Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company
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Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
Instead we talk about the direction of the country and indeed, humanity itself, with the same care and thoughtfulness that goes into rooting for your favorite NFL team, or voting people off the island on Survivor.
Back in my day and in Germany, "news" was from 20:00 to 20:15 with the last 5 or so minutes of that were dedicated to the Bundesliga :)
This is how the news was for me as a 90s kid who only had over the air channels for TV. 6:00-6:30PM was local news, 6:30-7:00PM was World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Outside of that folks weren't particularly concerned with what was happening beyond their immediate bubble.
I blame CNN for much of the state of news today. TV news has always been poor, but before CNN proved otherwise, news was not something that was considered a profit-maker. Once CNN showed it can make money, then the profit maximalization began in earnest, and with that came the descent into news-as-entertainment.
That started well before the gulf war.
As an aside, 99% invisible had a pretty good podcast on how radio (which delivers news to more Americans -and is trusted more- than TV) content has changed over the years. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-divided-dial/
The change has been systemic, and that change shaped CNN more than the other way around.
Which has an effect on the political process.
It's not that I want the ads so much as I want a short break from consuming the content.
And that was pretty much it.
I don't know if I'd call newspapers long form, as they certainly have lots of short articles, but I'd say they regularly have "longer form" than Frontline.
There are not enough relevant things going on in the world to merit a 24-hour news cycle, so the media has to make things up to fill the gaps. But once they make things up, they're pathologically incapable of distinguishing their own made-up crap from actual relevant news items.
So we spend the day glued to our phones flooded in crap.
While true, I can't help but think everyone who says that is talking about "other people" (mostly people on the other side but maybe a few from my side) or "other news sources" (mostly ones from the other side that I don't watch and maybe a few isolated examples on my side).
Some of us are mostly adjacent. I'm a right-leaning libertarian. I actually dislike when people refer to modern progressives as "liberal" as it's pretty insulting to classic liberals who also aren't into where progressives have gone. I never voted for Trump, don't really like him. I have to admit, I did/do enjoy how worked up those with TDS get about him though. But it's completely hyperbolic on both ends, and there's more dishonesty about the man than from the man.
Many people want the establishment out... the problem is, as above, that there are several camps of what people believe should prevail in terms of direction... so no traction gains and the establishment wins. I'm thinking more people on either side should start voting for more anti-establishment candidates all around. They may be a bit cooky, but in the end, if they're willing to negotiate we could see better outcomes overall that at least try to serve the people and not the establishment insiders.
News companies, specifically news company executives looking to sell as much ad revenue as possible, and are willing to produce any content that gets viewership, are to blame.
> Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
No, it's television in general. People were famously making that exact same point in the 1980s, before the widespread adoption of cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death. tl;dr: the medium is the message, and the message of television is entertainment, even when the news was only a half-hour a day.
"... the human race is divided into two distinct and irreconcilable groups:
those that walk into rooms and automatically turn television sets on,
and those that walk into rooms and automatically turn them off.
The trouble is that they end up marrying each other."
Is it a supply issue, or a demand issue? If people didn't want want it in the first place, would the producers bother to make it?
We've had salacious media for a long time:
> Scandal sheets were the precursors to tabloid journalism. Around 1770, scandal sheets appeared in London, and in the United States as early as the 1840s.[4] Reverend Henry Bate Dudley was the editor of one of the earliest scandal sheets, The Morning Post, which specialized in printing malicious society gossip, selling positive mentions in its pages, and collecting suppression fees to keep stories unpublished.[5]: 11–14 Other Georgian era scandal sheets were Theodore Hook's John Bull, Charles Molloy Westmacott's The Age, and Barnard Gregory's The Satirist.[5]: 53 William d'Alton Mann, owner of the scandal sheet Town Topics, explained his purpose:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_journalism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
-Steve Jobs
He also said "We don’t think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."
Though maybe he was kind of wrong about televisions and PCs not merging - see youtube, netflix, Apple TV (both device and service), "smart" TVs, etc. I also imagine Jobs might put social media in the "turn your brain off" category.
To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale. This is unlikely to happen for the same reasons we make every other stupid choice as a citizenry. Also: picture the quality of leaders we vote into Congress and try to imagine them doing anything as high-minded as solving the problems of the news media fellating them half the time, and flogging them the remainder. (Literal extensions of the metaphor juxtaposed with contemporary congressional scandals are left as an exercise for the reader.)
