I Hate the News (2006)
aaronsw.com
aaronsw.com
- Actionable news. Only news to which you can (or have to), as a citizen, take some action. Examples: Changes in law, cultural events that will take place in the future, openings of new institutions, planned political demonstrations or petitions.
- Old news. Only give news about something after it is resolved, not when it is happening (avoid especially breaking news). Examples: Instead of speculation who will be appointed to some office, just tell me who was appointed. When disaster occurs, wait three days when the information is more complete about the aftermath. Reviews of products that have already been released.
With old news, it does seem like there's a class of news subjects that are picked before ripe in a sense, and it'd be great to stop doing that—but stuff like disaster news is probably best to keep reporting as soon as possible...
The problem with news, as described in the essay, is that it's mostly not useful. The above solutions talk about ways of filtering it in order to make it more useful. Filtering, however, isn't the only way of solving this problem. For example, you could keep all the information available but categorize and label it, or impose some sort of hierarchy. Of course options for doing that are limited (though not exhausted) in traditional, non-interactive mediums—but that's probably a large part of why communicating it in an interactive medium instead is the current trend. Which obviously comes with benefits of de-centralization when done via the internet.
I think the solution is, as in the article, to stop consuming traditional news sources; there are intrinsic limitations to informational organization in a static medium. Instead, grab something interactive where you can select what's relevant to you.
I think it does. Serious news publications are de facto appointed representatives of the public, to hold politicians and officials to account, with their influence largely decided by the number of people who buy their newspaper.
Lots of forms of government do that. The purpose of democracy is to provide a more graduated use of force spectrum for countervailing force than 'get screwed' or 'civil war' to attempt to keep those decisions roughly in line with what the electorate would choose were they in that position.
Results vary.
The actual problem is with 24 hour formats reporting things they don't actually know. Which happens because there is an ongoing story with ~15 minutes a day of new information, but just repeating those 15 minutes of information all day will cause you to lose viewers who leave the news on all day and don't want to hear the same thing over and over whereas reporting other stories for the rest of the day will cause you to lose viewers who tune in at random times looking for specifically that information. So they try to report "new" information about the most popular story all day even when they don't have any.
There is a fairly obvious solution to this, which is to discontinue broadcast reporting and provide news on demand. If you want to know the latest on the lost plane, here it is; that story will stick at the top of the page until people stop clicking on it but nothing new will be posted until something new is actually known.
Then let people create custom news streams like channels on streaming music sites: If some news happens with the missing plane then make that the next story in my stream, otherwise give me news about NSA surveillance, then protests occurring locally, then tech product reviews, etc.
-Local events site
-Wikipedia's world events page once a month
I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to argue with on a micro one. I spend most of my day following what's going on in the world, and it hasn't added much value to my life. But I worry about everyone not caring. Not because that would kill my company (I started it because I hate news in its current form too), but because there are times when public outrage changes things. It's like voting - my vote doesn't matter, but on aggregate it's everything.
I'm convinced that the goal of a good news publication should be like Google - to get you in and out the "door" as quickly as possible understanding what you need to know. We're rebuilding everything around that. A publication one can consume in thirty seconds with the most important stuff, ruthlessly curated and fact-checked. No entertainment gossip or puff pieces or PR pitches. (To get it as an email sign up at https://grasswire.com)
I'm looking forward to reading what others think on this subject.
I'm stuck with live feed on left which shows me exactly the kind of useless "breaking" stuff I want to avoid and popular feed on the right which I don't seem to be able to control beyond either providing fact-check or comment.
What am I missing?
It's a little bit chaotic this early in the morning, but our algorithm pulls in the "breaking" stuff on the left, and the most upvoted stuff flows to the top of the "popular" page. Grasswire users fact-check stuff for accuracy, and comment on whether or not/why it's important. The site is mostly for news junkies. It's a little bit hectic right now because a bunch of people from HN are just upvoting random stuff to screw everything up, and it will take the power users a minute to sort through it.
The result is at the end of the day, the best stuff curated and fact-checked by a couple thousand people, and we send that out to the everyday person in an email they can digest in 30 seconds. We're adding a short, editable description to each news item to give some background, and allowing anyone to submit external stuff, so it's still a work in progress, but that's the gist of it.
One thing to note, though - on the left I'm seeing a number of duplicated entries, with the duplicates immediately after the original. I'm using Firefox, if that matters.
Admission. I think I up-voted some comments by accident. It's not obvious what that large up arrow does (now that I say it out-loud I think it's probably pretty obvious!) and there's no way to undo the operation. Sorry.
