The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
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chuck.is
There were also stories I was directed away from because they would alienate our audience.
It's a narrative business.
The worst thing is watching everyone around me, even very intelligent people, get so angry over a space that is so heavily fabricated, optimised even for that very same outrage.
Non-profits give away billions and billions for non-economic reasons, they'd probably fund these loss making news outlets, and they indeed fund many non-economic advocacy organizations because they help them change the widely believed narratives to support their respective missions.
Nonsense example. Carlson was the figurehead for a narrative that cost Murdoch $800 million in defamation.
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/26/tucker-carlson...
He was a commentator when he was on CNN as well. He has never been a news anchor.
I would swear as well in court Fox News claimed he was an 'entertainer' at some point.
Excessive cynicism is a real danger too. Democracies rely on an informed electorate to guide decisions. If you throw up your hands and say the truth is unknowable so nothing matters anyway, you're giving into autocracy. There absolutely are forces that would like you to give up on the notion of being able to tell truth from falsehoods.
You may not know absolute truth for absolute certainty, but if you live in a democratic society and you'd like to keep it that way, you really ought to make an attempt to know what's going on.
I would like us to strive for better, not keep it the way it is now.
You could spend every waking hour reading news, it wouldn't improve your or anyone else's life much, and it definitely wouldn't be better than putting that effort into a whole lot of other things.
You care for democracy and politics? Excellent. Get involved in your local politics. won't take one tenth of the time and will pay off orders of magnitude more than reading stuff constantly.
When several news organizations follow the same narrative in a coordinated manner, is it because their editors just advertently sense "the party line"? Or the are some meetings where they are instructed? Or some written instructions distributed among them?
In Russian and Ukrainian practice I heard the term "themnik" - brief written instructions of how to present various themes.
Given that in the early post-soviet times, when this started, they all hired and learned from western (mostly american) political technologists, maybe this practice came from the west?
Have you ever saw or heard of such instructive, narrative establishing docs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent?useskin=...
I am just curious about specific details or material artifacts of the media narrative control.
Herman and Chomskiy, as I understand, describe more conceptual model, that media orgs depend on their owners, on advertizers, etc, and thus influenced or biased.
But how does it work, if reallly present?
Pure self-censorship when people don't want to harm the interests of those who they depend on? This alone may not be enough, because requires clear understanding of the interests, which may not always be transparent.
Personnel policy, when only people with right beliefs are hired? May be not flexible enough, if the narrative needs to be changed quickly.
> When several news organizations follow the same narrative in a coordinated manner, is it because their editors just advertently sense "the party line"? Or the are some meetings where they are instructed? Or some written instructions distributed among them?
In the US, I think it's mostly due to shared individual biases causing the organizations to coalesce around a "party line." IIRC, a large majority of journalists have personal beliefs that are for one party and against the other, and even a very strong sense of professionalism can't fully neutralize bias like that.
I think it's important to read news with that in mind, but almost treat it as game of spotting and anticipating the way things will be twisted to fit the narrative. It's helpful to familiarize oneself with concepts such as "burying the lede," and read some snarky media criticism from a perspective that cuts against the typical bias of the mainstream media.
Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
Cable news is the junk food, and TDS showed it to be so bad that even a parody news show could do a better job of informing people, a point made very often by the host. Using it as an example of junk news is missing the point by a rather wide margin.
> Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
It's all coming from the same six companies, as per the article. It all has a lot of the same messaging - trust the police, the good guys always win, torture is bad but if you have a good reason it's ok, Islam is super scary yo, capitalism is cool actually, being too smart isn't cool, and leave the status quo the fuck alone or get Avengered.
... Turn your brain off at your peril. Junk food can kill. If you really feel the need to watch absolute garbage and ignore the news, you probably need to work less and/or sleep more.
This comment only makes sense if you're trying to imply the Daily Show increases how informed people are.
It seems plausible that causation runs the other way: more informed people are more likely to watch the Daily Show, because then they get all the jokes.
It's the same political culture of preaching to the already converted and mostly shouting about how bad the other side is. No attempts at persuasion.
I sometimes wonder if people who compare things like the daily show or John Oliver to Fox News have watched Fox News at all in the last 15 years or so.
And TDS is not a great example of that, because from the start it was an explicitly self-aware reaction to the awfulness of corporate news.
As a result of this thread I looked into the first US newspaper and discovered it was shut down after one issue because they printed something a governor didn't like, lol. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publick_Occurrences_Both_Forre...
There was a great documentary where a lot of the politicians who were satirized on it explained how much they loved and loathed their portrayals which often affected their prospects: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xiafmh
https://firstamendmentmuseum.org/exhibits/virtual-exhibits/a...
This is where preferences meet reality. How do you influence the world to work the way you want it to?
What's the best way to become informed about a topic? Or, is it better to stay ignorant?
