what to cover and what to emphasize is a conscious choice, and that there is no such thing as neutrality there.

> Most of the news that appears via AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, etc. is largely factually accurate. Especially when you're looking at their core competencies of covering domestic US politics, basic foreign affairs, and domestic economics/business. E.g. they've been doing accurate jobs on factual reporting about the recent battles for house majority leader, events unfolding in Israel, and events unfolding in Ukraine. Sometimes you might be bothered with their "present both sides and don't take stance" but it's still largely factual, accurate reporting about what is happening and what public figures are saying.

Regardless of how “factually accurate”, selective reporting is no different than selective omission. The very nature of a finite space to print (or display on the front page in the digital age) means that there is always an angle.

Google News is an interesting one because they add a level of indirection. They pick the sources they’re willing to aggregate. It’ll never be all news everywhere. It can’t be anyway. There’s always going to be some editorialization, even in the selection of “factually accurate” information.

I'll admit I don't have any deep first-person familiarity with major political events. It's possible they're right about those things. Maybe my point doesn't generalize.

But I do have deep familiarity with other topics that are of similar impact and complexity, and the gaping holes in the writers' understanding of the topics in the articles on these topics are so gigantic you could drive trucks through them. I'm not talking about nuanced issues. These are big-picture mistakes.

It's certainly possible that they're only wrong about the topics I understand. Maybe they really are right about everything else.

It just seems extremely unlikely.

What are the topics that you are a knowledgable of that major outlets get wrong all the time?

It would make make sense that reporters get political news right more than more niche topics - that’s most of what they report on, it’s most of what they read, and something politically adjacent is probably the most common major for a journalist besides journalism itself.

Anything else and the reporter is likely straying a bit out of their wheelhouse. Eg if they’re reporting on a scientific discovery they go to one of a handful of their reporters with scientific backgrounds, who may not have studied the specific field in question, and gets reviewed by even more removed editors. Compare that to political news where everyone in the chain is very much family with the broad subject matter.

> It would make make sense that reporters get political news right more than more niche topics - that’s most of what they report on

Except for specifically political reporters, no, its mostly not. OTOH, for TV, network anchors seem to generally have spent some time on a political beat.

> it’s most of what they read,

Where do you get this?

> and something politically adjacent is probably the most common major for a journalist besides journalism itself.

In the US, ISTR that the top 3 majors for journalists, and the only ones above a 10% share, are, in order, Journalism, Communication, and English. Even if Poli Sci is next after that (and I think it is), its a really small share of reporters.

Years of experience crafting he-said/she-said dueling press statements from politicians and other government officials and interested lobbying groups into narratives doesn't equate to understanding of politics or government.

I agree with your analysis. I think news is generally accurately reported. I agree there can be some slant and distortion in the telling, and in my opinion it calls for response; I love efforts like alas shuttered Newstrition that would display a news nutrition label, with things like a "spin" factor. I think there are layers we can and should be getting better at to temper ourselves as consumers. https://ijnet.org/en/story/newstrition-labels-aim-help-reade...

However, the bulk of the parents argument wasn't about the veracity of the news, albeit your quote did show a strong dig from the parent. The parent was chiefly arguing that being aware of the world seems to be a bad thing, and that globally we would be better people by not being aware at all of the world. No matter what the news looked like, the parent argued, we shouldn't read it.

It feels like some crazy dark world shit to me. I can't imagine a return to the darkness, to being unaware of each other & the happenings of this planet. It's a burden, yes, and I think there's a ton to recommend about finding balance where local matters and our own lives aren't so entirely outshadowed or even sandblasted away by the enormity of the acts unfolding upon the global stage. But I just think of ignorant easy to manipulate peasants & awful fuedal systems, when we can't or won't consider the setting & events of this planet.

We are a better species for this noospheric connection we have, and rather than fret about whether we should go back, I'd like to figure out how to progress forwards, like to figure out how we can do it better.

Parent here. I don't think I said we would be better off with no awareness of the broader world. I said we would be better off without Google News and the kind of megacorp news networks it features. I also said that our awareness of issues we can actually affect should outweigh our awareness of things we can't.

If you know ten of your neighbors by name, you're in a vanishingly small minority in much of the Western world today. I would happily take a bet saying no one in this thread can name ten of their neighbors, what they do for work, and two things those people care about, without counting more than two from the same household.

