Things You Notice When You Quit the News
raptitude.com
raptitude.com
I was visiting friends during a couple of major air accidents in the past couple of years (The MH370 and MH17 incidents in particular), and was astounded at the propensity for news stations on ALL channels to fill every minute of the day with news 'updates' on the events that eventually descended into getting quotes and theories from just about anyone they could get to talk in front of a camera.
I was only exposed to that for a few hours at a time, but I found it absolutely exhausting to be bombarded like that. Not only that, I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources.
No thanks. I would rather control my own news firehose, and be selective about the information that I want to learn more about.
This is true every time there is a news story on about anything that somebody around me is an expert on. It's always "what the hell are they talking about!?"
I've seen this directly, too. I've been on the local news quite a few times, and EVERY TIME what they end up broadcasting, and what I was explaining to them are different things.
What's really really scary to me lately is all of this talk about "fake news", which originally referred to outright lies that were part of click-farms, but is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news.
Frightening. Really truly actually frightening to me.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
-Michael Crichton
But it appears that these days, the rush to post something that will get clicked on bypasses all the actual information that people might want to know.
Take the recent tragic crash in South America that wiped out a whole football team. When I heard about the scale of the accident, one of my first questions (as a former pilot, and knowing the carrying capacity and safety reputation of most aircraft) was "I wonder what aircraft model it was?".
I read through 3 articles on common news sites which didn't state this information at all. Two of them didn't even have the airline or carrier name published in their story. I ended up resorting to a pilot discussion forum, where I found out the information I wanted.
I am surprised by that too. This whole "fake news" thing appeared out of thin air around the US election and is reportedly a new phenomenon - as if most of the "regular" news coverage wasn't already of various degrees of fakeness.
I believe that was the intent all along.
Blocking the bad ones and blessing the good ones are two sides of the same coin. We seem to think as long as government isn't doing it, it's not "censorship" and no problem. But we learn that time and time again, various governments major tech firms are actively working together.
Even more fun.. where did you hear the term "fake news" or where do you hear it regularly? Is it the same people who claim they're the "real news"?
Whether you agree or not, if you ask any suspect if they're guilty, the answer is "No!"
That started this era of nonsensical analysis and up to the second coverage of random car chases, progressed to constant updates about other random things, and then the 9/11 ticker sent it to the moon.
I'm genuinely curious to know where it's talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are the pinnacle of reporting?
Honestly I never hear/read anything but hate for them?
this is an intentional ploy designed to conflate the issues of tabloid-trash and dissent.
we don't even need a ban for the tabloid trash... but once we link it to dissenting from the mainline and call it the deciding factor of the election (a huge leap...), we put the mainstream media who have proven to be incompetent and dishonest back at the wheel.
Well, it's sad. But, in part, you can relax: The "fake news" is just a current meme and will go away in at most a few weeks.
You can hear so much about such a meme because the news organizations form herds, gang up, pile on.
Don't worry, Congress is going to fix that for you if the "Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 ", H.R. 5181 passes. We'll have trusty folks over at the "Center for Information Analysis and Response" [1] to help us by "disseminating fact-based narratives" (!) to aide in determining whats true and whats false. How handy!
[1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/hr5181/text
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-07/propaganda-bill-con...
Completely agreed from personal experience. Not new but always worth re-iterating.
The news can't even get the basic facts right without twisting through addition or omission.
How are we supposed to rely on them when factual sources are suspect/false in the age of fake/lie-news?
Find experts. Do your own research.
I noticed their feed back then starting to change from a simple and useful dissemination of their newspaper articles, into a conduit for posting tabloid style or inflammatory/unverified web links and popular memes.
I questioned them a couple of times on this in the comments area, but was told on both occasions by the page admins that their Facebook page was a 'fun and social' outlet for their paper, and if I wanted 'real news', I should just buy a copy of their actual paper.
Shortly after, I noticed that their print paper started to echo their Facebook feed, in terms of unresearched articles simple copied and pasted from other sources. I stopped following them on Facebook and stopped buying their paper shortly after.
When clicks, eyeballs and stickiness trumps good journalism, then that pretty much closes the door for me.
The channel start with the best intentions of conveying legitimate unbiased news to inquisitive educated audiences... but eventually the supply of news seekers gets depleted, while investors and advertisers demand more. The channel is "forced" to keep expanding so they start catering to people that don't seek out news... steadily devolving into click-bait infotainment articles.
Low-brow content alienates the original news seekers, and they leave for cleaner sources of information... but by now the channel's legitimate reputation is lost. They must double down on the infotainment market to keep turning a profit.
Eventually that gets saturated too, so the channel abandons their original (expensive) legitimate news reporting and continue chasing low-brow audiences, competing against all the other devolved spam-news sites. If their name held enough trust, they might chase profitable corporate/political puff-pieces ("fake news" aka lies).
It feels like an awful game-theory scenario.
In the 2010s, "breaking news" apparently means early news cycle filler as opposed to late cycle filler that's already been reported 47 times in the last 24 hours, so after the attention grabbing fanfare, the breaking news is the national christmas tree lighting ceremony in DC, or surprisingly it snowed in the winter in the midwest yesterday, or congress is boringly making sausage as usual, while I'm sitting there waiting, come on, whats the breaking news part, did the ISS re-enter, has a political leader died, has a new war begun? And then they go to yet another old person pharmaceutical commercial, because those are the only people who still watch news channels, and I'm all question marks. Where's my important news?
We watch the occasional TV show via on demand streaming (guilty pleasure="The Voice", food for thought="several long form journalistic features, tv documentaries etc")
The improvement to our quality of life at home as been significant. In the little free time our daily chores still leave us, we simply play with our daughters (lego, board games, silly play) or read a book with them.
The only concern I have is with the kids growing up. Is the lack of exposure to daily news going to make them less aware of the "world out there"?
After all we could make the choice to live without TV/News after growing up with it. All that news noise is part of our accumulated view of the world. How will this affect someone growing up?
For instance, my younger son is super interested in space and space exploration. Whenever I see a news article or announcement on the web (or even right here on HN), I read up a little about it and then seek him out with a "Hey, did you hear about ...". This often leads to a great discussion, and ends up with us sitting in front of the computer to visit the NASA or ESA websites to get more information, photos or videos direct from the source, without much editorial slant on it.
It's all about piquing their interests, without overloading them with a lot of garbage. They've got enough on their plates with school and social activities etc., so curating their news for them like this is I think useful, plus also leads to some good father/son bonding time where we talk about big ideas like adults.
All that news noise is part of an unreliable, distorted view of the world. The article gave you the solution: read books.
No 2010s kid is going to get "street cred" socially by walking into school talking about how sick Buicks are and Crestor is awesome and its almost but not quite the 15th anniversary of John Ritter's death.
> No thanks. I would rather control my own news firehose, and be selective about the information that I want to learn more about.
My worry is: Isn't this what caused the fake news / misinformation silos? By being selective about our information sources, aren't we distancing ourselves from how a majority of the world lives and thinks? And as product developers (as majority HNers are), isn't it in our benefit to understand as much of the world as possible?
For instance, I absolutely loathe 'celebrity news', but most main news sites here that I go to have at least one or two articles on rubbish like that as their lead, and I have to dig to find the stuff that is relevant to me.
To use the example of air accidents above - I rarely find out anything useful that I want to know from popular news sources. Of course, I hear about the incidents on them, but when I want to dive deep, I go to specialist forums or sites where people in the know are talking about it.
Similarly for mundane things like sport. If I want to find out more about, say, Formula 1 races, I will visit certain sites that I know have motor heads discussing things. That way I can learn about future car developments, driver contracts etc. Mainstream sports news seems to want to talk about dirt and gossip for just a handful of drivers.
If I wanted to know how majority world lives and thinks I would go and sample this information in real world by traveling and talking to different people, and not getting this info from people who have their own agendas to push onto me and who call themselves journalists.
I hear a lot of people say this these days but it doesn't really count for much if you regularly watch Netflix or other ondemand Internet based TV instead.
The difference is that it is totally under our control, and we can select the content (and reject it) at will. The pure lifestyle changes around this (i.e. we as a family would far rather be caught up on other creative endeavours rather than watching TV) have been significant.
You enjoy watching movies, sitcoms, documentaries, etc, on a 27" computer monitor? Just buy a TV and external hard drive, it's so much better watching stuff on 55" TV on a couch...
Also, my couch is a floor. It isn't as glorious to stretch out on as one might think.
But your criticism of television does not support the idea of disengaging from news altogether.
This is what I hear from real experts every single time their subject is dealt with by the news. I've experienced it first hand myself with certain technology-related news where I've been heavily involved in the real thing. So when they report on economics, health or anything else I'm not an expert in, I assume that the real experts are shaking their heads just like I shook mine.