Take $10B of annual spend out of the US budget. Which will never be missed. Fund a public network that only does news. The budget is something like 2-3X FOX News' top line; it's enough to hire real talent and smart leaders. Give the public network one KPI and a new line item: they fund an arm's length fact-checking service or some other form of objective evaluator to score them every day for remaining factual and balanced (and be clear when it's news and when it's opinion). I don't know that you can do 100% facts in the real world -- but can you be balanced, non-sensational, and transparent? The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day -- apparently we can do this when it sells, so scoring truthfulness isn't impossible.
It seems stupid that we can't take a sub-rounding error of opex out of the budget and do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage, so maybe I've got it wrong. Even if I don't, we're not smart enough to make something like this reality.
This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms. The news industry literally got government to force tech companies to peddle their noxious product.
> To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale.
This has got to be the dumbest or the most naive thing I've read in a while. If you get government involved, then you'd get garbage statist propaganda. Also it would really put a dent on the false myth about journalists 'holding power to account' when they are paid by the government.
> The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day
The media that created the Trump brand, the media that gave him 24/7 free publicity, the media that got him elected, etc? That's the media you are praising?
> do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage
The problem in society is news. More news or more government funded news is not the answer.
To me this seems like one of those “reality has a liberal bias” or “the positive aspects of negative thinking” - mainly that education and intellect are anticorrelated with happiness, that there are very few happy and informed people.
I’m not a news guy or a liberal but I think there’s a lot of ink being spilled over a phenomenon that could be explained simply by: the world is a very fucked up place and people are getting tired of hearing about it.
The problem, however, is the impact this change in political reporting has on actual politics. That, I'm not sure how to solve.
It used to be that pre-election debates were for nerds and policy wonks. Now everyone watches them, but all substance has been removed. Debates themselves may even cease to exist.
As opposed to being paid directly by the people they're supposed to hold accountable?
Government-funded media would at least have a fighting chance of being neutral, checks and balances and all. By all accounts the US justice system is corrupt as well, but it would obviously be orders of magnitude worse if you outsourced it to private corporations.
The product was already being produced pre-Internet, pre-television, pre-radio:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_journalism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
A new distribution medium didn't cause it to be created.
It's very similar to how professional wrestling isn't real wrestling, but actually 'wrestling entertainment'.
I call this the 'WWE-ification' of the news and politics.
If you synthesize all that happens in Washington in a day, it is a giant soap opera. IT keeps its power by keeping people paying attention to it. Even a "just the facts, maam" view of the news is largely rabblerousing. I wonder how much of what I see on https://www.memeorandum.com/river today will matter in 10 years. How much of it belongs in a history book. How much of it is needed to make an informed decision in an election. How much of it is needed to understand the world around me.
I did a little write-up after reading AOtD for a TL;DR of the book: https://lambdaland.org/posts/personal/2020-06-07-amusing-our...
(Though you really should read the book and not my dumb little write-up.)
Mcluhan, his French counterparts, Deborah, ELlul, all understood something 60 years ago. Mass manufacturing and mass media are the key determinants of our society. The first has commoditized the physical things we surround ourselves with. The second commoditizes our dispositions. Political or economical arrangements matter so much less.
Taking that view, and the internet is not nearly as much of a transformational technology as we think it is. Just another means for media saturazition, washing out individual thought.
A salient effect, when everything is essentially the same, the only mechanism to differentiate is branding. Hence, everything is captured by marketing. Products are differentiated by their commercials, people differentiate themselves by the identity they assume, everything/everybody is thrown in a marketplace where comparison is based on image, not substance. Really nothing can be evaluated intrinsically anymore, our evaluation of everything gets mediated by a story, a narrative, an image. The matrix is real, not the living in the computer part, but the unease that everything is fake, everything is a projection.
If true, and it also explains why the classic California easy-going personality is now the dominant one. It is not even cool anymore to be 90s abrasive or cynical, that just elicits eye rolls (the rebellion in fight club looks quaint now, almost adorable). Better to just bland in.
The logical end point of this evolution is that we all become widgets. Essentially the same, responding to inputs, participants in algorithm, the only difference maybe the skinning, the look&feel. All undifferentiated tough.
May be true, may be not. But it certainly explains a lot of the last 150 years, and it makes our current era less special. which is comforting, we're not messing up in ways grandpa wasn't already doing so.
To pine for any kind of quaint return is missing the point entirely. The only way through is forward and out.
