I completely disagree with Aaron, but I respect his opinion. Reading the news is incredibly important, and it shapes your understanding of culture and circumstances outside your social bubble, which in turn affects your future social interactions.
> Others say that sure, most of the stuff in the news isn’t of use, but occasionally you’ll come across some story that will lead you to actually change what you’ve been working on. But really, how plausible is this? Most people’s major life changes don’t come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed.
Most people I know who I would class as common, though I do not mean this in a demeaning or derogatory way, watch the unfiltered mass news daily or at least weekly—like Aaron described. They'll get home from work and turn on the 5PM news or have the radio going. Yet these people are common in that they work a 9-5 job they often complain about, they seek to buy a bigger TV and have a family holiday once a year or two.
They know a hell of a lot more than others about current events but effect little change, it seems, in their own lives or those around them. If the majority of people watch the news regularly, why isn't there more change? If the TV was off, perhaps people would be outside a little bit more? Maybe us Westerners would know more about our local area than we do about popular topic x in foreign country y.
Others who have agreed with you also seemed to have had their own comments already answered by Aaron and here have had others quote those parts back to them.
Couple of bigger anecdotes;
- Watergate. A president's criminal behaviour was dug up by a newspaper, forcing him to resign.
- Vietnam war coverage forced the US to reconsider their attitudes to weapons with high collateral damage, conscription and large scale land wars in general.
"With the time people waste reading a newspaper every day, they could have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the daily doses they get dribbled out by the paper. But people, of course, wouldn’t read a book about most subjects covered in the paper, because most of them are simply irrelevant."
News coverage is more immediate. And while 95% of all news is useless bullshit, there is still stuff in there that is useful and relevant for shaping one's understanding of the current times.
This isn't really an argument against Aaron's position, because it is Aaron's position. News shapes your perception of culture and The World, which is a negative because it does so in a harmful way.
With this in mind, I agree with him — I benefit more from comprehensive articles describing long-term developments than from the latest events in some affair that affects me way too little for these details to matter to me. This is not to say that the happenings in faraway countries are something I ought not to know about, however, a short summary after the events have passed would usually suffice.
In the Essay Aaron isn't talking about just the concept of being informed about the world, but rather the up to the minute 24/7 generalist news stuff.
It seems like most major events have books written about them later. There were good books written about the Iraq war, for example.
I also think you could learn a lot more about culture by reading non-fiction books then by watching the news. I don't think I learn anything about culture from the news, other then which celebrities people are paying attention too these days.