You can learn Arabic or Russian and go to Ukraine or Syria or Iraq and inform yourself talking to the people there, both sides of the story, or you can let the TV media tell you what is happening.
I have done it(I don't know much Arabic and a little Russian but I have traveled there) and it is quite an astonishment that what TV shows you has nothing to do with reality. I remember talking with a Syrian showing me a CNN video from US News of a Syrian manifestation(from natives that were being flood by foreigners with bad intentions), they reduced the audio volume and told everybody the manifestation was from the other side(the side that US was supporting).
The fact is that people that understood Arabic could listen what the protesters were saying and they(CNN) DID NOT CARE.
They did not care because it is a numbers thing, most Americans don't know Arabic, and millions of them will watch the channel and make themselves an idea from the eyes and ears that people in power have chosen for them.
The city where the protesters went into war and was bombarded for years and nobody displayed it on the news. Now it is displayed every single day because the people the US is supporting is losing there. Now it is so important civilians in this city, when for years they simply did not exist.
If you control the perception, you control the emotions that people will feel, and you could make them do exactly what you want. They will even believe they are "free", because they are to behave as they wish, but they are not because emotions are quite automatic.
If my memory serves me, tabloids like The Enquirer have been sitting on news stands for as long as I can remember. So how did this fervor over "fake news" coalesce so quickly and uniformly?
Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate death throes of an outdated and superfluous institution. Don't expect they'll go down without a fight though.
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactur...
Edit: Ironically, that post was doing great until it got flagged.
Edit 2: It has been unflagged
Edit 3: Flagged again.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episo...
Heck, it's basically the non gaming equivalent of the 'gamers are dead' stories that become suspiciously widespread after GamerGate took off.
So far, non-mainstream outlets have proven a whole lot worse. Call me a small-c conservative, but I'm going to keep supporting civil society over the conspiracy theorists.
That's a rather normal phenomenon, sometimes when someone coins a new term, everybody else jumps on the bandwagon.Sometimes the term makes it into the fixed inventory of the language, sometimes the fad goes away. That's as true for "fake news" as it is for "abso-fucking-lutely" or "glashole".
> Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate death throes of an outdated and superfluous institution.
What an utter nonsense! You must have been brainwashed by social media and shitty blogs that sell opinions as news.
There is a fairly good reason why mainstream outlets "move in lockstep with each other": They let one and the same reality dictate their news rather than making it up like the online trolls from St. Petersburg. I'd be rather worried if they didn't "move in lockstep" and each of them was reporting something else as news...
The president elect is a birther and anti-vaxxer. Bannon had a leadership role in Trumps campaign. His cabinet is a clown-car of conspiracy peddlers. Google and Facebook are taking action to squelch fake news. Fake news is a subject of interest to many influential individuals and organizations. If it weren't covered by mainstream news it would be irresponsible.
Do you honestly not see the difference between creating fake stories about celebrities and then creating fake stories about people in the government, stories that end up having far reaching real world effects?
>of an outdated and superfluous institution.
Oh brother. If anything this last year has proven exactly why the publication and editing model should flourish for quite some time. Because as of this year, I guess whatever makes you feel better is clearly more valued over what is actually true (see all the reports from Breitbart and company, especially in regards to the Clinton emails, or even global warming), especially with people who believe that "fake news" is just some kind of conspiracy theory accessory for the "MSM" to keep their grip on the industry.
"Fake news" is just yellow journalism by another name, and "fake news" is "uniformly" being talked about because it became readily apparent over the course of this last year that people believe and act on the information presented from yellow journalism. And _apparently_ for some people any action taken to correct yellow journalism is decried as censorship. Truth is not oppression.
That there is part of the problem. That is a very western phrase that reflects an ingrained system at the root of the problem. Binary is for silicon. There are multiple sides, or there is one. There is almost never exactly two. But we are trained to expect equal time for "both sides". It makes people think they are well-informed, when in reality if you are hearing exactly two stories you are almost certainly being hoodwinked.
This isn't Hotelling. Hotelling occurs where the proponents choose their sides, their stances in a debate. When a news organization wants to inform people that a meteor is heading to earth, picking a pro and con pundit isn't hotelling. That's just manufacturing a controversy where none exists. Note that weather forecasts rarely give "both sides" ... until one wants estimates beyond next month. Then they have to bring in the pro/con people in that manufactured controversy.
A careful citizen should dismiss two-sided debates, or at least realize that "both sides" is a marketing trick. Read the research. Read, and understand, the statistics.
Then you get people who lack critical thinking reading crap published by anonymously owned (read: Russian or Russian sympathizers) "news" websites, and they believe it because, "you need to decide for yourself what you believe" and "everyone lies anyway".
Maybe it's less noticeable in different countries, because Russia is not investing as much into distorting the public opinion there, but in Central and Eastern Europe you can see it quite easily.
>The city where the protesters went into war and was bombarded for years and nobody displayed it on the news. Now it is displayed every single day because the people the US is supporting is losing there. Now it is so important civilians in this city, when for years they simply did not exist.
Reusing old/different footage and claiming it's something else. What else is new?
>The city where the protesters went into war and was bombarded for years and nobody displayed it on the news. Now it is displayed every single day because the people the US is supporting is losing there. Now it is so important civilians in this city, when for years they simply did not exist.
You don't mention any specifics, so it's impossible to disagree.. "Now", what is now? Since when? Bombarded for years? Starting when?
What is this manifestation you speak of, where did it happen?
(I'm non-English speaker, cannot judge, just my opinion).
http://www.imediaethics.org/nbc-today-baltimore-protest-mich...
-From Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 11 June 1807
http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-57...
We have at least a veneer of nonpartisan purpose to the major newspapers of today, although you can argue they still have a bias. Online news/blogs/etc. are more analogous to the newspapers of the early Republic.
Paying attention to current events and bearing witness to some of the darkest aspects of human history is important at a societal level and if you don't think it is important to you personally then consider yourself lucky to live a life where the real world doesn't creep in often. Understanding topics such as why refugees are fleeing conflict, the societal changes due to automation etc, and the consequences of climate change are critical to a healthy and functional nation.
Personally I can't stand the breathless hysteria/sensationalism of most mainstream American media organizations (particularly television) and prefer organizations that favour accuracy and historical context over clickbait.
But, how do you even know what really happens? Mainstream news is ridiculous in its intent because it literally is "if it thinks it stinks, if it bleeds it leads". There is nothing good to get from mainstream news. Nothing. Sliced and diced to the most emotional snippets you could conceive of.
I feel bad for people that just get trampled on from all over the world, but that's as far as I let it go. During the 2nd Bush election I went all out, I was into trying to 'make a difference'. I protested, traveled, got involved with local and national groups, was surveilled, and literally was putting my safety on the line to try to make the world a better place.
In the end, he still got re-elected and some of the most corrupt people in U.S. history continued their rampage. It was bad enough the first time, but the second time completely just blew away my foundation of what I thought was just in the world. I never trusted the news or politicians after that. They are not here for 'us'. They ALL have an agenda whether you like it or not. There is such a disconnect between 'content' and real people - it's pathetic and there's no where that that comes out more than from tv.
After all of this, I've decided to just act locally and contribute to causes that want to fight the good fight but, in my mind, are in for a lot of suffering and struggle (eff, aclu, center for human rights, amnesty, etc). It takes a toll on one when you are struggling and it's nonstop uphill.
My wife and friends are always coming up to me with the latest tragedy that has surfaced on facebook. family members, the latest shooting or crash, or death or whatever. I choose to remove myself from all of this because it does _no good_ to me and for me.
Unless I actually go to those places and involve myself with those struggles (see point 5 in op), then I'm just fooling myself by being 'concerned'.
Tv and news is a waste of precious time and there are much better ways to affect and change the world than being sedentary and 'informed' yet doing nothing.
I can't fix the World or the dark aspects of the human soul, but hopefully made my local area a better place since I dropped-out of the news-cycle a few years ago. I use my former news 'time-budget' to become invoved in Council business, to follow the activities of my local politicians and to just go and do stuff that benefits people around the town.
I feel better informed as a result and I'm no longer surprised and enraged by 'unexpected' changes in my local environment.
I helped to fix a pothole in a local road last week. Utterly irrelevant on a global scale, but then so is a plane crash in Colombia.
Or not, maybe it would be better. Imagine country where people are mindful about their immediate surrounding and don't buy into ideological bullshit sold by mass media. Want to send young men to some war? Well tough luck, if there is no conflict at the doorstep then this move is probably to benefit someone else, not you.
Refugees overflowing streets? Common sense tells you to take a look at what kind of people they are and if they are good and acknowledge their situation and want to better it, then help them. But if they act like arrogant invaders then common sense would be to tell them to bugger off. Yet media adhering to its ideology would tell you that you are wrong to use common sense. That somehow WYSIWYG is not right here and that some abstract oppression these people are fleeting from is more important.