Not sure there is an easy answer. None of us want to be censored, but for sure the market has failed (both the demand side and the supply side, and there is lots of money to be made from all the fake controversy and scandal)
With the First Amendment we revoked Congress’ power as a lawmaking body to govern publishing. The market hasn’t failed, but other people are reading and believing things that you or I don’t agree with, but the difference is that you basically want to make them stop doing that, which I guess includes me as I am disagreeing with you here.
Don’t forget that all elected positions are Offices of Power and to seek an election is to seek to acquire power. I am more than happy to keep the flow of information outside the grasp of the types of people who seek to acquire an elected Office and the power vested in it, even at the risk that other people are wrong and take wrong actions with wrong information.
I certainly wouldn't trust or give politicians the ability to censor what they don't like.
As I said, this is a hard problem. No individual should be censored. But, as with most things, scale is a problem in of itself. There is a significant scale difference when I, as an individual, say whatever I want, vs when CNN or FOX (or pick whatever large scaled publisher you want) broadcasts falsehoods to everyone for their profit. There is significant profit in anger, fear, sowing divisions, artificial controversy; but this comes at a large detriment to us as a society.
That’s embarrassing. I actually did overstate the disagreement upon re-reading your prior comment. My apologies.
> There is a significant scale difference when I, as an individual, say whatever I want, vs when CNN or FOX (or pick whatever large scaled publisher you want) broadcasts falsehoods to everyone for their profit.
Even CNN and Fox can be held in check for literally lying, but by the people they’re lying about, and in turn they operate in a space where they report on a more powerful entity than themselves when they lie or subvert the truth. The American government is also a player in the information space, and its chief officials are not always telling the truth, or disclosing the full truth. So what we have is a wash in which information competes with information, and we don’t always have good, accurate or useful information where we need it or desire it. I still wouldn’t call this a market failure, people profit and lose off of good or bad information all the time; it’s when we allow ourselves to become tools for moneyed or empowered interests who use those programs and writings to induce action that we experience a very real human or political failure.
The purpose of the news industry is to inform, but it has always and will forever be at the behest of people with an interest in informing in a manner they prioritize in competition with other people with differing interests, and it is itself for-profit industry whether or not the profits are expressed on the P&L of a given corporation.
And you are never going to get the fairness doctrine to apply to those that are online.
You could have Facebook set rules for posts on their network, but then Facebook competes with Twitter and Tiktok and whatever, so if the posts on Facebook are less engaging than those on Twitter, people may go there.
Its all broken incentives all the way down.
Viewers are to blame. Cable and the internet are just better than ever monetizing the garbage people gravitate towards. There's more high quality journalism on offer than ever and it's audience just keep dwindling in favor of social media and purely fraudulent news like FOX.
People talk about media or corporations or government like they're from some alternate dimension or alien species. They're run by the exact same human beings that exist in your daily life. Most people act out of self-interest and are subject to bias. Media didn't invent it, it's an extension of human nature.
That's a very bold claim but I can't say it's wild. The news is supposed to be a critical source of information but I think the effect is a net negative. By a large margin. It's a pretty perverse situation.
I don't think the government should ban news or anything. That's obviously bad. But society would probably be better off without it (as-is), as extreme as that would be.
Essentially this is arguing for limited distribution & gatekeepers for the news. That would almost certainly be better for society, but there's the problem with disenfranchisement & how you select/entrust gatekeepers. I don't think the "old" solutions to those problems were particularly good.
The solution to this tradegi of the commons is to ignore it all and read up on the various candidates a few weeks before the election.
And when entertainment isn't recharging our souls, giving us time off, isn't wholesome (which all apply to current news) we don't get what our souls need, and we become worse people individually and collectively.
Watching the 24 hour news cycle as entertainment is just like any kind of constant trauma, constant onslaught, constant conflict and it fundamentally is rewiring our brains individually and collectively
How about reinstating the fairness doctrine that changed (along with so much else) in the 1980s as a start? And creating some rules to prevent news sources from being used as propaganda machines by billionaires?
And that's really the way it used to be. It was even better before 24 hour news networks, as your evening news would give you the stories of the day, and then you would buy the next morning's newspaper if you wanted to read about it more in depth. Sometimes multiple newspapers if it's a topic you really wanted to sink your teeth into. There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician.
As more people turn away from the news, it seems that they rely on their own smaller, informal communities to filter and signal boost the topics they really should pay attention to. Articles that get shared in a Discord catch my attention more than anything on Drudge or even Hacker News.
