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Comment by chernevik | Hacker News Reader

"There is voting, of course, but to become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election."

For one thing this places enormous trust in the guide-writers. For another it enormously oversimplifies the topics on which the guides would touch.

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sure, but think back to the last election. 95% of the coverage was about stupid stuff like Mitt Romney's campaign manager talking about an "etch a sketch" or whatever.

Instead of looking into the details and explaining Romney's bogus tax plan, they just invite a republican and democrat on to yell at each-other to stay "ballanced"

And yet what alternative is there? If you follow the news you're placing the same trust in journalists.

To become a truly informed voter, not relying on others' summary explanations, would be more than a full-time career.

How about people that are like-minded band together and dedicate one person to research all of the issues and present them, or an issue per person (or something else)?

That sounds suspiciously like a meta-political party.

My thought was that if you kept it small, you could keep a better handle on whether to trust the person that was gathering the information for you. It's more difficult to scale this sort of solution without running into the same trust issues brought up. But there's not reason that a ton of small groups like this could dot the landscape.

people that are like-minded band together and dedicate one person to research all of the issues and present them

That sounds a lot like what FOX News does actually.

I'm talking about smaller groups of people that you know you can trust to present the issues with little bias / in a fair way. The scale of FOX News is obviously beyond that. I'm literally talking about groups of maybe 10-20 people. It allows you to all be more informed as a group, while sharing the workload of doing all the information gathering/compilation.

I don't find it so. You do need a strong background in a variety of topics: economics, history, science, history (of several varieties, military history among them). You need some grasp of the importance of ideas and frameworks, and how human nature influences the way others think, speak and report.

Amassing that is lot of work and a number of years. But it's worth doing in its own right. And from there, yeah, you needn't rely on others' summaries.

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