>and the consequences of climate change are critical to a healthy and functional nation
Lets see how in future china deals with climate change as opposed to societies with 'well informed' citizens.
And that in turn leads to negative outcomes.
More authoritarianism, more withdrawal into closed communities, more willingness to vote for leaders who will solve the "terrible state" of the country / world by any means necessary, more enthusiasm for punishment over empathy, more othering of whichever ethic/social group that's currently being blamed for Everything Being Bad.
If you're trying to gain an accurate understanding of the world, starting with sources with an extremely strong incentive to bias the hell out of your worldview is probably not the best way to do it.
And if you're just trying to understand and mentally experience the worst humanity has to offer, then history books have plenty of really horrible shit in them, generally far worse than the 21st century so far (thankfully).
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+sun+sensationalist+hea...
I think on the way to that happening, the world would become a much better place before it gets worse. Only a very tiny percentage of us needs to try to understand events around the world and repeat to peers what they think is worth repeating, then those peers repeat to their peers what they thought was important to hear, and so on.
It's already kind of happening since journalists aren't a big percentage of the population, but instead of filtering out the important stuff, it's what we call the "media circus" and big business.
You are confusing reading/watching the news with being informed. Trusting superficial and biased news is disinformation. Being a witness, a citizen journalist, an activist, and reading books thoroughly is another thing.
I agree it is not a good idea to watch the news. It's probably a good idea to read it.
> To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here
Title is clickbaity, but that's not any commenter's fault.
This is just silly.
> I told them that people in my life would let me know if anything occurred that I needed to know.
This is so true. I told my girlfriend the same thing after she got mad that I quit news and said "Oh, you'll need to know important local news (stabbings, crime in San Francisco, protests for traffic etc).
That 1 time where someone 4 blocks from my home got run over by some dummy doing facebook live in her car while driving, the convenient store guy in my block asked me "Hey, did you hear about that so and so got run over." I said no, but you just told me. :)
* It puts the burden of collecting and summarizing relevant news on others
* You are at the mercy of the grapevine effect, which only gets worse as more and more people take up this solution so your news takes more hops before you receive it
* And, most importantly, your sources are also not getting their news first hand; their sources the very same crappy news outlets that you yourself rejected.
Please don't change the subject to downvotes. The HN guidelines already contain two admonitions against this and I'd like not to add a third.
That's the problem here. The signal-to-noise ratio is too low in the news in general. I've spent the whole last year reading speculation about Clinton's emails, Trump's cabinet picks, and shocking news from "anonymous sources" that turned out to be 99% noise when the final draft of the news came out. Why did I waste so many hours reading baseless speculation masquerading as authoritative information?
I'm not wasting my time on noise anymore.
I don't get sucked in, and also just get an idea of what people think is important that day/week. Usually it is just noise but it can be at least helpful to know when things have happened. The headlines are enough for me.
They're just like other Muslims but they take percepts that are valid in Islam and run with them to the ridiculous extreme.
Same goes for cutting down on Social media or regulating your consumption of news. There is nothing to be gained by turning into a puritan. It makes you feel good about yourself for a while but you're just cutting yourself off from vast dimensions of human experience.
Its possible to read HN once a day just to keep up instead of refreshing it every few hours.
Its possible to stop visiting twitter every hour and perhaps use it a few times a week.
Its possible to restrict your reading to good long form articles in NYT or WaPo or The Economist.
If we started completely cutting out anything and everything that had a remotely negative influence the logical conclusion is that we end up turning into Puritan Wahhabis who don't drink alcohol , ruthlessly suppress sexuality and generally lead colourless lives.
EDIT:
Downvoters , I'd appreciate if you gave your reasons.
That might be partly due to the very nature of social media and news these days being made to be addictive eg. clickbait titles. Making people end up in a loop, without noticing and before they know it they've wasted hours on it or worse created a habit that is hard to control.
For which the only solution seems to be to go cold turkey in that case. As it seems much harder to reduce usage than to stop it entirely. So I guess it's a matter of what stage you identify yourself in, in this news and social media detox.
You could go on a "fast" , ie avoid it for a while to break a destructive dependency but avoiding entirely ?
No thanks.
Its not that you have to ignore all news sources because of the possibility of bias (or easy, emotion filled "emotional truth" nuggets that fill so much of the discourse), but that you should be aware of these issues and react accordingly. Take time to reanalyze whether the narrative being pushed really makes sense. Compare it to other sources and validate the findings.
Don't just throw out everyone and only trust "NYT" or "WaPo" or "Fox News".
From a rational, logical, and chemistry point of view, one cannot have a balanced view or understanding without positives and negatives.
The only thing that makes it work is critical thinking; or at least rational thinking, though rational thinking is easy enough to manipulate by any sophist. Recognizing the forms leads to recognizing the art of sophistry as it occurs. However, emotion is even easier to manipulate and inflame, ridding one of the possibilities of rational thought.
The people I know who are absolute news hounds end up knowing all the talking points of the talking heads, but don't actually think for themselves. I'm on the board of a small prep school and one of the most important things we do is teach critical thinking. This includes analyzing statements from a historical perspective, recognizing that the speaker probably has an agenda and memorization of the logical fallacies.
In the '80s I was a big fan of Rush Limbaugh ... he was entertaining and for the most part, did talk about current events. I felt informed. In '92 when Clinton was elected, his monologue quickly became hateful and negative. My mood was dramatically worse and I became hateful too. Funny since the Clinton years were coincident with a huge boon in my businesses. And then I found myself repeating his talking points without even thinking about it.
Finally I realized that I didn't actually believe much of it ... and when I looked at the vitriol the other side was spouting I didn't believe it either. I think it's pretty important to know the facts of what's happened in the world but you can't do that through news.
Now I completely ignore the news channels and generally skim through headlines. Some headlines are factual while others are purposely skewed to the writer's biases. It's easier to tell that someone has an agenda from the headline and I even occasionally read the first paragraph. I don't miss the period of my life where I was under the influence of the news channels, and I spend the time I've recouped in my community ... I find it easier and more useful to know the pulse of the area where I live.
In the end, it is unlikely that all of us will have an impact that goes beyond our local community. What is the point of endlessly fretting over things far removed from us, and far out of our control? We can't all be heroes, and we can't all be a guiding light for the world, so what can we do?
We can be a force for good in our local community! I think it's the healthiest mindset to have, even if you do want to stay informed about world events.
You need a balance. Neither extreme works.
It's a rather universal principle.
In my experience, the people who actively don't follow any news at all are fully aware of their blindside. They just don't care (or have judged, quite reasonably, that they have more immediate personal concerns)
The worst people are those who are glued to the TV or net, closely watching things as if the future of the world depended on whether they knew politician X was fired right now or five minutes from now. They attach far too much drama and emotional involvement in matters which they have no control over. In addition, they're just as much in a bubble as the ones not engaged at all. The tragedy is that they don't realize it.
If you're in a discussion with somebody who doesn't follow the news, as long as they are reasonable, you can cover common ground fairly quickly, then get to whatever your point/question is. If you're in a discussion with somebody who is glued to the news, you can spend hours teasing out their bias and failing to reach any kind of common ground at all. That's because news promotes rhetoric instead of the dialectic. People are being taught to argue like lawyers over whatever beliefs they have because they spend hours invested in a medium that shows them lawyers arguing about events. They teach themselves how to have a closed mind.
Nope. I'll take a non-news consumer with an open mind over a msm news consumer any day of the week. Life is too short to program yourself to be so hard-headed and impervious to change.
But I think someone's opinion on this will differ depending on where they fit on the political spectrum.
Right-wing thinks MSM has liberal bias - would rather people avoid it.
Left-wing wants people to consume more MSM - vice-versa.
(The two are not remotely the same.)
As a side note, I know precisely zero people who I would describe as "moderate" on the left-right spectrum who are at all enthusiastic about the state of 2016's news media. Of all political groups, I'd say that they're the most likely to be critical of the mainstream media.
A guy like me turns the "news" on and at best it feels like an advertisement wrapped in a reality show. At worst, it feels like a bunch of young children yelling at each other on a playground. There's an infinite amount of noise out there and it's my job to control the tuner and volume buttons.
All that said, I presume the real problem comes into play here when the ill-informed make decisions based on their position without acknowledging the situation.
TV news is the "at worst", but your description of "at best" sums up how I feel about all news better than I could have.
There is something distinctly off-putting about the sheer volume of advertising in news publications. It gives me this subtle sense that to be a "proper citizen" I must: read news; buy things.
I read on Quora from a senior editor at the Economist that the reason they charge the same rate for digital and print subscriptions is that because it's harder to ignore or block the full-page advertisements in the print, they are worth more to the advertiser, and therefore offset the cost of printing and delivering weekly subscriptions.
Isn't it a little weird that we place so much trust in our sources of information which, in turn, (almost) entirely rely on advertising revenue?