Are there plans to add a frontend to it?
We see the "frontend" as a daily email that goes out or an app with a daily push notification that says "Hey, here you go, the best news of the day in 30 seconds." So the hours of work that the people are putting in on the back-end really just reduces the amount of time for the end user. We could probably hire five people to do that, but it's important to us that it's democratic and open.
The problem with curated news is that we can be consuming propaganda and not know it.
Even as it stands now, we hear of certain news in the world, but not others, and it severely affects our understanding of the world.
We're consuming propaganda either way. Media outlets chose what to write about and what not to cover, then stories that match people's biases tend to get disproportionately popularized. I hope that this fact-checking feature can at least do something against news sites publishing obvious lies and misinformation.
That said I still like the idea of being able to "touch base" with the news as it were - something that I can scan quickly and, if I'm disciplined enough, filter down to the bits that are actually relevant to me. Most days, hopefully, that's nothing at all.
Here are some tenets to which I think any news company aspiring to change the field and report news responsibly should think about:
Popularity is poisonous and the enemy of the good - what is good or even factually right is often not popular
Context is key - without context, a fact can be meaningless or actively misleading (e.g. the most liberal senator in the senate, 45 minutes from a chemical war from the dodgy dossier).
On the ground observation is key - this is something modern tech has changed in a very positive way, though it does also allow for rumours and misinformation.
Analysis is key - without analysis from informed observers, lots of news is hard to digest and understand - it provides context
Balance is an illusion - Opinions always colour analysis and the facts reported, we should be up-front about this - every org and person has them.
Fact checking with primary sources is key - how can you possibly fact-check factoids that your readers are constantly upvoting? How can you possibly fact check an opinion?
National news is often horribly biased, and national newspapers usually pander to the government/demographic they serve, especially in time of war.
Most public outrage is wrong or at least ill-founded - we have representative and informed democracy to try to avoid the rule of the mob.
Quick news is the antithesis of thoughtful, incisive news
There's plenty of buzzfeed-esque junk out there trying to recycle news and readers as quickly as possible, and it is neither viable in the long term nor is it good for news or for readers. So I disagree completely (as does the article I think) on what you consider to be a good news publication.
PS Your website doesn't even show me what it does before it asks for email, you might want to consider changing that. I tried a fake account and looks like some kind of buzzfeed reuters mashup, and I'm afraid guilty of a lot of the sins Aaron points out.
I've expressed my view on this (and similar password-related policies) many times, but apparently it's all simply a box ticking exercise for pen testers...
Also, https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn is amazing.
The "offending system" I mentioned, however, is our old PHP application that I don't really work on. (I mainly develop much more modern Rails stuff!)
Like I said, the primary concern of the company is simply to keep pen testers happy - and their criteria for a "secure" website is, in my opinion, often misleading or even downright wrong. But if I ever get the chance to genuinely improve the system, I'll definitely look into using this.
Crowd-sourced fact checks are an interesting idea, I'm not sure it works for news. You need to be fast and thorough, which is hard.
I'd love to have reliable background information for long-running issues, like the Ukraine crisis. Maybe this will be easier, as the value can accumulate over a longer time period.
I wish you good luck, we need better news!
It's tough for me to grasp what someone wants/needs to stick around. Right now we have a pretty good core of hardcore news junkies that come every day, and maybe that's OK for the curation/fact-checking side of things, but what do you want/need?
We're adding a "background" area to each news item. That was an issue that I didn't really have at first because I sit there and watch the news all day, but turns out not everybody is like me :). That may take a couple weeks along with all of the other changes we need to make, but it will be in there.
People should re-read this and understand that this is the best way of doing marketing for your startup. "I agree, here's my solution".
If you were selling books or long-form journalism I could understand your post, but as it stands it's blatant self-promotion. And I say that as the founder of a news company.
I disagree with him that it's 100% - I think it's just 99.9%, and that .01% is valuable. Perhaps that's a major difference, but Swartz's point was that it's not valuable enough to waste time on. I'd like to think that if he could spend 30 seconds to get that .01% of important news he would feel differently. But, of course, we'll never know.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. 99.9% of news is garbage, .01% of news is valuable. I want to make it easy for people to get that .01%.
> Perhaps you should take Swartz advice and stop fighting to improve something that has so little value to you.
I think news is badly broken, and I'm trying to fix it. I don't understand what problem you have with that.
As for Grasswire, I think your solution to trying to improve the news won't work. As someone who previously ran a collaborative fact-checking site (which included a factcheck watch that monitored the main fact-checking sites), I think fact checking is over-rated. Most people are not really that interested in fact-checking the news, or in even reading fact checks. Fact checks themselves are in most cases just as biased as the reports they claim to fact check.