If that question exist, the answer is: be ignorant. If you are involved into the topic, you will be pretty informed. So the question is: should you be involved into the topic in he first place. If true, you go to the Uni, join NGO, join related job or research program and get informed pretty quickly, otherwise it's not worthy. Besides, with contemporary media all you can hope for is getting misinformed.
There are basically 3 grades of reporting - trashy lies, very biased and informative. Misreporting what people actually said is a strong tell of the first two - which can still be fun to read but ultimately they're trying to sell you on something that is probably against your interests.
For "biased" rather than outright lies, I think the two most common easily observable techniques I see are:
- Quoting known unreliable sources: "Black people eat human babies! (say KKK leadership)"
- Using passive and active voices to shift blame: "Police shoot and kill bystander during drug bust" vs. "Shots fired during drug bust fatally injured potentially uninvolved man"
"Between the years 1939 and 1945 more than 6,000,000 Jews died amid a global surge of fatal diseases." is roughly the level of factual accuracy in that specific episode.
In general, I think even without familiarity of the topics discussed it is easy to see how in every episode John Oliver cherry-picks statistics, presents the opinions of individuals as facts or as widely held opinions and slathers the whole show in adjectives so you know exactly what is the correct opinion you are supposed to hold.
I quite enjoy the show as entertainment, but I would not turn to it as a source of truth or to become better informed about a topic.
I think its success can be attributed to how it presents things that are often inherently worrying, controversial or critical. By partially presenting it in a funny way, it's easier to digest.
The reports typically present verifiable sources and quotes - at least in part. But I don't think he is suggesting that he's the arbiter of unbiased truth. There are clear biases, exaggerations and so on. What they choose to cover is also impacted by these biases.
Given all that, it seems more honest and authentic rather than less.
Compare that to (non-satirical) news media that _does_ act as if it's objectively truthful (except for example if pressed in court). Where claims are made _without_ verifiable sources but via punditry and half-truths.
Read disparate sources knowing they each have their political biases. That is - explicitly read some right (or left) wing news you don't like as a check & balance on the flavor of news you do like to read.
Understand the difference between the news & editorial side of papers.
I would also note that "business news" (WSJ/Bloomberg/etc) tend to be more just-the-facts than your median WaPo/NYT/Fox/MSNBC/NYPost/LAT.
- News needs to be verifiable. Direct links to data sources.
- News need to have history of modifications to their article.
- Factual errors will cause dings to their score.
- Revenue sources/tax forms need to be public to find conflicts of interest.
If a news site wants to sell it's soul to make ad money, that's fine, but I want to see some sort of "F" rating on that site. There's no incentive for news sites to make good news right now.
Edit: Or, linking to this article: a sort of "nutrition facts" label for news
For such a thing to work, it needs to be funded. At the end, it doesn't matter if it comes from public or private hands, it's going to be leaning towards one direction or another, then a group of people will consider it the absolute truth and other group of people will create their own site for "fact-checking".
If humans cannot possibly be objective and independent (yes, that's what I believe after 30+ years in this planet and having met multiple people), then news cannot possibly be. Bearing in mind such a limitation, let's think how this can be possibly improved.
I personally gave up on news being informative and just see it as entertainment - it's a narrative business.
For example, with fact checking, some fact checking is easy. Eg if an article says "the unemployment rate last year was X%". You have to do some research to determine what measure of unemployment they're using, but boom, you can say it is factually incorrect if no measure lists that number. This process is even easier if it's linked to the data source. These are likely the only types of facts that can be checked. This is limiting, but at least it creates some sort of check on what feels like a runaway industry.
Statements like "he was the best president since X" is an unverifiable statement. "best" isn't qualified. An article with a statement like this should immediately be dinged. And it's fine to have a site that makes statements like this! But just not a news site.
Things like bias or swing are not really possible to do as part of this. This is mostly trying to make it matter when news sites drop their standards.
So I doubt people are coming to a news site to read a one-liner with some statistic, they want more development, perhaps adding some opinions in between, comparing it with previous governments, whatever.
But yeah, there's not much business in a "news site" that'd just copy-paste statistics.
The graph is entirely incorrect and contradicts the numbers in the paragraph just before it. And good luck finding the source for that statistic I spent half an hour trying to! And all the discussion about this article online was incredibly confused since people were drawing the wrong conclusions from the graph.
I think this journalist and this newspaper should be dinged when errors like this are made. (And also dinged since it hasn't been corrected months after the article was published).
This is just one of many checks that help differentiate lower quality news from higher quality news.
What if we were to try?
Humans also could not run a 4-minute mile, or build a machine that can fly.
One person doing something and that something being the norm are wildly different asks.
But then look at all we've achieved, and sometimes all it takes is one or two people to try and a new movement is catalyzed, gaining steam over time.
Optimism can also be helpful.
1. Bias is not all or nothing.
2. There is a large degree of commonality about baseline ethics and quality of life. Polarization accentuates wedge issues disproportionately.
3. There are classes of statements which can be factually assessed.
4. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. A step in the right direction combined with other forces can make a positive difference.