However, I also believe that TV news and constant news checking are unnecessary and can make you depressed. You can easily get a wrong perception of mankind in general and the stupidity of other people by consuming too much news. This happened to me recently with news about Trump and the composition of his new government, for example. I genuinely got depressed from this. So I've limited my exposure a bit. It's not as if I won't find out who's in the new government anyway, and I don't need to hear about obviously stupid tweets, deliberate ignorance of facts and involuntary attempts to lead the world to WW3 every day. (What makes me depressed is ignorance, especially deliberate ignorance, not other other political views, and I'm sure I speak for many people in saying so.)
I've also found out that newspapers and their websites are much better than TV channels and their websites, so I'm now surfing to the Washington Post from time to time to keep me informed. Since I'm not living in an English-speaking country, subscribing to a good English international newspaper in paper form is a bit too expensive for me, but I've also found out that the International New York Tribune (formerly International Herald Tribune) is a great printed source for the weekend, and it's available at every international newsstand in the world. It's informative but not so long that you spend a whole afternoon on it. My girlfriend loves it and buys it all the time.
As for a bias of news, sorry I can't confirm that at all. Every news source is and always has been politically biased in one way or another, but in my experience the only people who complain about this are those who are unable to distinguish news from opinion and are heavily biased themselves.
Its important to ask yourself why you trust a certain news outlet.
You can read any reputable well-established newspaper in the world whose language you understand and be well-informed enough for anything except for making particular business decisions. It doesn't matter at all whether the newspaper is right wing and conservative or liberal and progressive. That's because they report the same daily news which is based on the same reality, and any newspaper worth reading clearly distinguishes between opinion and news. I've compared many newspapers during my lifetime, and the only differences between them in the news sections is in the selection (what goes to front, what's on page 3) and some bias in the presentation, and neither small differences in the selection nor any bias in the presentation is of much relevance to any adult with a brain of his own.
The tone of the paper is vastly irrelevant for its news contents, it only influences whether you personally like editorials and invited opinions or not, and these are not news, of course.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with either site, and I do not endorse either site. My opinions are my own.
What does benefit me is what is going on in my local (as in town/municipality) government and community. Living in a European capital, even that is too much. I just don't follow those news either. I do follow cultural events, bird rescue fundraisers, local IT meetups, farmers' markets.
You see, you may be saying I am spectacularly ill-informed by some third-party information that is even less trustworthy than the so called "official channels", however, you probably live in the same sort of informational bubble. You argue with people on Facebook, you read your left or right wing media outlets, you are getting biased google search result and go with those. Maybe you are aware that others are affected by these cultural glass-walls, but not you, since you are aware of these issues. Well, you are probably just another brick in the wall. Sorry, no ad hominem here whatsoever. I simply wish to raise your awareness that
1. On average, you are not better than the average,
2. What you think really matters is probably not what really matters to me.
3. What do you care if some people are oblivious? Chances are, you know nothing about nutrition and go with the usual recommendations, just to end up being fat, diabetic or a cancer patient. What do _I_ care about that, though?
I'll be here, reading books on programming, organic farming, evolutionary biology and micro-brewing fruit wines. Oh yes, and dinosaurs, because dinosaurs and paleontology are real fucking entertaining and interesting to me. You do your thing. But don't force your "informed" standards on other people.
What sort of practical utility do you gain from being "informed" by "the news"? Could you give an example or two of how being informed by the news made you operate differently in your day to day life?
I run a software consultancy based in the UK. I work with a variety of subcontractors, most of whom are based in Europe. The outcome of Brexit might potentially have a significant impact on my way of working with Europeans; I don't think it will, but keeping abreast of that (developing) situation is fairly important to me.
I'm going to Venice on Wednesday. If there had been riots following the outcome of the constitutional referendum, I wouldn't be going to Venice on Wednesday.
And haven't news organizations been known to exaggerate/mischaracterize small peaceful protests as large scale riots? I would think simply looking up "Venice riots" on YouTube and filtering for the last week or month would provide you the information you'd need rather than watching a talking head read a teleprompter while the same short video clip plays on repeat.
I make rather a point of saying "I don't know much about that" when the topic of current affairs that I'm not following come up.
Then again, that's partially because when I do want to know about something, I tend to deep-dive on it (https://medium.com/im-trying-to-fact-check-brexit). And it's largely because many of my friends are spectacularly highly informed on anything they're likely to comment on, and so any time I do slip and attempt to sound informed on something I'm not, I have about a 50% chance of sounding like a complete idiot.
So this may be much easier to do in my social circle.
I guess I can see how being unusually well informed in news relevant to a very specific economic sector might help one make a good investment choice or something, especially if you get that information before most others do, somehow. But general news? I think it's very unusual for that to improve one's life in any real way, especially compared to the time it takes. Knowing in detail the daily developments of e.g. the war in Syria or Trump's cabinet picks is of little more personal use than knowing who's backstabbing whom on Days of Our Lives. It's entertainment or a fairly low-value hobby, even when the reporting's well-done.
Do you want to know about awful stuff people are doing to each other across the planet or spend an extra half hour on your pet woodwork project?
Choose the project most of the time and you'll likely be happier, though less informed. Why is it so important to be constantly reminded how awful humanity is every few minutes?
I'm a technology enthusiast, so I would rather read articles on that.
I also feel much happier when not informed about the politics about my country.
Besides, I don't know for how long mass media has existed in its entirety, but TV only existed for maybe 60 years. Before that we managed just fine without it and I think we'll manage just fine in the future as well. We'll find other ways to connect with matters we care about, which is the basis of news anyway.
When things such as what we need to spend our time on become obligatory, and enforced by social pressure, people will feel entrapped sooner or later. That's what's happening now. The media keeps dividing us into so many categories, and then passes judgment on all of us. To them, no one can escape, no one is free, no one is good - it's the only thing that sells. We're all stampeded on by editorials and pounded on by inducing guilt and forcing ads. Conflict is a cash cow.
Personally I think that the importance of news is terribly overrated - I've yet to hear of any reason for why it should be important that resonates with me. As I've said, I've tuned out for many years.
That being said — as it, despite my intentions, might be considered a plug because I am a volunteer with them (i.e. I am not benefitting from more listeners, though do get a kick out of seeing the numbers increase), it feels more appropriate to detach this bit from my parent response.
In the UK we didn't get voting rights for all males until 1918, and voting rights for women until 1928. The US didn't get votes for women until 1920.
Before then, news had very limited popular political influence.
With the internet, we're increasingly seeing automated and industrialised fake "news" generation used for political leverage at the expense of impartial reporting of objective fact.
For most of the things we do, we don't need to weigh in the geopolitical consequences in the other side of the world. Common sense works most of the time. The news media are in continuous war with common sense.
So based on that, you could make a strong case that following the news will in the vast majority of cases turn an uninformed, dogmatic Democrat into an informed, eloquent Democrat, and same for Republicans, and therefore won't affect their vote. (Again, in the overwhelming majority of cases, not in all cases).
Then there's the issue of media quality. Is CNN high quality journalism? How much time did they devote to Yemen, then? (on the TV channel, that is) Is Trump eating KFC with a fork more important? The media blames Trump for this, but their ratings-obsession is their own responsibility.
The issue of Trump's phone call to Taiwan is a great example.
On CNN, you get pundit hysterics about Trump's "incompetence".
On Stratfor, you get an insanely good article[0] that goes in-depth on the historical context behind the US-Taiwan "non-relationship", the reasons why Trump "highly" likely planned the phone call carefully, why the Taiwan issue is a red-line issue for China, and why this play on Trump's part could signal a shift to put China back in their place. As Stratfor says: "In the Track II talks between U.S. and Chinese figures, it isn't uncommon for the [Chinese] to berate their American counterparts while the former offer declarations of cooperation and critiques of their own government's policies", so this Trump move may bring much-needed leverage back to the US.
This is just an example of very high-quality vs trash media coverage. Avoiding the mainstream press and seeking specialized press seems like a basic requirement if you want to be informed.
There are 2 "problems":
- People that stay in their bubble and only follow biased news (which includes mainstream news, which has a mediocrity bias. Most people are in this category)
- People that choose to follow almost no news, because there's no person al benefit (after all, if following the news doesn't directly earn you more money, you're wasting your time. This category includes probably quite a few people on HN, but few nationally)
The former cannot be "solved" without censorship. The latter is what very few people talk about, and it does not want to be solved.
We all want to live in a society where most people are informed, except the personal ROI of it is substantially negative. The smart choice is to be underinformed, if you value your time. The people claiming "we all have a societal duty to stay informed" never bring this up, and never offer a resolution to this dilemma. Kantian ethics (what I do is moral if and only if the world would still be fine if everyone did the same as me) disregards the fact that nobody wants to be the sucker.
[0]: https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/taiwan-trump-and-telephone-h...