Nonetheless, I am genuinely interested to see how it works out for you.
Many people think the news is completely junk:
http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par...
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-informatio...
http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/why-tv-news-is-a-waste-of-human-...
http://www.stansberryradio.com/James-Altucher/Latest-Episode...
How is this addressing the frustrations you claim to have in common with Swartz?
And for accusing someone of dropping links you sure seem to drop a lot of links to your news site Newslines. Newslines seems to be little more than a celebrity gossip engine. Are you attacking Grasswire because you see them as a competitor?
My site is not a competitor to Grasswire. Grasswire is an attempt to fact check news streams. Newslines is a news archive with no fact checking at all. As I said, I used to run a fact-checking site, so I have some experience in the area, and a continuing interest in how fact-checking may work.
I am interested in all of the new news entrants, and you will see my comments on posts about Infobitt, Grasswire, Inside.com and other sites in many places across the net. That said, I have not directly criticized his site, and only said that I think fact checking in general is over rated. Unfortunately, Austen has taken my comments as a personal attack on him. He should grow a thicker skin.
I think getting feedback, positive or negative, from the community is extremely valuable. Your observation that my site is "a celebrity gossip engine" is useful to me, even though you intended it as an insult. Thanks.
Circle of concern versus circle of control. Pay attention to things proportionally to the amount of control you have over them, rather than worrying disproportionately. (And if you want to care more than that about something, find a way to have more influence on that something.) If you have a vote on something, you have a non-zero but very tiny amount of control over it; spend time educating yourself appropriately. But the vast majority of news stories discuss items that should not in any way affect the actions of the people watching them.
Also, considering that later in this thread you explicitly describe your service as being for "news junkies"...
I consider our service like Wikipedia - there is a small collection of people who are just abnormally fascinated by the news - the 1% of news junkies who want to see what's happening, vet it, and tell you if it's wrong. The biproduct of that is that the 99% of "normal people" get a news digest that contains only the most important info, that's easily digestible.
So the current website is for news junkies, just like the "talk/edit" part of Wikipedia is for... encyclopedia junkies? The daily email and coming read-only stuff is what I hope is appropriate for 99% of people, including someone like Swartz.
What is your definition of "important"? Or, more importantly, what definition of "important" does your community of "news junkies" apply? Because almost by definition, those "news junkies" have a different idea of what's important than other people do.
Of course, that's very difficult to quantify, and there may be some bias of the news junkies, but I think the end product is pretty great (though not perfect yet). Of course that's just me, and I'm probably biased as well, but there have been times when I have said the news coming out of grasswire is complete shit, so I'd like to think I'm at least trying to be honest with myself.
[1]
If you don't allow the user to define "important", it's the same thing. You're just replacing the editors with random fact-checkers who are most likely regurgitating the headlines editors put on their screens.
I was surprised I couldn't filter by region. I think Aaron's point was that if it doesn't affect me, why should I follow it?
The sad irony of this statement is profound.
They're still holding office, journals still charge an arm and a leg for publication access, and the last I heard the amendments to the laws that led to this are held up by lobbyists.
The news, even global news, absolutely affects all of us even if we live local, cloistered lives. Let us take the United States - which is overly represented on this site. The US economy is fueled by its finance and investment sectors, which are in turn fueled by neocolonialist enterprises overseas. The success of the US domestic economy is fundamentally tied to its navigating geostrategy and multilateral diplomacy, its overthrowing of governments, stabilizing and destabilizing nations with propaganda and embargos, fixing international law in favor of the leaders of its private sectors, and in its opening resources abroad to US companies is the primary and nearly exclusive driver of the finance sector. And in fact, domestic and international law now blur due to a similarly increased globalization.
I find it odd that Aaron, known for his stance on free access to information and to being informed, would fall only to the knowledge of the academic - and not information and facts about the world in which we immediately live.
Yes there are some truly irrelevant news items (take celebrities). One must filter and prioritize. It is a small price to pay.
I would love to defend whichever notions have offended downvoters.
I think one of the most wrong thing in the article is this statement.
> Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics.
Yea, no... A big fat screaming no. A voter guide is a propaganda piece that has ZERO substance. Maybe for the propositions they give a little bit of pros and cons, but for the candidates, they give you nothing. The only way you can discern who is a lying asshole is by following the news. Maybe the conclusion will be they are all lying assholes, but at least you'll be informed of that.