This comment section, in this smarter than usual community, is chock full of lazy, heuristic thinking. We can't even try to not make errors on certain/most subjects, it is our nature, suggesting we do not is socially punished.
This approach may work well for reporting that deals with data and science, things that can be incontrovertibly proven, which counts for a lot. But I think that same approach might fall apart when applied to reporting on complex social and political issues.
Then again, the camera has been a technical solution to the same social problem to some extent. Vietnam was a culture shock for a lot of Americans because they could see real firsthand footage of the events for a change, and that increase in awareness through reporting caused a social reckoning. So maybe its just a question of visibility, seeing is believing
I think it would be a good thing if people were introduced to the concept of the unknown, and learned for the first time in their life to be able to reliably identify it.
And it wouldn't be journalists doing this work, this would have to be an entirely new job role, blending skills from several disciplines (philosophy, psychology, geopolitics, etc).
People watching Fox News all day can't possibly think that it's a picture of reality, unless they use their intuition and rational systems in exactly the opposite sense that you are doing here (and this system of ratings would serve). People are not interested in more information, they are interested in the right information. Information that's belief affirming.
These individuals are using their "survival mode" default setting of understanding reality, not the scientific, rational, system 2 type thinking you're using here.
They feel like they're constantly under attack, so they join a system-world where constantly being under attack is validated for them.
There's no overlap between "let's give people more information" and fixing the actual problem. The actual problem isn't lack of information, but the overwhelming lack of emotional balancing and maturity to take in information you don't like.
The destruction of the newspaper and the "liberty of information" of the internet is now compressed through information warfare, or as Steve Bannon puts it "flooding the zone with shit".
You flood the main channels (social media now) with disinformation and misinformation, or even information calculated to create as much anger as possible (Cambridge Analytica knew that making people angry was the easiest way to make them change their minds). You use bot networks and sockpuppets to spread it.
Through that you get the same overall effects as when newspapers were a thing - even with "unlimited" channels, they're all showing what you want them to show. You flooded the zone with what you want people to see, and you made it so that it follows the response that the algorithm will propagate it even more (sharing, liking).
Overall the effect is the same. And for the same reason. Those controlling the information want to control leadership, leadership choices, and leadership selection. That's the target.
This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is why Bob Mercer bought Cambridge Analytica (an information warfare firm that was doing counter terrorism work for NATO) and put Steve Bannon in charge. Influencing elections.
But blaming the consequences on the capacity of random people to decide for themselves is a completely wicked and wrong conclusion to take from it.
It has a noticeable, immediate effect.
Accuracy ratings for news would just make people say your rating is biased, I think.
(a recent example: a lot of places had to issue apologies and corrections over Imane Khalif due to quoting disreputable sources at face value)
While the lean of an article is not a measure of factual errors. It at least is a move in the right direction. Maybe one day they will include a nutrition facts.
The other problem I see is who does the fact checking? That cannot be cheap.
I think I’d be willing to go further. Purely from an economic perspective, there are negative externalities that result from poor quality news organizations. Current market mechanisms seem to reward polarization.
So what do we do?
A common response is: let’s educate people to pay more attention to their critical thinking and media diet. This can work if people change habits to align with higher level thinking. With more high-quality aggregation options, the easier this gets for individuals.
An uncommon response (that would attract the ire of many) would be to impose economic penalties on the organizations that correspond to their negative externalities. Perhaps tax them like cigarettes. It is hard to think of targeted policy interventions that don’t have all sorts of loopholes.
In broad strokes, perhaps the best solutions I know about at present are carrots. Spend generously on high-quality news organizations.
(This is just a first draft and could stand a lot of improvement.)
How much do you personally spend subscribing to independent journalism? There are great outlets and journalists closing down and moving on every day, because when push comes to shove, people don't want to pay a dollar to read important news that they care about, even in their own communities.
You can't produce a system where the EPA gets its funding from the amount of pollution it stops for example. That's a perverse incentive. These types of organizations are by definition cost centers. And must be treated as such.
If news sources were publicly funded like schools, that compromises the very important news function of reporting on the government.
Not necessarily. In Sweden the public service system has independent right to basically tax the population. So it's not the government paying the news, it's the news taxing the country directly. I'm not saying that doesn't have its own issue, of course it does, but it's a smart tradeoff I think.
New has always been a business. The 1st amendment to the U.S. Constitution was put in place precisely to prevent government from controlling the press.
I think, like the junk food analogy implies, it's up to the end consumer to decide what to purchase. Yes, there are psychological and neurological factors at play... sugar is addicting, and there is a dopamine hit in anticipating what's behind the click-bait... but if enough individuals realize there are better things to eat and better information to consume, these business peddling junk would go out of business.
Or, another possible solution, while I'm spitballing... ban paid advertising in some ways. Let local community advertising by local business through, by all means, but ban ads to consumers by conglomerates who operate outside of some radius?
(Corrected typo.)
The reduction of direct state/party influence (2014) has also achieved little.