This is really it. Who has the time or the emotional bandwidth to spare for following all of this? I was talking to somebody about the overturning of affirmative action, and their response to me was basically "if you haven't read the Supreme Court opinions on this matter, we can't have a real conversation about this." That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then.
It's incredibly hard to have a conversation on a complex legal document if you do not read the legal document.
On HN, not only is it easy, it's standard operating procedure...
/s, but not really...
237 pages of legalese is way beyond what most people can handle, this is why lawyers exist. If you're saying people shouldn't have an opinion unless they read complex legal documents you're just saying you don't think people should have opinions.
Each section was written to persuade the reader that the author's position is correct, and nobody gets appointed to the US Supreme Court without being really damn good at putting together a clear persuasive essay. These are extremely smart people with a small staff of very smart editors trying to convince you their position is the only right one; it's not like an insurance contract or EULA designed to "baffle 'em with bullshit".
If you've got a few hours to spare and even a modest level of background knowledge about American history and the current controversy involving racial quotas it's very readable. If it leaves you more ambivalent than before you started it's probably because they're arguing over a genuine public controversy where intelligent people operating in good faith can come to very different conclusions.
Depending on how old your kids are you might have an hour per day of free time. At an average of 40 pages per hour, this could take 6 days. Or I can find a legally versed content creator on youtube that will explain this to me and be done with it on the bus.
This is a topic that everyone has already moved on about. The fact that it's totally doable to spend 6 days on it does not make it a good idea to do. I would go as far as to say that for such a niche topic, for the vast majority of people this is a bad idea to do, and they shouldn't do it.
I totally understand being over the whole deal, but if you actually care about the issue the PDF itself is more coherent and readable than almost all the pre- and post- decision commentary which is mostly predictable, information-free nonsense.
That's not comparable to a book. The organization of an opinion is quite good and you can get a quick sense of what the arguments are even if you skip a bunch of stuff. When you find a claim that you don't agree with, dig into that a bit more and see why they say that.
(While reading the concurring and dissenting opinions may be useful, they are, in effect, other important people’s opinions on the opinion, and not necessary to have an basic informed opinion on the opinion.)
Yes. Why do you want to have opinions on things you don't understand?
Yes, and they are entitled to a vote that gets aggregated with others on the issues and candidates subject to public elections.
That’s different from them having an opinion that is worth listening to individually.
I'm sad that kids these days did not get to experience things like the Sopranos, otherwise known as the best TV series ever.
One hour. Once per week. No binge watching.
Sometimes to keep your sanity you need help from others.
I strongly disagree with that. I wasn't exactly a teenager back then (past 30 already), but in the 80s and 90s, news papers over here informed you about happenings in the entire world, and social developments in my own country, and neighboring countries (what you exactly got depended on the news paper, as they ranged from populist-conservative to communist; news could be rather biased). I sometimes read the NY Times in that period as well, and it had a huge coverage of world events. Their Saturday edition was no joke, so it wasn't just a European thing.
However, what you didn't read was: American boy assaults someone, twitter is outraged. American celebrity did/said something stupid 10 years ago, twitter explodes! American police officer hurts poor person, twitter has a stroke!! And that 10 times per day. All that online clickbait was missing, and rightly so. I don't care what some idiot does 6000km far from my home. If they start forming a threatening political movement, then I'd like to be informed.
The quality of journalism has degraded considerably since then. There is too much attention to personal stories, either sobbing or ecstatic, never in between, and almost always with an implicit political agenda. Some of that is good, because it makes the abstract policies and distant wars relatable, but it has overtaken the hard news. Even national politics has largely disappeared from the news paper. Only when some politician is accused of intimidating behavior it gets back in the limelight.
And that's why I am ignoring the news more and more. Not because it informs you too much about the bad in the world, but because it informs you about trivia, and lacks the things that really matter. Journalism has made itself irrelevant.
Today, you look at twitter and see a massive range of news from populist minutia of what a celebrity said/wore, or every single military engagement in Ukraine. The gulf war in Iraq was probably the first 24/7 news cycle engagement in human history for any significant number of people.
I also agree on quality degradation. There is both more editorialization and lower quality writing all around. In addition to personal narratives all around.
I'll try to avoid being political here with Trump. Trump was a deconstruction of old guard media and the illusions they put up with the political process. He reduced political campaigning to almost pure media events and games, with almost no substance for the right or the left (except outrage or adulation).
As part of that, old media like CNN that tries to keep the trappings of authoritative news delivery have been thoroughly "pantsed". Everyone knows you are stupid if you accept what newspeople tell you at face value (unless they are telling you things you already agree with emotionally).