I also think that saying I don't follow the news because it does not personally affect me is short-sighted and self-fish.
For example, those Christians minorities getting slaughtered by ISIS has nothing to do with me. But hearing their stories and learning about them through the news will certainly teach me a bit of compassion that I will need in some random tangential decisions I make later.
Similarly, seeing the high coverage of Coptic Christians where coverage of attacks on Muslim minorities (which are much more frequent and equally horrifying) by ISIS and sometimes America, allies or contractors (or of similar atrocities by Mexican drug cartels in the Americas) is missing helps to understand how media and state moral narrative diverges from more universally applied and internally consistent humanitarian compassion - and how and when this and these narratives may align with broad geostrategic policy goals. Insofar as Coptic Christian moral narrative may be used, as an example, as justification for some activity or funding, one will know to look to see if that activity or funding has been a long-standing objective or has been proposed and denied before due to a lack of public support.
When modern institutions realize they have an information distribution problem, they don't get a bunch of ink-stained, dubiously sober arts graduates with no special qualifications, and tell them to write stories. They pay people to do regularly updated dashboards or reports with charts and graphs, establish information reporting networks and hierarchies, institutionalize whistleblowers, schedule mandatory periodical reviews of how certain projects are going, that sort of thing.
The human element is necessary but journalistic "storytelling" is just a euphemism for titillation or reinforcement of certain narratives. With minor exceptions, I'm not sure it was ever any different.
Even if they did, an organization would discover that they could get more views and exert more power using titilatory stories. What you propose is not a stable Nash Equilibrium.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
EDIT: re-read and that seems to be kinda your point. Apologies if it is and I'm oddly argumentative.
To continue, one reason why organizations use stories is that stories are one of the data structures more efficiently-implemented in our minds.
Anyway the reason why is because they have different incentives. The question is how to make incentives like that work for society, hopefully while keeping the critical independence of the media. We can't imagine that now, but we have new funding forms like Kickstarter, and Wikipedia is an existence proof for achieving consensus about what claims are well-sourced.
But I think we agree that it's not a great idea to run society on an information system that gets paid every time it stimulates our basest impulses for the lowest possible cost. The endgame of that is Buzzfeed.
It's like questioning why tech executives have to be adult-supervision MBAs from an Ivy league. Ostensibly the MBA is trained to be a manager of $anything, but a founding engineer might still be a better CEO due to their special understanding and vision. And that MBA is never going to have as much skin in the game - they're in it for what they can get.
Similarly the journalist is allegedly better trained to tell the story of $anything, but maybe we could do more effective work with subject matter experts who pick up the basics of fact-checking, storytelling, and information design. And journalists, unless they are assigned to cover a beat or do a long investigation, rarely have much invested in a story - if something else juicy comes up, they're onto the next thing by tomorrow. And in the Buzzfeed era, that's becoming the next few minutes.
Any time you read a story by a general-purpose journalist on something you know well, there's a familiar pattern. It all is very slick and authoritative-sounding, but is usually hilariously wrong and simple-minded. Consider that this is happening all the time, for the subjects where you aren't an expert. So much for 'writing skills'.
Instead, a journalist can contextualise those jobs figures and explain why someone you don't know being out of work can affect your life. Narrative is, and always has been, a method of engaging people.
Never mind the fact that journalists also uncover data themselves. Formalising whistleblowers is all very well, but you still want someone to investigate. Take yesterday's story of a Congressman who claimed more miles in expenses than his car had driven - that was a reporter querying FOIL records to match up the numbers. Two completely different data sets in different governmental bodies. There would be no whistleblower there. Who heads up these information reporting networks, the government? What about government corruption?
What you are describing sounds ideal - but that's exactly what it is, an ideal. Very few real life systems work like that.
I'd say the biggest challenge in no longer paying attention to the news is the idea that it's a serious person's domain, or even duty. That you're "not a real grown up" if you stop paying attention to the news. Every now and again you'll be among some NPR listeners and you won't know what happened in Kuala Lumpur or whatever. You need to be OK with that.
I came to the conclusion late last year that I was spending too much time reading social, news and commentary - getting really sucked in. It was a massive waste of time, a productivity killer, and often quite depressing.
For instance, I live in a country where the police have no guns, and gun crime is almost non-existent. And yet, I felt like I was constantly reading about police shootings and brutality, (primarily from the U.S). And... it started to really upset me. This news has no context in my existence at all, and yet I know about it in great detail.
Same goes for all the Twitter flaming, and all sorts of other stuff.