Disclosure: I learnt to write an inverted pyramid in j-school but dropped out after a year, I didn't want to work in this industry. Also maybe I just wouldn't have been a good journalist.
An interesting book on this subject is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, it's where the term "Churnalism" was coined.
I mean, go back and read some random New York Times issues from the 1950s and you'll see the same thing.
The simple reality is that there is not enough happening every day that is relevant to our lives that people actually need to pay attention to.
If you're not actually making some change your life, your diet, your finances... SOMETHING...then the news is just entertainment same as watching a Sunday morning cartoon.
I've got to really disagree and I can provide proof.
This is The New York Times, today: https://www.nytimes.com/
This is The New York Times, May 3rd, 2001: http://web.archive.org/web/20010503145505/https://www.nytime...
This is The Washington Post, today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/
This is The Washington Post, October 3rd, 2001: http://web.archive.org/web/20011003085017/http://www.washing...
The difference in style of writing, specifically headlines, is more than noticeable.
Who cares that Snyder backs his coach? What are you going to do with that information? Who cares that Hollywood holds in breath? How do you change your life based on that?
(From your Oct 3 2001 link.)
No amount of "less clickbait headline" will fix the fundamental pointlessness of those articles to anyone's family, career, or daily life.
After all, the earliest sources of "Journalism" were not much more than PR rags for the local lord. "Yellow Journalism", is over a century old. There is an amount of romanticism for the era around Watergate, and the Fairness Doctrine though which a lot of people harken to for "the good old days"
However I think the situation has gotten incredibly worse for journalism in general because of there simply not being the money in it any more. Journalists are must produce more for less, quality slips even further, the attention economy becomes even more acute (although that aspect was always there to a degree in the tabloid news)
For example, multiple studies have shown that in communities that aren't addressed by a robust local news outlet, local corruption goes up. Having a good newsroom _does_ improve an understanding of what your representatives are up to, and a lack of information _does_ allow them to get up to more behind our backs.
I think the biggest failure of this piece is to make all news equivalent. Yes, cable news is junk; yes, many of the corporate newsrooms that churn out hundreds of articles a day are junk. They use engagement as a metric for success rather than finding ways to align themselves with impact and creating an informed, empowered electorate. That last thing - an informed, empowered electorate - is what it's all about.
Real journalism that is diligently undertaken in the public interest does make a real difference. (Should we know whether Clarence Thomas was taking corrupt bribes? Yes. Should we know how climate change is progressing? Yes. Should we know if the police are killing innocent people? Yes. Should we know that the police at the Uvalde school shooting hung around for over an hour doing nothing? Yes.) Telling people not to pay attention to the world around them results in an electorate who cannot meaningfully vote on real issues.
For those of us who build software, we need to know the factors that impact the lives of the people we're serving. We need to know the trends in the marketplaces and communities where we show up. The news is good for that, too.
Turn off cable news; pay more attention to non-profit news; go for long-form written journalism. Stay informed.
It's absolutely true that we take a psychic hit for doing so. I'd say that's more to do with the world than it is the media overall. Perhaps we should spend more time trying to make it better?
Seeing the latest tragedies on the other side of the world catches headlines, but rarely actionable by regular people.
Should we give aid to other countries? How should we think about global society? Those things are all relevant, too.
Once can form an opinion by catching up on major events once a week or less.
I have been actively trying to build something to get away from the endless feeds of news.
Essentially a modern day newspaper. So you can read what is important and then be done for the day.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131
I am using LLMs for what I am building and i'm envisioning a system that understands what you read yesterday so its able to give you more concise and direct information.
I also enjoy the completeness of a set amount of stories.
Very well executed app. I have lots of questions about how it even works.
However, every unread tab I close feels like a personal failure to keep up.
I can see the value of news articles and short videos like those from Fireship: It might be educational and/or entertaining, but if not, it hasn't been a serious time investment, so it doesn't matter anyway.
I used to think so about books... but after some thought... why?
If you still read enough articles/books/whatever (so it's not your attention span failing), and if the article/book wasn't "good enough" to keep you reading it, why does it matter if you didn't finish it? There are many more articles and books than you are able to read, keep with the 'good ones' and forget about the rest.
One interesting idea I have been toying with is to use prediction markets as a filter. Like, ask myself if I can make a prediction based on this. Then go to a prediction market and actually put a bet on a prediction. Either find one which already exists, or make one. What I have found interesting is how the situation develops into me being wrong. And how hard it is to get above zero. If I can't gain by making predictions on a situation I'm somewhat interested in, then how might being in the red on less informed topics be messing with my thinking?
Probably not realistic, but I have been thinking about how I could make it work.
Follow the money.
I used to be a huge news junky. After a while I realized it's all designed as entertainment to drive ad revenue. Gave it up and I've been happier ever since.
Nowadays I prefer silence during breakfast.
I cut out news (except here) about three years ago. My life has not changed, except that I'm not pissed off as much. Turns out all that the 24 hour news cycle really doesn't teach you very much.