But I realized that I would still read articles based on whatever was in my social media feed, and that tended to gravitate towards the affect-driven news that I fled when I stopped watching TV news.
So recently I subscribed to a good old-fashioned newspaper (NYTimes). It kills trees, it's not real-time, it gets wet outside. But I get to read news in a different mind-set:
- I found I'm now reading news to understand, not to prepare a witty reply/comment.
- I enjoy the dryness of the paper medium as it further decreases the emotional appeal.
- Op-Eds/columns are clearly marked as such; I find the distinction more obvious than online where the context of "today's paper" doesn't really exist. I still read them but I'm placing their contents in a better context.
- Reading the news has become more efficient. Instead of using news as a time-filler between holes in my day (and invariably getting distracted), it's a one-time review that takes just a few minutes depending on how much I want to read. It's counter-intuitive but the by-product is that now I'm happy to ignore news articles when they come across my feed online (unless it's some specialty topic). That ends up being a time-saver.
Because of this, they only get summaries of the most important things that have happened, and they are left with plenty of time for scientific pursuits.
"There are people who would hardly agree with you," replied Conway with a smile. "Quite a lot of things have happened in the world since last year, you know."
"Nothing of importance, my dear sir, that could not have been foreseen in 1920, or that will not be better understood in 1940."
"You're not interested, then, in the latest developments of the world crisis?"
"I shall be very deeply interested—in due course."
-- Lost Horizon, James Hilton.
This is similar to the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect, where famed quark discoverer Murray Gell-Mann opens the newspaper and reads a physics article. He is disgusted at the lack of research, the blatant misinformation, and random theories disguised as respectable reporting. Then he flips to another section - like politics or war - and reads it as if it was somehow more accurate than the nonsense he just read.
Just a simple example from today: The CIA's claims regarding Russian election hacking. I'm the CEO of a cyber security company and I'd hate to think what would happen if someone asked me about that and I wasn't aware of it. It's not just CEO's that need to stay current. If you're in PR, policy, marketing, communications, law, research - all of those professionals benefit in many ways by knowing what is going on right now.
Our company heard about the Mossack Fonseca data breach earlier this year and went and figured out a likely vector they used to gain entry within 24 hours and published. I had journalists from the AP on the phone within a few hours.
Certainly there are jobs that can get away with a news blackout. But I'd consider carefully if you're one of those. And I must agree that many days I wish I could just turn it off. The signal to noise ratio, particularly on the mainstream news outlets, is atrocious.
Here's my daily routine:
skim thehill.com, politico.com, reddit.com/r/news for headlines
zerohedge.com when I want to see what's going on in right-wing land
newsblok.com if I want to see what the crazies are talking about without giving them clicks
thenation.com and theatlantic.com to see what liberals are pissed about today
slate.com for mainstream opinion pieces
verysmartbrotha.com for a laugh
salon.com and rawstory.com for the lulz
truthdig.com and counterpunch.org for neoliberal bashing essays
cnbc.com to check the markets
Its front page is also very information dense, so it's a lot more efficient than hitting all those sites individually. I believe I've seen content referenced there from most those sites you've listed.
I didn't know that site and just had a look at it. I found that really disappointing! All "news" for today are about Trump and nothing else:
Sunday, December 11
- Trump Honeymoon Begins: Confidence in Economy Booming | Cohen & Thomas, NYT
- Why "Trump Boom" Is a Real Possibility | Kenneth Rogoff, Project Syndicate
- Here's How to Drain the Swamp | Sen. Cruz & Rep. DeSantis, Washington Post
- Forget Populism--Trump's Picking Orthodox Republicans | Doyle McManus, LA Times
- How the Democratic Party Lost Its Way | Thomas Mills, Politico
- Obama Preaches Empathy; Trump Projects It | Kyle Smith, New York Post
- Donald Trump and the Art of Getting It Done | Monica Crowley, Washington Times
- Why Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide | Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker
This is "news" without information. The worst kind of news. "Information" would mean: Choose a different topic where you can actually write something informative about.
But those articles importantly are a mix of left & right viewpoints in 1 place. Neither the left (panic & planning, and how the right is wrong) nor the right (touting future Trump accolades, and how the left is wrong) are shutting up about him, because it is a very volatile moment in US politics.
However, there's also the attack in Turkey, other post-election matters, Saudi Arabia, common core education, campus echo chambers, and other non-Trump topics represented in the front page list. The overall variety will return back to normal in time.
we really need to start blasting clickbait as clickbait. They are not going to self moderate.
- edx.org
- coursera.org (now less that it has changed)
There are others like Udacity but I found that I ended up taking almost all courses on only these two sites.
Over 70 courses thus far, most of them completely outside my own field (I'm an IT consultant with a CS masters). Currently open courses (all edX):
- Soil4Life: Sustainable Soil Management (https://www.edx.org/course/sustainable-soil-management-soil-... - I want to learn something substantial about agriculture, not a lot of courses compared to other subjects but this seems like a good start)
- MITs truly excellent Introduction to Biology - The Secret of Life (again, I had to stop in the middle last time I took it): https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-...
- First Nights: Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring: Modernism, Ballet, and Riots (https://www.edx.org/course/first-nights-igor-stravinskys-rit...)
Examples from the past: Western Civilization: Ancient and Medieval Europe, Pet Birds 101: Introduction to Avian Care and Medicine for the Pet Bird Enthusiast, Medical Neuroscience (huge course - >30 hours lecture videos, Coursera), A Global History of Architecture, Cellular mechanisms of brain function, Human Anatomy, Introduction to Physiology, Principles of Biochemistry, Solid State Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, Statistics and R for the Life Sciences, Networks, Crowds and Markets, Introduction to Big Data with Apache Spark, Vocal Recording Technology, Horse Nutrition, and many more.
I think this is closer to what the article advocates. You just replaced relatively shallow news sources for others.
Try taking some courses. I have the advantage to work from home, I know if I worked 9-5 in an office I would be way too exhausted to do much of the above. But you can still find pleasurable easy courses like the History of Architecture or the entire First Nights series about five pieces of classical music which don't take much mental effort. Each time I read news now it feels like eating a McDonalds meal when you are actually used to real food. It keeps your mind occupied but it feels like there are no "nutrients" (in the news), nothing of substance.
As a side note, the other more fun yet still kinda learning use of my time has been to watch a few older Japanese shows - not the crazy all-over-the-place stuff they have today. For example, Musashi (2003). It's fun to watch and at the end of every episode they talk about a site in Japan where Musashi traveled in real life. I find this type of show enriching. Another good one is a show called Change (from 2008) which is again Japanese about a young man randomly becoming prime minister of Japan. The show again discusses the intricacies of Japanese politics in a funny way but with a big dose of the real issues in Japan (e.g., the small number of young people vs the old).
Another good take is N. Taleb who contends that news contains "negative information" in that it makes you stupider. Much news is just noise on top of the signal.
Can anyone recommend such a weekly or monthly review? One that isn't particularly ideological. It would save so much time.
I find the Economist suspicious because no names are given for articles, and they contradict themselves every couple of issues. Well they used to about 4yrs ago when I stopped reading it.
For immediate news on whatever happening is going on I have a 4chan app as it's surprisingly an accurate source for unfolding events (Sam Hyde memes aside) and I can quickly regex the content. I also read the Syrian /sg/ general thread to get the other side of the war there as Syrians often post to it.
I try and find a book for anything else, Princeton University Press is great for this.
English version can be found at https://mondediplo.com/
The Economist is good, but it's like the capitalist's NPR. Good content, but it gets a little preachy.
Also, if you are concerned by a topic, say war in Syria, just get your meat from Wikipedia article, it's not perfect but it beats all other info sources by very far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Syrian_Civil_War
It's worth noting that Wikipedia has collectively decided to call this conflict a "civil war", which is in itself a political judgment. There is mention in the lead paragraph of the other term being used to describe the Syrian conflict, which is "proxy war". I would prefer if this page were called something more neutral, maybe just "Syrian Conflict of 2011".
How do you start.
Better is to just exclusively use Hacker News as your news source. Important political or disaster related news shows up on the front page of HN when it happens (big earthquakes, presidential election winnings), otherwise more localized stuff is hidden. The news that does make the front page here is mostly relevant to technology, which is what most here care about.
I read Hacker News and local town news for news. Good enough and I miss nothing important.
There was a time when I got my news from the BBC website (I have never really watched any TV). It was very interesting, I heard a lot that I wouldn't have otherwise heard - but in the end I used up hours of time without truly learning anything. Nowadays, I get a daily news digest via email; just one short paragraph telling what has happened and where (takes about two minutes to read). I have also subscribed to a respected national weekly newspaper that doesn't so much report news as comment on current developments (takes about four hours to read).