I realised it was actually making me very unhappy. I decided to see if I could take a step back - I deleted my Facebook and Twitter, and tried to avoid comments and most extraneous news. I expected I'd go a bit mad, but the opposite happened - I'm actually surprised at just how happier I am now. Ignorance is bliss?
That said, I do believe there is huge value in being informed - but it is hard to regulate and parse all the information out there into something meaningful.
HN is my only vice now - I'm a lurker mostly, and it's work related so that's okay, right? ;)
It’s overwhelming, and there’s no end to “Oh, you haven’t heard about this? You’re out of the loop!” I always think of this Friends segment where Joey buys a volume of an encyclopedia to try to impress everyone else (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3eD0imnhQ).
I agree it’s hard to see how the effects of what goes on in the world propagate down to how each of us lives our life today -- but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t ever affected by them. I still think we have a basic responsibility to try to understand those things, and the primary goal of news outlets should be to make that information as accessible as possible (while still being accurate).
Full disclosure: I work for a news app (http://www.getbriefme.com).
A lot of people have started turning a blind eye to the TV, but very often they replace it with constant news coverage online. So they really have made no significant change in their lives. They're still spoonfed with something that has never had any impact on them, and most likely never will.
Anything with a significant impact, and unfortunately many things without it, are relayed through friends, family and co-workers.
If the bomb drops or christ returns then we have a warning system setup all over Sweden that wakes anyone up.
I can only imagine bad things from watching the news. I can't prove anything but it can't be good to constantly be told about negative things happening halfway across the world.
How does the warning system work for the return of christ? Church bells?
It's super simple and super passive. Basically I only read news brought to my attention organically; social media, word on the street which I later look up, etc.
Thus far I haven't missed anything of genuine humanity-shaking importance, my emotional state has improved, and I have much more time for reading, hacking, and all other aspects of my life.
It resonates with the "millennials consume news differently" piece submitted elsewhere on HN actually.
Generally, the principle relies on "if it's not important [1], people don't talk about it". In other words, anything someone directly or indirectly mentions to me may be of value, everything else is just soundtrack. [2]
Further, I often find that news that does matter comes to me from the likes of a more considered periodical; I learnt a lot of fact-based detail regarding the Alberta oil sands from National Geographic, and I learn about peace process break downs from twitter users I follow far quicker and with less bias than from mainstream media outlets.
Local news tends to be handled by random people I meet on the street. It's effective so far!
[1] This is an overly burdened word in this context. Darfur is very important, but we rarely hear about it, for example. What I mean in this context is "relevant enough to daily life to stop me in my tracks and get my attention". It's worth highlighting here that a lot of very important news doesn't make it to us via mainstream media because mainstream media selects for sales and / or target audience bias / interests, ergo in that sense, I'm actually NOT hearing about important things by tuning in to traditional mainstream media.
[2] People murdering each other due to orders from invisible people in the sky is going to be a soundtrack to my life thanks to the era I live in. I know this happens. It will continue to happen for my life at least. No, I don't need daily reminders of this universal constant. The way I conduct my life and my advocacy against such acts will not be altered because I don't get those daily reminders.
Having spent a large portion of my life keeping up with the news, other than a few minor quibbles about semantics, I'm inclined to draw the similar conclusions.
Most of what is presented is not news, it's politically slanted propaganda relating to daily events that further the political position of the network that owns that media outlet - this goes the same for papers, TV and radio. They only bring in "experts" that corroborate their own viewpoint, and when opposing opinions stray too far from their party line and cannot be discredited, they're let go. It happens time and again, and eventually you have to wonder why you continue to allow your own perspectives to be influenced by their agenda.
It's gotten to the point where I'm so tired of wading through all the bullshit to find facts or something remotely resembling truth that I frequently wonder why I bother...
We all know at this point that what goes on behind the closed doors of Government doesn't even closely resemble "legal" or "constitutional" and when they get busted, they "welcome public debate" and change the law or reinterpret the constitution to allow their illegal or unethical behaviour to continue and discredit anyone against that as at best unpatriotic or at worst a traitor... you get to a point where you wonder which side is the side of truth and righteousness. Does any of it matter? Is it all just bullshit, distracting us from greater things...?
This was starting to be discussed on HN the other day, but unfortunately didn't seem to get much traction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202533
This site isn't perfect, but it's useful to know what's happening in the tech world. Knowing about the world's current events is similar. We shouldn't dwell on negative events, but they happen and they happen to real people. Just because they don't happen to us doesn't mean it's not affecting us in a broader human perspective. We are all in it together.
