Ignore the news
antipope.org
antipope.org
What isn't good for you is getting sucked into the manufactured drama and drawn out 24 hour news cycle.
The correct attitude would be something more like "be an intelligent consumer of news" rather than "news is bad, stick your head in the sand and ignore it". If you understand that news is entertainment then that's just about all you need to know to be able to pick out the relevent information and go about your day. The news media may do a lot of terrible things but journalists themselves still exist and are still ethical. It's just that they're beholden to their bosses who turn their reporting into something other than a report of the facts.
News is not bad for you. The inability to think critically about what you see on the news is bad for you.
So how about most news is bad for you? ;)
I mean, you're right that news qua news isn't terrible. But very little of what's branded as news is actually news; you said it yourself that it's entertainment.
And while news can be entertaining (e.g. Daily Show), news which exists solely to perpetuate itself and garner more eyeballs is bad. I agree with the author that it's depressing and it's a waste of time.
I'm not actually disagreeing with your practical suggestion; I think the right idea is to find out the facts and move on. But I absolutely think that it's a mistake to "feed the beast," so to speak, any more than is necessary.
(Edit: fixed formatting.)
It doesn't work that way.
Our cognitive threat detection systems create very real biological responses to the information we receive from the news, prompting shifts in cortisol, adrenaline, and other stress hormones. That automatic threat response has very real effects on your short and long-term health and mental/emotional well-being. [1]
The potential for sudden, dramatic, unexpected loss of life or property (called Loss Aversion) is one of the most attention-pulling things in the world. Once you start paying attention, it's extremely difficult to stop, even if you can't do anything with the information.
It's easy to be sucked in by modern news media, and spend way too much time and energy ruminating on situations you can't influence or control. You're burning the limited amount of attention, focus, and energy you have each day on something that ultimately provides zero value.
I'm all for being informed about what's happening in the world at a baseline level, provided you focus on information you're in a position to act upon - by avoiding a local threat (weather/earthquake/wildfire/etc), donating to a non-profit in the event of a disaster/tragedy, educating yourself before an impending election, etc.
Otherwise, the best way to handle most news media is not to pay attention to it at all. Treat it as a tabloid: best to be avoided if you want to preserve your focus for more important matters.
[1] See "The Science of Fear" by Dan Gardner, http://www.amazon.com/dp/0452295467/
I don't think it's healthy for anyone to have a full on "let's not ignore news" or "let's totally ignore news" attitude. A lot of what you're saying is true and they're valid points but they're not compelling enough of a reason for anyone to stop consuming news. It's impossible to live a life where you avoid anything that would negatively affect you. You mention loss aversion. That could be considered a bad thing. But it can also be quite helpful. After the bombings in Boston yesterday we had a noticeable increase in security in Chicago where I am. Because I paid attention to the news I knew something had happened and was a little more aware of my surroundings on public transportation than I would normally be. Now, did anything happen? No, but having that awareness didn't hurt me either.
Ignoring the news means being ignorant of the world around you. I understand that no one is immune from the emotional impact of what they see on the news but it doesn't mean they also cannot pull themselves away from it or that it will necessarily lead to some kind of depression or other negative.
People like us don't need to be told to ignore the news. It's the people who watch Fox all day long and can't discern opinion from fact and are looking for someone to validate their world view that need to be told this. The rest of us I think can take it in, learn a thing or two, and see the rest for what it is. If a few of us get emotionally invested in a story for an hour or two then so be it, is there really any serious harm done?
This entire "ignore the news" idea is way too black or white to be realistic. The vast majority of things in this world, including this idea, are far more complex than a simple "do or don't do this or that" answer can provide. There are things you shouldn't do - don't eat Uranium, don't jump off tall buildings, don't stick your tongue in a light socket... this isn't one of those thing.
Of course there is a LOT of overlap. Among other things, news that inspires fear or titillates sells particularly well. But that should maybe be cause for consideration, that regardless of ethics they have strong financial incentives behind what they report.
I actually wonder if this is one of those scenarios where you have to be especially wary; when a person's ethics or morality are incredibly well aligned with their self-interest, it ought to give you pause. It may in fact be more interesting to discuss the kinds of stories journalists won't cover, and why.
I'm not sure the news helps as much there as we like to think.
They do say that the difference between a man who reads the news and one who doesn't is that the former believes he's informed.
My site is looking to bring in the underused resources of think tanks, academics, NGOs and partisan blogs to put flesh around the bones of the core journalistic reporting on politics and economics.
As the old proverb goes "small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events and great minds discuss ideas". We can select against people (celebrity) with classifiers, and surround events (broadsheet news) with deeper discussion of ideas (policy, research, philosophy).
However, if you don't have ads you don't have money. So my project, http://igg.me/at/jkl/ , is largely unfunded. You can see a very basic prototype here as well: http://jkl.io
Flip on a VPN and you hit the BBC World version of the BBC news, complete with adverts.
Besides which, competition is healthy - so I applaud the creation of another another non-profit news site.
So if I am funded I will go well beyond the BBC site for politics and economics. Considering I am only asking for $40k and they have a budget of four billion pounds I think it's a reasonable proposition.
That said - because the UK spends four billion on the BBC, Australia spends one billion dollars on public broadcasting and there are things like PBS, subsidized journalists in France etc. - I think it's not unreasonable to use them as the backbone for the news part. Going up the continuum though they are unequipped to do the higher policy/ideas part.
Edit: The BBC also has its own biases, they refuse to release the Balen Report for example. Also, as a British citizen not in the UK, I can't access a huge amount of political content without a VPS because iPlayer is restricted.
They might "care" about their work, but the fact that they all-too-commonly deteriorate into fear-mongering & tragedy porn means nothing more than a startup with great employees and really nice guys with great intentions who fail to create revenue.
> There probably won't be any meaningful updates for a couple of days: but the TV channels and newpapers have to fill the dead air somehow, to keep the eyeballs they've attracted on the advertisements, so they cobble together anything they can grab—usually talking heads speculating without benefit of actual information.
Calling out people for doing a poor job of their job isn't being "mean" as much as it is stating facts - no matter how much said employee "cares" about their work.
Moreover, a short sound bite isn't the place for nuanced analyses of how the media works. But it is maybe the right place to try and help people who're feeling overloaded right now by the glut of bad news spinning up around the bombings in Boston. Not to mention the other bomb deaths of April 15th -- Iraq (55), Afghanistan (37), Somalia (30), Syria (18), and Pakistan (4).