There's a radio show in the mornings in my country that I call "the hour of indignation". A "news" presenter rants on for many minutes about something that is very wrong with the nation. There's another one later in the day, so I think this radio station has a lot of success making people mad.
I know a fair number of people who post fascinating things, but also retweet a lot of news and politics I don't want.
People I know who do consume news interestingly only bother telling me about super shocking stuff that I don't need to know, e.g. "someone got murdered", "a celebrity said so and so" etc. They rarely tell me stuff I might need to know like "income tax is changing next year".
I built attabit.com to summarize the news for friends, family, and myself to remove as much sensationalism, bias, and 'junk food' as possible.
The site has been having all kinds of problems today with the claude 3.5 sonnet outage but outside of that, its become the main news source of high level news for me and a lot of my friends and family.
It lets you know what's happening without getting sucked into it. If you check it out, let me know what you think?
Want to catch up on Olympic event medal status for my home country? Sub to the email newsletter.
Want to follow politics in your state? Sub to the email newsletter at local and state orgs.
Want to follow updates in tech industry in general or a specific subfield (ie, nanotechnology, or the latest hype?). Sub to the email newsletter.
With this method, I can choose when to catch up on these topics. Sure, I might be 1-2 days out of sync compared to the news junkie. But with this method I can at least guarantee a variety of sources come out and get a much better view of the issue. Rather than the often sensationalized version presented at _real time_.
One very hilarious instance of where real time junkies got it very wrong: JD Vance, the VP choice for GOP, was allegedly sexually involved with a couch. Original author of post cited a random page in JD Vance’s autobiography in tweet. What was clearly supposed to be a joke, but turned very viral.
“Influencers”, comedians, and I think even some mainstream news outlets ran with it.
I don’t recall _when_ it was debunked, but had to have been within 24 hours of that tweet.
Is there something better out there?
Apple News does offline reading FWIW.
What do those and the Economist have in common? They're oriented at business users who are using the news to make decisions on, not to maintain their sense of identity, stoke their rage, or share on Facebook.
It seems like for every human desire or appetite or source of value, there exists a quick hit, instantly gratifying satisfaction that is bad for long-term health. And there also exists a slowly-acquired, initially difficult or unpleasant, eventually-rewarding satisfaction that is good for long-term health.
Wouldn't a healthy society encourage its members to pursue the more stable, initially uncomfortable, initially difficult, but long-term good option on as many axes as possible?
We should seek out and eat nutritious, wholesome food rather than eat junk food non-stop every day. We should read books and articles rather than consume infotainment and social media. We should go to the gym rather than sitting on the couch and doing nothing. We should commit to real relationships instead of participating in infinite hookup culture. We should find real social circles to belong to and become loyal to them instead of embracing abstract political tribalism that tickles the "belonging" nerve but leaves us with no one who personally knows or cares about us when we're in actual need. We should buy things when we need them and when they're a good value rather than spending impulsively as a therapeutic exercise. The list goes on and on.
I'm concerned that the currently-most-common set of societal norms across pretty much every Western culture I'm aware of seems to encourage the opposite of all that. And I think it's gotten that way, not least at any rate, because sad, scared, addicted, unhappy, immature, overstimulated, overmedicated, physically and spiritually unhealthy humans are simply easier for corporations to make money off of than the alternative. Which suggests that this situation didn't just happen by accident—there's pressure coming from influential people and groups to make it this way. And that means there's systemic resistance to be expected when trying to swim against that current, whether for oneself or, for e.g., for one's kids.
I don't know if you used an AI chatbot for this, but this is an often used starting point.
However, that does not mean that all journalism should be disregarded. I read the Washington Post and listen to NPR (regardless of how you feel about their cultural programming, their news organization is excellent.) Citizens in a free society have a duty to be informed about the issues facing that society. I reject the idea that there aren't readily available high quality sources of information about the world. Are any of them perfect? Clearly, no. But ignoring them because they're not perfect strikes me as nihilistic.
There's one quote from the article that alarmed me:
> The news is overwhelmingly about things you cannot possibly influence
In democracies, we do have elections...
>“The news (and social media use) is indicative of a poor information diet.”
When I was young my grandfather would listen to KCBS news radio in the morning and KTVU 10 o’clock news in the evening. That’s it. My dad read the local Argus newspaper. That’s it.
As a youth I didn’t, but the impression was made.
Now I listen to WNYC (NPR) radio in the morning when I get up. That’s it.
News doesn’t have to be what they offer—24/7/365–but a habit of keeping yourself informed about local, regional, national and world events. I prefer one dose in the morning (“should I go back to bed?”)
My opinion in reaction to an opinion piece.
Anyway, I feel like the human species has arrived at a time when we have the internet, without having a great way to deal with everyone's feelings.
Some news media orgs make junk food, some news media orgs make information poison - they make it harder to understand what is going on in the world.