"News", I believe, should be about something new or recent. We're now talking about an article (op-ed?) written by Aaron in 2006. This isn't news and much of Hacker News isn't either. It's more just curated information.
Many issues that are sort of important I ignore because I can't see how I am supposed to get to an educated opinion about them. There is so much noise and bias going around that I don't have the time and abilities to aggregate them down myself, and no way to know which external aggregation to trust.
It's not supposed to work. Democracy makes us fell like we have a say in politics, but we really don't.
If we did, there wouldn't be mass surveillance, governments wouldn't be taking away our rights, and criminalizing entire segments of the population.
But hey, at least we can vote once every few years, for one of two to four candidates who claim to be different (but really just work for the same interests anyway).
But, once a government reaches the point of what you describe, that is no longer a government of the people and has become something else. Which, according to history, is almost certainly inevitable.
Are you sure? Outside of this little bubble we live in, there are lots of people willing to give up every last bit of privacy ("nothing to hide"), in exchange for the government giving them the feeling of "safety".
i.e. the headline might be about a train crash on the other side of the world, rather than some good story that happened in my own country.
I spent two weeks above the Arctic Circle in September hiking and camping, with no access to the world [1]. When coming back along the road, my car radio was continually searching for a station, and it eventually locked onto one randomly. The first words I heard from "the world" after two weeks were "ISIS Threat".
It turned it off and didn't turn it back on for the rest of the 8 hour drive home.
[1] If you're curious, it looks like this http://theroadchoseme.com/the-dempster-highway
In Nov '04 I went through the Northern Rocky Mountains:
http://pics.camarades.com/d/210055-1/dscf0537.jpg
And these Elk would like to say hi to you and they're happy they avoided your freezer ;) :
Aaron seems to reject the notion of the implicit involvement, in a democracy, of every citizen in the affairs of their government. We supposedly elect (a significant portion of) the government, we pay for its activities, so we should care about what it has done and continues to do in Iraq. Virtually every extremist who has attacked the U.S. and lived to be captured and give statements in trial has cited U.S. foreign policy as a chief motivation for their actions. This alone should have us caring about U.S. foreign policy.
I agree that news covers too many topics to report on any of them consistently well (or guard against interested parties shaping the news into propaganda). I think there's a Poe's-Law-type meme about that.
I stopped following the news, other than this site, after years of dedicated reading/viewing. I'd become disgusted with the amount of time that's dedicated to manufactured scandal, fained outrage and disemination of non-facts. I'm happier now and actually feel better informed.
Sure, if I want to know about something I'll hit a major news site from time to time but honestly the longer I go without digging through the daily news pile for information gold, the more it just looks like a midden concealing a few soggy turds.
If you're living within a corrupt, self-serving political system (we are), then naturally the only people who run for office will be products of that system. If a candidate who genuinely wants to change the status quo somehow manages to slip in, they will be prevented from achieving anything meaningful once inside.
No matter what, none of these people have my interests in mind. So I ask, what's the point?
-George Carlin
Vote. Spoil your ballot paper if you must (these get counted, at least in the UK) but take part in the process. Otherwise you are indistinguishable from those that couldn't be bothered or didn't care.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?
If 40% of the population votes, they don't worry about the 40% who are use voting as the opiate of the masses... the problem they see is the 60% who didn't fall for the scam.
The arguments in the following essay are compelling. I haven't heard much of an argument against them, historically, other than pure sophistry (that domain sucks, etc) or tradition (you should vote because your ancestors voted)
Clearly parent disagrees that it impacts the world in any way; simply asserting it is probably not going to change their mind.
You know that's what the power structure wants right? An apathetic population.
Not voting does not mean being apathetic, and vice-versa.
How on earth can people look at our current situation, where the majority don't vote, and say it's working?
I don't think parent is saying it's working, or that the solution is to not vote, but that voting or not is irrelevant to the result, and therefore, why bother.
It's almost as if the total number of people voting in Brazil has nothing to do with the quality of the individuals running for office within their system...
If these politicians are as corrupt and self-serving as you say, then it actually becomes quite easy to enact meaningful change. All we need to do is coalesce around important issues and threaten to vote politicians out of office if they don't bend to our will. Schwartz himself was one of the individuals who rallied broad segments of the population to mobilize and defeat the passage of the deeply unpopular, industry backed legislation that was SOPA by implicitly threatening to punish politicians who voted in favor of it.
I think people assume that because their vote doesn't cout, their voice doesn't count. Even if you don't vote you can still donate money to opposing political causes (or threaten to), write your congressmen, protest, rally public support, and call out your elected officials publicly. If enough people do this it is possible to elicit change without stepping foot inside a voting booth.