This combination of small daily updates plus detailed weekly analysis is working out very well for me. I stay abreast of current events while not wasting any time on half-baked articles, but also don't miss out on thought-provoking quality journalism. Not a bad situation, really.
Nina: We find our viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs. What that means is a victim, or victims, preferably well off and white, injured at the hands of the poor or minority.
Lou Bloom(Jake Gyllenhaal): Just crime?
Nina: No, accidents play, cars, busses, trains, planes, fires
Lou Bloom: But bloody
Nina: Well, graphic, the best and clearest way that I can phrase it to you, Lou, to capture the spirit of what we air is think of our newscast as a screaming woman, running down the street with her throat cut.
Lou Bloom: I understand. "
~15 years ago, we abandoned this to spend our free time sharing Buzzfeed quizzes with one another.
- US TV news: hopelessly biased and sensational, sometimes hysterical.
- US newspapers: outside of the tabloids, generally serious and reputable. Ethics and integrity are taken seriously within the profession (even if not always adhered to).
- UK national newspapers: hopelessly biased, shrieking headlines, foaming-at-the mouth hysteria, click-bait headlines galore. Self-centred, nasty, unpleasant, possibly the most racist press in Europe.
- UK TV news: far from perfect, but strives for impartiality, balance and even-handedness
- UK radio news (BBC dominates): possibly better than TV news because you don't get the emotive visuals. (But, of course, sometimes pictures can convey the magnitude or seriousness of an event more than just words.) Also, unlike TV, you can access BBC radio news wherever you are in the world for free.
Elsewhere on the BBC Radio network, Radio 5 live does a good job with its rolling news coverage, the BBC World Service has fantastic features (I enjoy their technology programmes Click and Tech Tent), and the local radio stations are sometimes the only place you'll find decent coverage of local news.
As you point out, the BBC does dominate, although I have a fondness for LBC and talkRADIO, too.
> UK TV news: far from perfect,
> but strives for impartiality,
> balance and even-handedness
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/86307/b...
But if you read a US Newspaper daily, is is ridiculously biased. The longer form investigative reporting articles are usually outstanding though.
It's very hard to find impartial news outlets that aren't just pandering to confirmation bias, or that don't have an agenda. Sucks about all the competition for attention on the internet... people realized that they can catch more bugs with honey, and so they just tell their audiences what they want to hear.
At the end of the three weeks I was excited to go online and see what I had missed. I found that I had not missed a single thing worth knowing about in the long term. All the energy I would have spent on the news in that time would have been for nothing.
I am back to being a daily news consumer but I wonder how much time I am wasting.
https://www.amazon.com/How-News-Makes-Dumb-Information/dp/08....
Excerpt from desc of the book:
Sommerville argues that news began to make us dumber when we insisted on having it daily. Now millions of column inches and airtime hours must be filled with information--every day, every hour, every minute. The news, Sommerville says, becomes the driving force for much of our public culture. News schedules turn politics into a perpetual campaign. News packaging influences the timing, content and perception of government initiatives. News frenzies make a superstition out of scientific and medical research. News polls and statistics create opinion as much as they gauge it. Lost in the tidal wave of information is our ability to discern truly significant news--and our ability to recognize and participate in true community.
This is something I heard mentioned a long time ago specifically relating to creative ideas. The concept was that you shouldn't rush to tell people about a new idea because that expression of it serves as a form of release.
Lots of wasted "brain" time.
[1] In fields I know it's completely useless to listen. Makes you wonder about other fields too .. It feels like entertainment rather than information.
ps: I'll add the neurotic swing of medias. So many crysis (greece, ...) you hear about for a month constantly. Then nothing. No follow up or so rarely. It just doesn't matter what they say.
Personally, for anything international and important I like to mix BBC (known bias), Al Jazeera International (different known bias), and Economist (explicit bias, in-depth analysis). Your tastes may differ.
> Their selections exploit our negativity bias.
Which is true of a whole heck of a lot more than just mainstream news. Some people go overboard and try to get rid of all negative influences in their lives, but that's just going from one extreme to another.
A lot of social media is negative - because controversy inspires discussion, discussion means engagement, engagement means value.
There's too much focus in online engagement in the form of controversy and I'm of the opinion that it is a very bad thing. There's all kinds of room for innovation and disruption in the form of solutions that create healthier online engagement.
That is a bit extreme but it is true that very few people actually try to learn about things that the news makes them concerned about. That said, I do record the news on my DVR, skip to the weather forecast and then fast through the sports highlights. That way when I go to the office if I'm asked about how the local team did or did I see that move or play I won't be completely clueless. And I don't leave without rain gear if its going to rain. Those are pieces of information I can use.
You have not had to do much about what's in the news because your demographic have been disproportionately media savvy.
The article argues that you are better off 'switching off' from the media because you won't be doing anything about any of it anyway, other than having uninformed water cooler conversations.
The truth is, for the vast majority most of the news that's been happening for the vast majority of anybody's life, it's not worth doing anything about it, including investing the time to read books on the topics. Because, honestly, most of it is of no consequence to us, either way. And that's because the politicians know that people like us read the news and and are willing to spam social media and wreck their election chances at the slightest provocation, so policies that are against our interests are pre-filtered.
But it doesn't hold that this will always be true. If you and people like you grow complacent and block out the news altogether, one day you might notice that laws have been passed that oppress your demographic and your demographic alone. Because you didn't protest and the politicians know you wouldn't protest, because you switched off and they know that too.
This requires no ill-will on their part. It's just that their optimization function for re-election requires balancing the interests of only those who are willing to do something to protect their interests. Which necessarily requires them to be at least minimally informed. And for this, partial and shallow information is a lot better than no information at all.
The danger isn't that you end up 'voting wrong'. The danger is you'll stay home the day everybody else votes for the stormtroopers to kick your door in and take all your stuff.
One way to be better informed would be to read a daily digest of world history and contemporary geography. I often watch a german/french short TV show called "Le dessous des cartes" (translates to "Under the Maps"). This show is fabulous, because it explain a lot of political, economical and geographical context to explain the world and specific countries and their problems. It's backed up by scientific data, but is also able to do some geo-political analysis. I have not found any equivalent in the Anglo-saxon world.
Once you know about the basics of what countries have what regimes, their economies, their history, you realize you learn nothing by reading the news.
[...]
> One way to be better informed would be to read a daily digest of world history and contemporary geography
Wow, this is really strange. It seems you are so bombarded by minutely news, that daily news appear slow and well-thought to you?
A weekly summary is more than enough for most events. Let the dust settle. Give the journalists (and Wikipedians) some time to do their research and investigation. Same for politicians, firefighter, scientists, lawyers, judges or whoever is also involved.
The first days after and important event are full of false claims, mostly by accident, simply because nobody really knows. No earler than a week later (sometimes it takes a month or more!) the facts and non-facts are mostly separated. But then, nobody cares anymore.
If you delay the "news", you get to know from the event, but also get a well-informed picture, without the useless crap of the first minutes, hours and days after the event.
Example: http://www.arte.tv/guide/en/067846-003-A/mapping-the-world-i...
Search for "mapping the world" on the arte.tv main page.
(Celebrities, ok, maybe, but random people?)
Because it is your civic responsibility to care that such things are happening in your community, and to allocate your political activity, voting, and charitable giving in a way that you believe will mitigate that suffering.
Because if everyone said, "sometimes humans behave badly; why should I care?" we'd be living in a hellscape.
Says who? Where is that written?
I couldn't care less about such problems in my community. I pay my taxes so the city/county can hire people to solve these issues. My politicians have little to no competition so voting for who's in office is largely meaningless in my case.
Why should I spend my time, mental and emotional energy on "the news" when this offers zero immediate benefit to me? Even during watercooler talk if someone says "did you hear about x?" I can reply "no, please tell me about it" without losing any face.
I've been thinking about deleting news apps from my phone lately because I realized I did not actually enjoy or benefit from reading what's going on in Us politics or international affairs. This article cinched the deal. If something is really important then I'll read about it here, on reddit's FP or hear it from my friends/colleagues. Everything else is just noise.
If there is violence in my local community, then its realistic that I could affect some level of change there. For example, I could join a neighbourhood watch, work with local police etc. Help fund a youth club.
On the contrary, if I stay informed on as much snippets of murder, deceit and corruption that happen globally, pretty soon I will feel overwhelmed and rendered powerless.
Knowing about a drug murder in Mexico or a child slavery in north Korea, is not something I can do anything about, apart from feel depressed.
Fear and drama brings views and clicks.
There were a couple of moments when i was exposed to news. I couldn't believe it's this much manipulated and in your face sensationalist. Watching this everyday must be toxic as hell.
I spend lots of time on the internet though, so it's not like am disconnected. I just dodge the most vulgar of manipulations (i hope).
A few other things the author failed to note.
1. News delivery requires emotional engagement by the audience to keep them consuming and coming back. That means fear or people arguing. If you can get people arguing about things people are afraid of? Even better.