That is "some crazy dark world shit" to me. People don't know the people who spend half their lives within a mile of them, and yet they can spout of random information about dozens celebrities or conflicts or politicians thousands of miles away.

Humanity is weaker because of this. Only when we can do this better can we afford to try to extend our awareness.

> they've been doing accurate jobs on factual reporting about ... events unfolding in Israel

Well no. Just a few days ago most of them ran a story as front-page news that turned out not to have happened. Hell, a lot of them even seem to have Google image-searched for "bombed-out hospital" to get an accompanying photo, again of something they can't possibly have verified first-hand because 16 hours later the evidence came out that the hospital hadn't been bombed at all.

If you read the New York Times article in question you’d see they didn’t actually get the facts on the ground wrong.

They reported that a Palestinian official claimed that Israel bombed a hospital. This report was factually correct, but the claim was a lie.

It was bad journalism for other reasons - the headline didn’t emphasise the uncertainty, and it wasn’t wise to publish the official’s claim when they knew so little about the facts on the ground. But they said nothing factually incorrect.

They made no claim themselves about what Israel did, and the official said what they said he said.

Absolutely agree. One thing that has only recently occurred to me is also this stuff showing up by default in new browser windows/tabs. I’ve used about:blank as my default page for probably 25 years or more, and that is probably my first configuration change on any new profile, so I don’t normally think about it, but the normies who don’t configure anything are exposed to this crap every day on their work computers. And of course the “top story” is always political clickbait for engagement and eyeballs. This cannot possibly be good or healthy.

> I think that's what leads people to feel powerless and to live in fear. It leads to this "victimer than thou" culture where people act like (and largely feel like) their only hope for surviving something difficult that might happen in their own lives would be to get enough sympathy from a large enough audience that people would actually help.

That's because of decades of "small/lean state" preachers. Be it the UK's NHS, Germany's unemployment/social security scheme, or the US healthcare/social security/pension systems, it's the same: people don't have a safety net to fallback on, other than (for some) family. They're fighting for financial or literal survival every day - just look how many people are living paycheck to paycheck, and our collective governments are doing nothing to help the 99%. No wonder the populist far-right is in an upswing.

I think you have it almost exactly backward. I think it's because of decades of "daddy state" preachers telling people the government should provide the safety net people fall back on.

The overwhelming majority of things that actually happen in your life could be solved by a close network of 100 or fewer family members and neighbors who helped each other out.

Someone gets sick or becomes disabled, someone loses a job, a car breaks down, a house burns down, the road cracks, a store has trouble making ends meet--these things do not need national governments taxing every single resident of the country to solve them.

It's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. There certainly are exceptions. When a dictator sends an army to bomb your whole town, your neighborhood isn't going to be able to fix that.

But the overwhelming majority of things people consider "problems" could be solved by a community of 100 or fewer people who actually know each other, care about each other's lives, and are willing to work together.

> The overwhelming majority of things that actually happen in your life could be solved by a close network of 100 or fewer family members and neighbors who helped each other out.

Housing and healthcare should be human rights, available to everyone, backed by the government, without being dependent on their family or their "near community".

Imagine you're gay or trans, you live in a rural area and your family is Evangelical Christian. In a country with a strong government, you can be assured that you'll be taken care of with your basic needs. In a country that follows your ideals, you better do your best to conform to societal pressure, get a trophy wife and hide who you truly are all your life.

Which environment sounds better to you? To me the answer is clear: the one with a strong government that guarantees everyone's right to live like they wish.

You say that unironically, as though there aren't "strong governments" in the world that behead gay and trans people, or even just women who have been victims of rape.

You can have a meaningful impact on a community. It'll take time and effort, but you can actually have an impact. You can be the one who welcomes the rejected, who opens your house to the down and out, who shows people that love isn't something to fear.

You can't affect your national government. If you get exceptionally lucky, you might be able to get sucked up by some political party as their knighted figurehead, but that only happens because you happen to agree with their agenda, not because you're the individual agent of change.

I will gladly take the community of people who actually know each other and solve their problems together over the "strong government" every single day of the week and twice on Sundays.

It’s not the news itself at fault, it’s how sensationalized and emotionally triggering everything is designed to be from the story selection to the editorial control over titles. Everything is framed to generate either outrage or my-team-won fuzzies.