Change may be imperceptible day to day or year to year, but over the long term, it has been profound and there's no reason to believe it will not continue to be. In a decade's time marijuana will likely be legal in most of the U.S. and the drug war a shadow of its former self. In a decade's time I expect more legal protections for transgender people.
If this is the product of a corrupt, self-serving political system, then perhaps those are good qualities for a political system to have.
Women's suffrage is a good example, since voting was exactly what they wanted to achieve, and so they had to do it - without voting!
[Citation Needed]
But then, following the news teaches me stuff about the world and how it works. It reminds me how complex the world is and how dangerous. It educates and it coins me.
I've always wondered how Aaron found the courage to live his life and fight for his ideals like he did. Maybe ignoring the larger scope was one of the reasons.
Whoa, what? How can you use 'coin' as a verb in this context? The news turns you into a different word or phrase? You've just blown my mind. Or is that a typo?
I have often wondered how people can make uninformed decisions easily. Now I know.
Only reading a short guide, is akin to reading a Wikipedia article for a monumentally important decision, and not bothering to check the edit history, let alone the references.
Admittedly, I was writing emotionally, as the sarcastic "Now I know" might suggest. However, I would argue that reading "a short guide" seems vastly different from what you suggest.
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My emotional reaction was in response to how "a short guide" seems to suggest a very biased source; for instance a pamphlet that might be given out by a political party/group. Perhaps this was a flaw in phrasing, but that does not seem likely to me from the text.
I used to be a serious news junky, keeping track of everything that happened related to politics or the latest war. I'd even research what was happening regarding local politics in the place I was traveling to just in case the topic came up while I was with some people from that area. I monitored RSS feeds from various news outlets and blogs from others who also watched the news, and over time it became impossible for me to keep up with it.
After that point of realization (that it was impossible for me to keep up with all this information), I then realized that it really didn't matter anyway! The world did not end, my favored side didn't win any less and my most hated side didn't win any more... I just had more time to focus on things that really mattered to me. I probably now have a better state of well-being on top of it all.
"Its obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting people. Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less reflective thinkers. Its obsession with surfaces makes us shallow."
Aaron Swartz claims that politics, news and all that doesn't affect his life. And then a few years later, when he makes the news, he commits suicide. In particular, it was clear that his morals were not lined up to what the powers that be are.
Instead of working to better understand the risks in the "piracy" that he was undertaking, maybe he could have paid attention to the news and garnered a better understanding of people around him.
This "I hate the News" article glorifies ignorance in the most terrible way possible. Especially since it was that ignorance that eventually gave way to Aaron Swartz's untimely demise.
Aaron Swartz eventually did wish to become involved in politics. He took documents from a university and published them online, in the name of "opening up information". If he did so with the naive "I hate the news" attitude however, then he was flying blind. He had no idea how others perceived him, including the FBI and other police powers.
That was his mistake. And it is a mistake I hope no one else makes. If you are going to put your neck on the line and perform a protest that toes the lines of the law... be sure you are ready and willing to receive the attention of the media that will fall down upon you.
On the one hand, we have Martin Luther King Jr. who broke the law, and managed to turn those crimes into a strength. A victory that changed the country for the better.
On the other, we have Aaron Swartz who (probably) broke the law, and instead turned those crimes into a tragic weakness. A weakness that ends in the most horrible way possible.
Note: I supported Aaron Swartz's cause. I've donated money to his prosecution when it came up years ago. So my money and actions are where my heart's at. The irony in this article is rather strong however, especially when we take it into context.
A news website that covers important issues rather than petty crimes.
It boils down to the same reason you should vote, sure you probably won't swing any elections, but in the same way your voting might influence politicians into listening to the things you care about, by being aware what is happening in and around your city/country/planet you make it harder for people doing shady shit who rely on general public apathy to get away with it.
That's a useless conclusion in itself. There is an unlimited amount of news if you just include the whole world since "you live in it". Do you follow individual county elections for Nebraska? Why or why not? How do you determine what news is important enough for you to follow? Now you are back to square one.
I hope this doesn't come off as an attack. It is not directed at the author or any individual. I just feel like this is an undercurrent in society that is easily overlooked.
Quarterly that covers the news of the last 3mos after all the misinformation peddled by 24/7 news cycle has run it's course. I also like Stallman's political notes as they are brief and he has an interesting perspective sometimes
Ultimately, news is a form of entertainment. Now more than ever. People don't watch Fox News or MSNBC to be more informed voters or to take personal action. Many of them want to hear what Personality X has to say about Event Y. Same with twitter or facebook or the opinion section of the local newspaper. And that's cool. If that's what someone finds interesting or entertaining, then so be it.