"It's always in the last place you look" - if you already know how you FEEL about something, you don't have to think about it in information or factual terms at all. You don't have to keep looking.
When newspapers were the primary news consumption, it was a bit better - journalists had a few hours to collect facts before publishing. Now there's zero time so they will publish anything. Empty calories.
It does not even need to be a particular story. Experts in almost every field complain about how bad coverage of their field is, and you can extrapolate to coverage being bad in general. What Michael Crichton dubbed Gell_Mann amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
I would also add knowing a country that gets covered in the news but which is not important enough to be prominent (Sri Lanka in my case) also soon shows you the media are sloppy and make huge mistakes and write with little understanding.
The news has become like intellectual sugar, written more for page views than for merely informing, and I find that exceptionally irritating. Writing so-called "catchy headlines" and an overwhelming bias towards bad news has made me sick with all news organizations.
Of course, I am sure some people like it. Probably most. I am in the minority for most things, but I simply hate it.
Also, most of what you hear or read is just a reflection of who is spending money to get press. For example, Taylor Swift, AI companies and the Olympics all have a formula to turn press coverage into cash, so it should be no surprise that they are constantly in the news.
I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.
There's news on commercial channels as well but it's more aimed at entertainment, often has some lighter subjects and informal newsreaders, and of course ad breaks.
I didn't stop reading news, but I mostly stopped reading news that are not funded by the "Rundfunkbeitrag", because the funded news organizations are encouraged to be rather neutral and they don't use that much weird rhetoric. All the other private news companies are just trying to clickbait with stupid headlines.
OP said it's not a tax but it is the same. You have to pay it even if you don't use it and you go to jail if you don't want to pay. Doesn't matter how they are describing it, it's a pseudo-tax.
>the funded news organizations are encouraged to be rather neutral and they don't use that much weird rhetoric
Tagesschau is all but neutral and the tone of ZDF Heute is very aggressive. At least they are consistently bad and private newspapers are even worse so you know what you get. The state of news in Germany is sad but what do you expect when journalists side with politicians and favor more censorship?
That made me think a little. You are most likely right. Probably it doesn't bother me too much because it just fits into my world view. Maybe neutral is the wrong word here and I don't know which one fits better. Maybe it just feels good, because everyone else (like everything Springer) is so much worse. At least I don't have the feeling that they spread straight up lies or false propaganda. They might be politically biased though, you are right.
The fee instead of tax isn't to avoid political interference. It's for fee stability, without cuts whenever the budget is tight.
Politicians/the government meddle all the time. The governing body of the public broadcasters has about a third of its members from the government (the rest is the churches and certain social and political associations).
On the one hand, I agree that it’s necessary to be informed to some degree.
On the other, I think this can be done without consuming the news the way most people do, i.e. the daily dose and certainly the sensationalized stuff are not necessary.
I’ve stopped watching/reading the news on a daily basis, and instead I’ll catch up on the recent major events every week or two, sometimes less depending on the general temperature of things.
I value being informed, but also found that the majority of news changes nothing about my day to day actions, and of the news that does change my actions/help me make better decisions, it almost never needs to be consumed the instant it’s published.
Given the current landscape, personal habit change around news consumption seems like the ideal place to focus as an average person.
In the UK it does not improve the quality of available news very much.
> I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.
Bad information does not make for good decisions. Your argument is addressed by the article.
It is far better to read long analytical articles, and even more to read books, on the issues you wish to be informed about. A smaller number of works (i.e. books and articles) that give you real understanding, rather than a lot of superficial information that you will mostly not retrain.
Consuming lots of news, gives you a lot of information, but makes it harder retain, analyse and comprehend it.
I disagree, I don't think there's anything better than BBC news for junk food type news, an update on current affairs or the Olympics or something when you do want it.
Of course it's not hard analysis or thought-provoking opinion pieces, pay someone else directly if you want that.
But if someone mentions riots say and I just want to quickly read a couple of things for a high level understanding of what's going on, it's great.
In fact some of the issues may be caused by being too impartial and giving weight to opinions which many feel should be ignored.
Take the protests/riots example, I had no awareness of it whatsoever (I don't follow the news any more, just HN really), but I heard enough to be confused and want some idea. The potential political bias in whether it's described as racist/terrorism/peaceful/righteous doesn't really matter to me, I just wanted 'oh, people are angry about things in the vicinity of X, and there are riot police out'.
If I wanted more, yeah the likes of the BBC aren't going to give me deep nourishing (to continue the junk food analogy) insight, and I'd seek out a broadsheet, an insightful blogger, books on the subject, etc. But I don't, so I can instead move on.
Surely, one of the key points in TFA is that almost all news is about things we have no real influence over and are removed from effect on us to a large degree. Unless you are a stock-market trader, or there's news of an approaching storm I think most of us just succumb to "Oh Dearism" and chalk it up as "no action necessary" [0]
After writing my comment I thought about all the influencers and thought 'yeah maybe a good portion ain't really neutral'. It's a bit frustrating, but iirc their cut is something between 1 and 5 cents, right? Which still is too much money, but hey, could be worse than that.