I follow current events by reading the wikipedia current events portal [1] so I can stay informed without all the manipulation. It’s a completely different experience from the newsmedia: biases are still aplenty but they’re downright quaint when stacked against commercial incentives.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Even the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, says the site is full of propaganda. I'd look into the sources on those current event pages, its likely the same sensationalized publications you mentioned.

related: The Gell-Mann amnesia effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

I agree entirely, I used to pay attention to the news, in part because I wanted to be knowledgable, and I guess the premise was growing up I'd eventually be part of a leadership class that would need to make big decisions based on that knowledge...but I'm frankly just a laborer, and being ignorant of the larger world is a totally reasonable and healthy position to take.

The alternative seems to be to become an absolute news junkie which means a politics junkie which means a useful idiot arguing online with other useful idiots for some political movement I have no control or power over.

>being ignorant of the larger world is a totally reasonable and healthy position to take.

Reasonable yes, healthy I'd debate. More importantly, if you prefer to have something of focus it would local politics, your mayor and representatives. It is often said that what happens here is more impactful on your life than what happens in national or international news. You can participate whether a new library or infrastructure is built, zoning laws, etc.

You won't see this anyway on your newsfeed so it might suit you.

I imagine it is healthy.

I think of my mom and brother for instance, versus my dad and other brother - my dad and other brother are blissfully ignorant.

My mom and younger brother get worked up over things they see in the news daily that don't affect them at all.

I'd wager that stress, depression, and anxiety levels are all higher for people like my mom and younger brother than for the former.

I wonder how much of this is the incentives effect of who wants to be a journalist. Big 3-letter national media org Journalism requires you to live in a HCOL city while accepting miserable pay at the start. Yet there are enough people interested in the field that it also requires a prestigious elite college degree, and possibly doing some unpaid internships in college.

In my observation in NYC being surrounded by some of these people, it attracts A LOT of nepobabies. Even some of the famous newscasters you watched as a kid fall into this category. They, as a group, have largely chosen power over money.. but only partially because they do come from enough money to make that choice. Tons of overlap between the industry & working on political campaigns / in government admins.

Who else can afford to go to Harvard, work summers for free, then move to Manhattan for a $40k salary in a flat to declining industry? Who else has the parental backstop to choose to make 1/3rd their potential income given the school they got a degree from? It's kind of a fun game looking up random people in the industry on wikipedia and observing how many have 1 or 2 parents who have their own wikipedia pages (A LOT).

Even guys I deeply respected at some point like Michael Lewis, who started in the industry and knew it well.. eventually get so out of touch that their writing starts to exhibit the Gell-Mann effect.

Michael Lewis famously started on Wall Street, not journalism.

Yes, I should have pointed out WHICH industry in my digression "who started in the industry".. I was trying to make the point that even one of the good journalists eventually falling into the same trap.

Thank you for this! That's exactly the effect! I just didn't know anybody had associated it with a famous name!

Google news is a mess and doesn't work. Perhaps if you had all the requisite subscriptions. As of right now, it seems to direct you to a family of many publishers with separate plans.

This makes google news itself pretty hard to use. I think complaining about "paywalls" in general is stupid, but it's really hard for the news reader this way.

Part of the problem for me, is it seems like it's still very hard to get away from the web 2.0 part of news anyway. Is subscribing going to reduce the clickbait journalism? Nope.

I have apple news, and the quality of what I see isn't exactly encouraging me to go out and buy more subs. I will probably still get shotty, rage inducing content, just like I get on reddit.

By the way this same pattern seems to hold with local stations. In fact local publishers more pay walled, for important local stories. I think you could argue these are the subs I should pay for the most.

Do you click the rage bait content, read it, and don't tell the recommender system to not show you things like that in the future?

Because everything in my Google News is about my interests:

- article about cmake from kitware

- article about AI alignment from lesswrong

- article physicists creating a new form of antenna from phys.org

- article about benchmarking rpi5 from rpi.org

- travel ad to Casa Batlo as I've just been to Spain

...

I can keep scrolling and it's all articles from quality orgs on content related to my interests, without having subscribed to anything, and I get zero flame or bait content.

You need to tell the recommender system you're not interested in bait content by "showing less" instead of clicking on them.

I have to wonder if I am just having a disability exploited. I think I really have trouble avoiding these ragebate stories. It's just too tempting to get in, get a rage fix and move on.