2. Investigative and beat reporters are being eliminated wholesale. Political reporters are the ones left. This means news outlets tend to tell stories in political terms -- even stories that may be technical in nature. Everything becomes politics. (Which we can then slot up people to fight about!)
3. Best form of journalism? Opinion pieces. That's because opinion pieces are required to show bias up front, have a thesis and some kind of logical structure to support that thesis, and provide contextual details from news and history as part of the argument. These details provide the context completely absent from most msm news sources.
4. Anything that can be used to drive engagement _will_ be used to drive engagement. Disgusting pictures, sexual titillation, mesmerizing graphics, misleading headlines... it's all fair game. This means that "fake news" is a sliding scale. On one end we have people admitting their bias and trying to report anyway, even if what they have to say is boring. On the other end we have people who have a bias and motives that are completely unknown to us trying to create any kind of content required to get us clicking.
Quitting news is probably the easiest thing to do to get a boost in mental health, and as long as you love reading, ironically you'll actually end up much more informed than before you quit.
I think keeping up with current affairs is important. You need to understand the world in order to participate in it.
Here's some reasons why you should follow current affairs: so you can be a more informed voter; so you can held safeguard the democracy you benefit from; so you can be aware of threats to your livelihood and social environment; so you can make informed decisions about how you live your life (are there particular charitable causes that need my time or money right now?); so you understand the politics of situations when you travel; etc etc.
I think what most people mean when they say they don't like the news is that they can't stand 24 hour news, or find it too depressing, or too much of a distraction. But those things are artefacts of how you consume the news, not the concept of following world events itself.
After following current affairs avidly since being a teenager, I would recommend subscribing to the Economist and also regularly reading a left-leaning outlet (I read the Guardian, it's better than most). I'd also recommend listening to a sophisticated radio station (Radio 4 in the UK; I believe NPR is good for the US, although I'm not an expert), and less frequently watching high-quality news coverage (Ch 4 news or the Andrew Marr show in the UK). Combine that with a general scan of other sites like the BBC, NYT, Al-Jazeera, etc. etc. to ensure you're not missing any major stories. Spend some time understanding the story of the world.
Incidentally, one really nice consequence of staying informed is when you meet people from other countries. Just last night I met a bartender from Columbia and he was impressed with my understanding of the political situation, the FARC guerrillas, the referendum etc. ... it provided a good starting point, and then he gave me a more detailed insider's view.
My news sources: NYT, BBC, CBC, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star. I'm Canadian, as you might be able to tell.
Sometimes I read what Brookings puts out, but it's important to keep in mind their biases as a think tank.
However, I don't think refraining from the news will solve these issues.
I think you don't need to read the news every day.
I think each person needs to diversify its consumption. IMO you can rely on any single source anymore. I'm not saying you need 100 different sources. But I think you should be actively jumping around to see what other outlets are saying.
Finally, although people should have opinions about a wide range of subjects, I think people need to realize that - a lot of the time - they just shouldn't have an opinion on an issue because they're not qualified to really make an informed one. In sum, opinions are cheap; be more open-minded.
Sometimes when I'm in McDonald's or such places and I glance over their TV to see CNN running, I really wonder why in the world people spend their time watching these things.
Well, I have on multiple occasions gone as far as to not read the news for many days through my RSS (where I have all the sources of the world). That would make you feel even a lot better.
Aside from all the advantages listed there (all true) I'd say that the only disadvantage of not "watching" the news is, that you may miss out on the moving video scenes of some of the most iconic events in history, because TV repeats these things. But even that is not really a disadvantage.
This seems like a bootstrapping problem. How do you know what issues you should study up on. As a thought experiment, let's imagine a person that is completely ignorant of the news. How would they even know that Syria is worth researching without stumbling upon it by accident or getting input from another person that consumes news?
I think the pledge here is for better news and not for no news. I strongly believe that staying informed about what's going on in the world has value. It builds empathy and curiosity about different cultures and problems other people may have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glnYs7Fz0SM
As for the "concern" topic. I believe it's an evidence that you have to do something about it. But first, one must seek out the truth just as Socrates advised us millennias ago. Living comfortably is just not possible in an unexamined life because we are by nature rational beings. You can probably ignore, as they say, ignorance is bliss, but only until it hits.
Corollary: retweeting about being concerned also does nothing. That is, retweeting about climate change won't reduce emission. It might feel good but does nothing. Retweeting about homelessness and telling everyone to be concerned about it does nothing to clothe, provide shelter or food. The article mentions about a substitute effect and I think it is even strong when it comes to spreading concern via social media, there it feels even more like "doing something".
There are plenty of other venues for that.
Now, what if everyone was selectively ignorant regarding news? Public opinion is a major deterrent for a lot of things. In great part net neutrality has been maintained thanks to pushback from the community. That is only one example, there are many many more.
* Buy an Ouya (I was a kicktstarter supporter!)
* Buy an older (non-smart) LCD flat screen TV
* Download BBC documentaries
Never have to watch news and ads again! And also you are getting to choose what you want to watch and when!
And seriously, what beats watching "Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity -- Jim Al-Khalili BBC Horizon" and geek out!
"Media does not spread free opinion; It generates opinion" --Oswald, 1918 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West
I think the PBS Newshour has them beat. NPR's Morning Edition is slightly more liberal.
I haven't felt that my news are spun to be sensationalist, have a negative bias etc.
I watch public service news mostly. Do americans feel this way about C-Span or PBS?
Can anyone suggest one?
It might be because a right-wing government is more likely to make cuts in funding of a public broadcaster than the left. I have not thought the reason why it is in depth though. I wonder if you have an opinion?
Real perspective and information is nearly impossible to get from for-profit sources. It's not really what they peddle, but rather sizzle and shock value.
Yes, I have long wanted, and still want, to know what is important, both to me personally and more generally, about what is going on in the world so still make efforts to be so "informed". Then, over time, I went through much of the negative views about news in the OP: (1) One summer while in college, I was with my parents in DC and read The Washington Post, a lot of it, everyday and at the end of the summer concluded that I'd learned next to nothing and 99 44/100% had just wasted time. (2) Later, one day I counted and found that, in trying to be informed, I was getting 22 print periodicals, concluded that even the 22 were not telling me much of value, and cut way back. (3) I happened to notice in an Andy Hardy movie from the 1930s that then, too, apparently the movie makers believed that their audience would accept that the news was junk information. (4) I have left over from the past three quite good TV sets and with my phone and Internet service have some TV service for no extra charge. Still, I have no TV set connected to a cable or any other source and haven't watched TV in years with one exception: I tried to watch the first Republican debate on TV; mostly that was a flop. I watched the debate later on the Internet and got and read a transcript -- much better.
For the mainstream media, say AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, Boston Globe, LAT, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, Slate, Salon, Huffpo, Business Insider, and more, I have a triage:
(i) I am willing to glance at the headlines if only to see what nonsense the MSM is pushing onto the public now. And if there really is a big story, say, a nuke exploded somewhere, then I will want to know and likely that will be in the headlines. Also I get some lessons by example in, say, PR nonsense from some experts in getting attention from even usually next to nothing in meaningful content! Like in the remark about writing news stories of the reporter in the original version of the movie The Thing, if the real story is not good, then he "will make it good". So, the news distorting the truth is an old story. I also learn about "the common man in the street" -- from the fact that millions of people watch that stuff -- maybe the most important thing can learn from watching the news is about people from the fact that each day hundreds of millions of people pay attention to that stuff!
(ii) Any article written by a reporter or news organization, e.g., AP, I nearly always refuse to take seriously or even read at all anymore. From my huge sample of such articles I did read in the past, I assume that such an article fails even common high school term paper writing standards for meaningful, trustworthy content and that it is likely some or all of uninformed, misinformed, biased, and deliberately distorted, fabricated, or lying. I say that such articles are (borrowing from the Bogart movie The Maltese Falcon), with bitter contempt, by newsies and nearly always refuse to read them or, if read them for some special reason, flatly refuse to take the content at face value.
(iii) I am eager to pay attention to news stories on topics I'm interested in and signed by people with high credibility. Mostly for such an article, I keep a copy on my computer with a reference to the source and with an abstract and an entry in an index.
I believe that staying "informed" is important: E.g., here in the US we just had an election for POTUS. IMHO, the two main candidates were very different and promised significantly different, better/worse, results for the US and even my own life.
So, first, I tried to say informed and, to some extent, more superficial than I would like, did. And by watching the campaigns, the candidates, and the reactions of the newsies and citizens, I did get some education in such things -- I got some more insight into people, personalities, politics, e.g., stuff I didn't learn much about studying mathematics!
And, second, I got involved by practicing my writing and posting on-line -- so, I tried to do better as a US citizen.
So, sure, now I get essentially all my news from the Internet. One important approach is to use HN as a filter to find more important content.