Instead of doom scrolling news sites and social media for things that happen right now, you wait for some people to actually have time to investigate, synthesize, etc. There is just little to no actual information in the former way of consumption.
There is a good The Guardian article from back then.
“News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier” (2013
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
They are actually funding state propaganda. There are few news on public (and private) broadcasters.
If you trade individual stocks or other asset classes directly, finance news is pretty important.
Maybe staying on top of the field you personally work in. But that's probably best served by papers and long form articles in specialty blogs and web sites.
Other than that, how does "the news" help you make good decisions?
It's not fair to the taxpayer to have to pay for a broadcaster which is biased against you. Even Media Bias agrees that the BBC is left wing: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bbc/ .
State news organizations shouldn't exist because it's impossible to build a one which is unbiased. It will always be biased toward the establishment (which is center left in the UK but varies by country).
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Bed of Procrustes"
First the experts were confindent that the troop movements in Russia were just posturing and saber rattling, there's no way they'll do anything.
Next, once they'd entered Ukraine, it would be over in a few weeks. The Russians would win. When the Russians were getting their asses kicked and it looked really bad, the Ukrainians would win by the end of the summer. Next it would be over by the winter. Next the russians would run out of materiel soon. Next the russians would run out of men soon.
They confidently made every prediction except the multi-year trench war that actually ensued.
News would be accurately reporting on where the Russian troops were and what they were doing at that moment. News isn't supposed to include prediction. That's why Opinion sections were traditionally kept separate from the rest of the paper.
That being said I’m still looking for some good weekly news(papers) in English.
Would love some recommendations.
What happened?
In 1909, 1976, and 1998, Congress greatly expanded copyright. Instead, they should have done the opposite, and abolished it. It's mathematically dumb, and is the root cause of our toxic information environment.
I feel much better since I quit. I still end up hearing about things, through talking to people etc, and I will still read articles on stuff that was important enough to still be written about weeks after the event.
But daily news is just 99% not worth reading.
It's certainly jarring to hear major events like the assassination attempt from friends and family first, but it's very reminiscent of my experience before the rise of internet news.
1988- PROPAGANDA MODEL
https://chomsky.info/consent01/
//The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns. The domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.//
1989- MANUFACTURING CONSENT
https://chomsky.info/19890315/
//The fact of the matter is, Ronald Reagan had a hands-off policy. In fact, Ronald Reagan probably didn’t even know what the policies were. The fact of the matter is, for the last- I mean the media had to put on a big pretense about this, but most of the population knew, that for the last eight years the country hasn’t had a chief executive. I think that’s a step forward in manufacture of consent, and in fact it’s maybe a sign of the future of political democracy. I think the United States made a leap into the future in the last eight years. If you could get to the point where voting is simply a matter of selecting purely symbolic figures, then you would have gone a long way towards marginalizing the public. And that pretty well happened. You had somebody who probably didn’t know what the policies were. His job was to read the lines written for him by the rich- what he’s been doing for the last thirty or forty years. And he seems to enjoy it and he gets well paid for it, and everybody seems happy, but to vote for Ronald Reagan is like voting for the Queen of England.//
THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB IS YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB
//Let me return to the prediction of the propaganda model that I mentioned...//
//...However well confirmed it may be, it’s not going to be part of the discussion, it’s going to be outside the spectrum of discussion, it’s very validity guarantees that for the reasons that I mentioned. And that conclusion, again, is quite well confirmed, and one can assume with reasonable confidence that that will continue to be the case.//
2009- TWENTY YEARS LATER
https://chomsky.info/200911__/
// ... Ownership Advertising Sourcing Flak Anti-communism
EH/NC: What you refer to as the Propaganda Model’s ‘five filters’ requires some clarification. (a) Ownership and (b) advertising belong to straightforward institutional analysis — these are the kinds of institutional arrangements that predominate among US media firms and elsewhere. (c) Sourcing and (d) flak are two well-established processes to which any elite-serving media will adapt, whether we are talking about the elite US or British media or the elite media under Stalin and Hitler. On the other hand, (e) anti-communism, as a major theme of media production during the twentieth century, was reflective of the prevailing system of belief in the Western states, and has evolved with the collapse of the Soviet bloc since the first edition of Manufacturing Consent. In a crucial sense, and extending from the most minor comic books and cartoons all the way up to the highest academic discussions of the so-called Cold War (i.e. the system of propaganda known as the ‘Cold War’), anti-communism was a staple that provided content, narratives, heroes and villains. Since 1989, this staple has morphed into an array of substitutes. But the structural role that anti-communism and its successors have played, namely, the provision of an Enemy or the Face of Evil, remains as relevant as ever. //
So all together we have a theory of ownership and selection bias in news.
And the web is nothing if not a study of structures for attention-seeking by media.
Between agenda-setting and attention mgmt, what else do you need to understand about the structure of MSM news?
