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Comment by gambler | Hacker News Reader

I will start taking research like this seriously when authors will start discussing media spin as part of the problem. If you think bots are a problem, but news websites engaging in blatant, Orwellian language and fact bending are not... you should at leas be able to back it up with comparative research on effectiveness, which I've never seen being done. Online "discussions" of political topics are saturated with links to traditional media.

Increasingly, I think giving up on "news" and social media altogether is the best solution. I've quit most of it. HN is the closes thing to social media I visit. I watch YouTube, but limit videos to specific educational content.

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Indeed. People have come to treat the news not as a dull obligation to be informed about the world so that they can make boring but important decisions, but as a form of entertainment. It's more akin to watching sports on TV, except that we actually have skin in the game and some affect on its outcome.

You don't really need this news on a daily basis. News that actually affects you is rare; news that you can apply is rarer. You do get to make a decision every couple of years, and you do have some ability to affect things even between elections, but the vast majority of daily news consumption is more about getting to shout at the players on the TV rather than actually achieving anything.

So I applaud your decision to opt out of it. You can get everything you need to know about the next election in a few hours, two Novembers from now. Unfortunately, in the meantime, a lot of people will be using the shouting-at-the-TV to reaffirm their preconceptions of their own righteousness and the villainy of their opponents, and their decisions will be based largely on exacerbating that.

I notice you put "news" in quotes. Online discussions of news and aggregators are a terrible, bubble enforcing way of engaging with the news. And I would be cautious to call our online news (and cable news) 'traditional media.' They are a different animal. Even quality print publications have vastly different standards for what they publish online vs what gets printed. That said, while I'd agree that spin may be a bigger problem now due to this, spin has always been a problem. However, I think the way we engage with the news, as consumers, has made spin more detrimental than it has been in the past and perhaps more dangerous. To me, this consumerist model is the "news," but there are still great ways to engage with the news - you don't have to give it up.

As a high-schooler I was lucky enough to take a news focused civics course, where we received a subscription to Time Magazine and the local paper. Every day we'd get together and discuss the news, differing viewpoints in different media sources, and try to ferret out the "Orwellian language and fact bending" you discuss. To do this we had to engage with different news sources and actually _read_ the articles. Not just five or six mutually reinforcing headlines and a bunch of reddit comments.

As I sad, there are still good ways of engaging with the news media. There are plenty of publications still producing quality journalism, and publications that provide a thoughtful aggregation and discussion of the news. The Week comes to mind immediately and has continued to act a little bit like that class for me. I would not read David French without it, but I'm glad I do. Similarly, I keep a subscription to the local paper so I can read the local news (The rest of the paper is mostly wire trash, so I don't make a point of reading all of it) High Country News to keep up with regional news, and a few other monthlies for in-depth thinking and analysis of the news.

There's a stark difference in what the "news" is once you disengage with the 24-hour-cycle-driven consumerist news model - which the internet is incredible are reinforcing- and choose to engage, rather than consume, with news and analysis. The spin starts to fall away, and partially because it becomes more explicit. The monthlies I subscribe to have a very open, very clear agenda.

To put it in a much shorter way, we all need to stop reading "news" stories with headlines of "...and the internet blew up" or "...caused a tweet storm..." and instead engage with (vs consume) media about the macro in quality publications where you can identify the viewpoint and then seek out opposing view points.

You honestly do not consume any news about current world events, whether local, national, or international? Or do you just mean that you continually and deliberately ignore political news? I mean, that's not exactly rare: 100 million eligible voters (42%) did not even care to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election[0]; I suppose they either don't believe their vote would matter, or that Hillary and Trump were the same enough. I would think there are still easily tens of thousands of those people are still indifferent about the electoral process. Anyway, to me, it's easy to see how sports, video games, TV shows, porn, eating, alcohol, weed, and drugs can be seen as more interesting than, for instance, the current "battle" about if, when, and where the 2019 State of the Union address will take place.

[0] http://archive.is/NDUkb

>You honestly do not consume any news about current world events, whether local, national, or international?

Not intentionally. Information about big things still leaks through websites like HN and Slashdot, through articles/interviews about "non-newsy" subjects, as well as through people I know.

I've considered quitting HN and Slashdot too, but I need up-to-date technical information to do my job effectively. Can't find a good alternative.

>100 million eligible voters (42%) did not even care to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election

When I need to vote these days, I approach it as buying a piece of electronics. I dedicate time to research my options. As in, sit down and spend several hours or days searching for relevant (to me) information on the candidates. Obviously, this might include news articles if they are relevant, but those have to be articles about something specific (e.g. some particular thing a candidate did in relation to a particular social or economic issue I'm interested in).

It's a tedious process, but I think it's better than passively and continuously consuming whatever some media outlet cooks up to fill their air time, print space or website home page.

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