Here at HN, often there are references to articles at the NYT. Unless such articles appear to be signed by people with credibility and independent of the NYT, I flatly, automatically refuse to read them. I have, maybe with one exception a decade, zip, zilch, and zero respect for anything the NYT thinks or believes.
The Internet permits a news organization, maybe just some one person, to reach nearly everyone who might be interested in content from that person. From that fact, I am guessing that the Internet -- that does permit deeper presentations of information -- is the key to an irresistible, radical transformation of public understanding and effectiveness in the US democracy.
So, net, with some nuance, I disagree with some of the OP and conclude that the news and staying informed, are important.
I like your idea of archiving and summarizing articles you find interesting and meaningful. I've thought of doing something similar but, like many things, have never gotten around to it.
But the NYT is to me the worst of the sores on my back side from the media. I recently sent a carefully drafted letter to the publisher of the NYT explaining my complaints with his work and saying his paper was "dead to me". It is.
I would applaud the many links at HN to seemingly interesting NYT stories except, as I explained, I no longer can take seriously anything published by the NYT that is not signed by someone with their own credibility and independent of the NYT. As I explained to the NYT publisher: His paper has long tried to mislead me; I hate that; and they can't do it anymore because I just won't read their articles. I won't do it. It's over for me. I won't let myself pay any attention to their stuff. I have no more patience with their deceptions. I have better alternatives. Life is too short to do more mud wrestling with NYT nonsense; it's better just to ignore it. It's kaput for me. I can't know what the NYT has in mind for me, if anything, but I know I don't want it. Much the same for the rest of the MSM that, however, has been claimed, used to follow the NYT as their highly esteemed, revered leader.
Memo
To: The NYT and MSM
Subject: The Internet
Body: The Internet is here! Now even just one person alone can publish for 100 million readers without even a square inch of paper or a single drop of ink. Might want to think about the consequences of that situation.
Possible consequences: Lots of fragmentation of the media business with something for everyone and next to nothing for everyone -- that is, for each reader, there is at least one good publication, and there is no single publication for all or even nearly all the readers. Anger a reader, e.g., can anger some readers by misleading them, and they can be gone in a single click.
> I like your idea of archiving and summarizing articles you find interesting and meaningful.
For me, the keys are: (1) Good exploitation of the hierarchical file system on my computer, HPFS on Windows. (2) A good text editor that has a powerful macro language (KEdit). (3) A dirt simple way to jump to (go to) the more heavily used parts of the hierarchical file system tree -- a command line macro G <token> where there is an environment variable of the form <token>.MARK (set from a file a maintain with my editor when a console window opens) with value the tree name of the a particular heavily used part of the tree. E.g., I can type
G ASP
thus make current a file system directory with such information on some hundreds of references on Microsoft's ASP.NET software for building Web pages. For the software for my startup, I have now well over 5000 articles of technical documentation, and I can find and get to each one quickly. Indeed, commonly my source code comments have my file system tree names of relevant documentation, and one keystroke in my editor invokes a macro that displays the documentation. Right, the editor macro reads and parses the line with the tree name, keeps the tree name, and discards the comment delimiters, right, with the comment delimiter tokens determined from the file type.
Then some more command line scripts and editor macros make it easy to grab and save content and abstract and index it.
There is one more in a sense above all the rest: I have a little command line script FACTS that basically just uses the editor to open a file FACTS.DAT (the script does check to see if the file is already open and, if so, does not open it again and instead un-hides it and raises it to the top of the Z-order). Then this file has little notes, often as short as a Tweet. Each note has, right, some key words. Usually there are links as Internet URLs or local file system tree names. So, there are phone numbers, e-mail addresses, user IDs, passwords, street addresses, open hours of businesses, just things I want to remember, etc.
What is astounding is (1) how useful it is and (2) how few bytes it has. So, since 9/2/2005, the file has 2,128,672 bytes and 3811 entries, e.g., an average of about one entry a day. It is shocking what an effective memory aid that little thing is and even suggests that maybe real AI will need much less memory than one might guess. So, right, I have a few, simple editor macros to help me use that file, and with only the 2,128,672 bytes the simplest, least efficient text search and select works fine.
However, I find that I even need to take a break from non-commercial news from time to time.
US news is what the Enquirer was in the 80s. PBS news hour and BBC America are good.
This.
1) You feel better
2) You were never actually accomplishing anything by watching the news
3) Most current-events-related conversations are just people talking out of their asses
4) There are much better ways to “be informed”
5) “Being concerned” makes us feel like we’re doing something when we’re not
My own personal experience: I quit watching the news the day after the 2016 Election ended. I felt so ill the next day I couldn't even get out of Bed. So I googled stuff on "how to stop watching news" and came across this post by Buffer Co-founder Joel Gasgoine => http://joel.is/the-power-of-ignoring-mainstream-news/
It completely opened my eyes. Ever since I quit the news (everything incl. google news, reddit, huffpo 538, etc etc, except HN of course :) I've been feeling the following +ve effects
1) I am generally more happy and mindful, less stressed
2) I've finally made the most progress on my side-project that was languishing for years.
3) I am more mindful and get more things that are in my control, done. Related graphic => "Circle of Control vs Circle of Concern" http://www.jdroth.com/images/circle-concern-control.jpg
4) I smile more. I think this is because I finally realized that I can neither control, nor contain all the bad things that happen around the world, that we read about in the news.
Don't let the new "wash over you". Take control of the things you need to get done, for you and your family and friends and career and retirement and life, and start hacking away at them using all the time you would previous waste on following and watching "the news"
Growing up during an era of Johnny Carson, in a house with no cable, and attending high school in the 90's, "The News" was something very different prior to 9/11.
24 hour cable news started providing information on fast moving events, and that was relevent, in the lead up to the Iraq war, when everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It was obvious something bad would come out of 9/11, but what? There were hushed whispers of an Iraq invasion exfiltrating into grapevines by word of mouth (but not in the news, and not on TV) as early as January 2002, but would it become a reality? And if so, my god, why?
By summer, word of mouth was firm. Iraq was going to be a thing, according to people with family members in the military. And so, you waited for that to show up in the news.
By 2005, George W. Bush had been re-elected, and there was no longer any relevant information to be had.
The ruse was over. It was clear that cable news was a sham. Popcorn, for the mob attending yet another gladiator tournament at the colosseum.
Guardian reported about US plans (including use of ground troops) in December 2001. [2]
[1] In November 2001 72% respondents in Gallup poll favored invading Iraq with U.S. ground troops. http://www.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-americans... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/02/afghanistan.ir...
By mid-2002 there were weird goings on, things like lumber shortages, and it was like "Oh fuck. Iraq is happening for real, and this isn't going to be a quick in-and-out." [1]
This is just according to my personal memories, of course. They pretty much line up with wikiepedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
[0] Donald Rumsfeld memo dated 27 November
2001 (still bullshit territory)
[1] During 2002, the amount of ordnance
used by British and American aircraft
patrolling the no-fly zones of Iraq
increased compared to the previous
years and by August had "become a full
air offensive". (was actually happening)Not an air disaster that demolished two buildings filled with people. 9/11 had teeth that other stories couldn't come close to.
Like JFK, it was on another level, and hard to not watch.
Of course we all now know, but it was just so weird to see that because I knew it had little to do with any of what was going on (I also knew Saddam was an ally before).
But, such is the bizarro world we live in now.
Politics is everywhere. Take star trek. We all know the basic stories, and the thematic changes over the years. They map to changes in US politics. Even at home watching DVDs, you are engaged and influenced.
> Not watching CNN won't prevent other CNN-watchers from talking to you.
I think a conversation with a CNN-watcher is more interesting when you yourself have read slower sources than if you have both spent your time watching live broadcasts or reading live articles. You'll find you both have different kinds of points to bring to the conversation.
I've found a large difference between the daily (or 24-hour) sources and weekly/monthly publications. The latter are more removed from the day to day events, and so tend to spend more time on the issue itself and wider trends, and less on personality clashes or rare, once-off outlier events (which by definition, you don't need to be worried about^[1]). Relying mainly on them, you'll have heard less about what has happened in the last 24 hours, but likely know more about the major events and wider trends of the past year. The daily sources are particularly bad at portraying those wider trends: they will show a violent crime every night regardless of whether a hundred or only ten occurred.
[1]. The truly significant outlier events will still be covered by the slower news cycle and in normal daily conversations. There's no risk of not knowing that a 9/11 happened. I haven't found that it matters if I don't know about the latest disaster immediately: to the contrary, a conversation can be stronger when the other person explains in their own words what has happened, and I can ask questions with genuine interest.
Note that he's not advocating being oblivious to the world. See the third paragraph:
> To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole. There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic.
In my opinion, in some cases like this, the lengthy thousands word articles are often much worse.
Its something that takes many years to realise and fully appreciate.