The obvious question is: what structure of news is required to further free and coherent public participation in policy?
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> Reducing my intake of what is essentially junk information has significantly reduced anxiety and worry in my day to day life, and has freed up more of my time to pursue other interests and deeper reading.
Confirmed.
> My view is that "the news" primarily exists to keep consumers entertained rather than keeping citizens informed, ...
No, it exists primarily for two reasons:
1) Making a financial profit.
2) Political control over citizens.
The entertainment and dopaminergic aspects of it are simply means to those ends.
> most commonly in the form of advertisements, but also in the form of news that's constantly competing for our attention
Advertisement and news are often indistinguishable.
> I think any news junkie reading this will immediately go on the defensive.
I'm a news junkie in recovery.
> In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore. The 24 hour news cycle is something to be ignored.
Harari is a very uninteresting journalist writing shallow and irrelevant books. And those borderline pun based sound bites are indicative of it. There is no meaningful "power" in knowing what to ignore.
> resulting in "alternate" sources of information being either absurd conspiracy theories or "takes" of mainstream news on social media.
I do not agree. "Alternate" sources are the only sources of some of the news I care about. Some are maybe overly conspiracy theoretical but our governments and industries are conspirative. Regular news sources are almost worthless beyond providing a very high-level idea about what happened.
> Stories themselves are often slanted to please advertisers and company shareholders.
Or governments. And that is in and of itself highly conspirative.
> a small number of companies control 90% of the media - not just "the news". That's 90% of what we read, watch, and listen to.
And that's why people flock to "alternative" media ...
> A common argument against cutting out the news is that "ignorance is bliss", suggesting that those who do not consume the news are ignorant.
Isn't that more an argument for ignorance with regard to news?
> Let that sink in.
And that's why even X is relevant here. Cause where else will I be informed about who was stabbed again by a refugee somewhere in Germany if not there - and this is something I _DO_ care about. But also one major reason why I refuse to further bother with it as I lack the power to change anything about it.
> Rather it makes one less informed of the world and distracts you from what's going on in your own physical life and your own neighborhood, while instilling a very negative view of the world that's divorced from reality.
Yes. There is only so much attention you can give and if you waste it on what happens in Israel, Westjordanland, Ukraine or Venezuela then you have no attention left to what happens with yourself, your family, your neighborhood, your town. But those are usually not as exciting.
> Information junkies often have the most extreme views (on both sides of the US political spectrum) with a strong "us vs them" mindset where "them"
That matches my personal experience. Reading about all the terrible things happening all day long will put you into a constant mode of alarm and panic for which you have to find a release.
> That said, what difference does it make if I hear about the story hours after it happens?
Several times I've been lusting for live news on some exciting event on Twitter - hitting the F5 like in a fever. Last example probably was the assassination attempt on Trump. This always wrecks my entire day. My attention is glued to this object of excitement and my dopamine is going through the roof numbing my motivation management for anything else.
> we are today and governments and corporations are still getting away with murder and exploitation.
Yes, because they'll just produce news which is going to divert the attention somewhere else if it gets too hot. And the usual news agencies (all of them) are catering to their advertisers and certain political parties.
> Who is more ignorant of the world ... ?
I don't care about whether someone maybe considers me ignorant. The author shouldn't worry about that either. I care about my time and especially my mental health.
> Sharing your outrage of said article on social media makes it feel like you're doing something; that you're taking action, that you're doing gods work by spreading the word and keeping others informed of what's really going on.
Noticed this as well. But then again many of such people also search for ways to do something practical like going on demonstrations.
> ... but it leads us to make probabilistic errors with actual risks we face in real life.
Yes, but for many people school-shootings are not just exciting out of personal fear but also due to human compassion and empathy. For example my risk of getting stabbed by some crazy guy is negligible but I'm sick of reading about it, knowing somebody lost their life because we failed to deport someone who was a criminal long before.
> The truth is that we're far more likely to die in an auto accident or heart disease than we are from being shot or dying in a plane crash ...
Yes, but it's not like the former two examples aren't also used to feed people news. The entire Corona panic was based on a minimally raised risk of dying from it. And in some countries reporting on car crashes and other fatalities by displaying all the gory details is a relevant news segment.
> I'm not advocating a nihilistic worldview and if you think I'm being too cynical, I actually believe I'm being optimistic.
I'd advocate realism and fatalism. Nihilism is nonsense as life is valuable and all nihilists share this perspective while hiding it behind a mask of indifference. And cynicism is often simply a symptom of chronic depression - which isn't desirable either.
> Do you want news reporters setting the public agenda for what's important?
Well, they don't ... politicians and billionaires set the agenda.
===
I'm powerless with regard to each and everything that makes the news. So, why bother if all it does is consume time and make me miserable. That's my perspective.
Having said that ... I would prefer to have one reliable news source which I can consume for one hour once a week. That would be fantastic. But I just don't trust any newspaper anymore.