In general, all of the arguments in this post could be applied to anything that people read, watch, play or listen to. From reality tv to Shakespeare. "It doesn't involve me and isn't useful in my daily life" and "I've lived without it for a long time and my life is no less rich" are generic statements that would be equally valid discussing pretty much any form of diversion. Part of maturity is realizing that the world is full of things that you don't like, and that belittling those things or questioning their value doesn't do any good. We all get to decide how to waste our time. Let people have their news.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-t...
I have not found that I am out of the loop on anything relevant to my life. I still follow blogs and news sites (and of course, Hacker News). And I still feel that I am aware of important world events such as what is going on in Brazil right now.
Knowledge is power, but useless knowledge is a waste of mental capacity.
I feel all those thousands of comments, mini essays, online slugfests, number of likes or dislikes on politics are not going to change even a little how governments work or how decisions are made. I feel I've wasted too much time on such things.
I still follow tech news though, simply because it's interesting to me.
As for crimes and scandals, well, it's not called "crime porn" for nothing!
One could choose the period, e.g. 7 days to the past, and see all important news from that time-frame.
It would of course require a human to tag the news as important within a period. Subscriber only feature would suffice.
once a week and scan "Top 10" news for the last week and check out the articles that pique your interest.
I like the Economist for that -- there's a 2 page "world news" digest section in every issue. Some weeks that's all I read. But when I have more time there are also in depth, well written, well edited and unabashedly opinionated articles in the rest of the issue. (I really hate the fake neutrality in most journalism)
What would be really nice would be something similar for national and local news.
I, too, have moved away from most kinds of news. I only read tech news, and I could make an argument that tech news is more actionable. But even that, I spend less time on fewer sites. I used to look forward to a chance to catch up on HN, now I read it mostly during moments when I'm waiting for something else.
So, what am I (and the author) missing? Or what is society missing because we don't participate in the news cycle?
Also, does anyone know of a long time horizon news company that primarily provides 3-5 year updates on large macro topics? Actually maybe that's just called "a book"
That being said, there is a certain beauty to experiencing things in the moment.
-- Roger Rabbit
Thoreau agrees.
During my freshman year of college I stopped following the news. I was so focused on starting off well in school that I avoided most distractions. I found that those months were some of the most focused and productive I've ever had. Sadly I fell back into the habit of reading news articles and catching cable news at night. But I've been trying to stop, although my smartphone is making it very difficult.
Like Aaron points out I can't point to one thing I've read or heard on the news that has turned into actionable information. I also agree that reading better developed thoughts on a specific subject would be more beneficial.
Lastly I'd like to say I really miss Aaron. This post is an example of his brilliance. Depression is a horrible disease and the circumstances surrounding his suicide make it all the more tragic.
RIP aaronsw.
Then he says the news doesn't help with his voting choice and he can get everything he needs to know from a simple guide but nothing could be further from the truth. If you really want to get involved in that, you can gather much more information about candidates and their real thoughts and if they would vote how you want them to vote on issues. You won't get that from any simple guide or the TV news.
For example, maybe a bad one, I knew the brother of one of the candidates running for governor a while back. He's an asshole. I worked next to a lady whose husband was in the state legislature and knew the candidate closely. When I mentioned that I met the candidate once before she said, "Good family!". From there I could have learned a lot if I pursued it. You won't learn any of that from a brochure or the TV news.
The problem with TV and radio news is you can't pick and choose what you want to see or hear. Newspapers were good for that. You could flip pages quickly. Online news sources have that ability if online source is worthy and organized but those are few and far between.
In the past, TV news at most stations was its own department, especially at the networks, and not under control of marketing or advertising. This is no longer true. Despite some great reporters still working in newspapers, marketing has taken that over, too, cause the idea is to sell newspapers, not news.
The same is true for television. How often, now, do you see ads for upcoming entertainment shows during the "news"? How often does a new product come out and it finds itself on the "news"?
Unfortunate but true, the real news, along with in-depth discussion and analysis, can be boring to most. PBS probably is the only daily national news worth watching if you really want to learn but you may find yourself nodding off if the subject isn't of interest. Again, advantage newspapers and properly structured online news sources that don't emulate TV (CNN).
I worked in television news for about 10 years long ago with reporters who used to work in respected newspapers. I hate TV "news" today.
But of course, he doesn't mean junk clickbait tech articles!... Those are useful!