I'd like to note, I view myself primarily as a environmentalist, and the corollary to that is I feel I have no political party. The right is outright hostile to it, the left is duplicitous and non-supportive of it.
Social media has corralled everyone into echo chambers, and then added a massive amount of cacophony to drown out any real conversation.
But practically everyone is dealing with this for whatever they care about. Social media has highlighted how little we can do, yet amped up the education about a lot of shadow stuff that used to be completely hidden.
Anyway, now I watch sports "news" and let the social stuff bleed in.
The real question is if the internet has made people smarter as a whole. I believe the internet of the last 30 years has made almost everyone smarter. What will the next 30 years look like?
But it took 30 years for non-internet corporations and governments/politicians to "figure out" the internet on a fundamental level. IMO the Trump election was the first example of that. Control and corralling of information with echo chambers has changed things.
Cue oddly specific example of “The Ukraine” and “rocket volley”.
Next, the highlight that informal communities that make their own echo chambers are more popular as distrust in established media is sown.
Finally, a personal anecdote that echo chambers curate more attention-getting articles.
Nothing in this post is especially truthy or falsey, yet it serves up mild “distrust the media” nihilism.
This has been true consistently since the major drop in crime rates in the 1990s. (And it was true for particular kinds of crime that were declining well before that.) This isn’t a new effect of todays news that differs from decades past: “if it bleeds, it leads” and the effect that has is much older.
It can be simultaneously true that Urban crime rates have declined while average crime experienced by people has increased.
If Grandma grew up in a rural setting with a low property crime rate, and I was in a big city with a higher crime rate, the crime in their environment has gone up even if the city's crime rate is going down.
The same may be true for the average American due to the net increase in urbanization.
I daresay most teens in the early 2000s were aware of such minor news events as Sept. 11 and the subsequent decade of global war.
Your stereotypical Millennial news junkie that the Wapo is crying about moving on with their lives was minted in this era of hyper-pervasive media.
Note that the actual non-news media of the early 2000s, and the period pieces that remake it, mostly ignore this reality and are culturally set a decade or more earlier. This is a sort of 'the Simpsons' effect where creators in their 30s and 40s who don't realize how much the world has changed produce media about their childhood set in the present.
And before the 90s, you most likely sat down and watched the evening news at one time a day, then read the newspaper in the morning for further information. So this was an even more segmented version of the 90s and early 2000s.
Was the content of the news commercialized and partisan? Yeah, probably was. But you consumed much less of it because it wasn't shoved in your face, demanding your attention at every waking hour.
Now if you ignore the news you’re assumed to be some form of social pariah.
Personally, I think Aaron Swartz was right [1]: I feel better off, emotionally and mentally, reading a monthly magazine or an annual book than trying to absorb every tidbit of clickbait dished out by the view-driven media. Monthly content is generally more nuanced and often more actionable, and whatever social media furor accompanied each small part of it, as it developed, is omitted for being the tempest in a teapot that it was.
Beyond not watching news shows and not having a TV, this is how I filter. What action can I take? It has drawn me closer to local issues where I can do something.
Maybe I can clean up the beaches in Australia, but I'm not there. Becoming enraged about politics 1,000 miles away shows a lack of humility and lack of understanding my sphere of influence.
https://www.newsminimalist.com
I stumbled across it on HN sometime back.
Someone created an AI model to consume daily, thousands of news sources, scores the articles and lists what it's highest scored for the day.
---
Ironically, APNews use to work this way. They provide a "relevance score" for every news article they published/reported so that other outlets could use that score as a signal on what they should report on.
Problem is, all other news outlet are disparate for eyeballs, so everything becomes "breaking news" regardless of the news relevance score.
I like the "relevance score", it would be interesting to implement something similar to that.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131
We live on a planet with 6 Billion people. We’re living in the most peaceful time in history. And there isn’t anything positive to cover? I don’t know if it’s necessarily a conspiracy, but there is definitely some kind of mind virus going on in modern society.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news buddy, but we're at 8 billion...
That's a shame. How could most of the popular news be such nothingness?
I really don't want to know what is happening to youth in a country that is very far from me as often.
Is this article 'news'?
The article talks about 'traditional' sources of newspapers, NPR, MSNBC -- is there a certain type of 'news' that people are starting to avoid?
I find that it’s much more productive to just ask “what happened 2 weeks ago?”. All the unverified trash gets filtered out at that point. All the outrage bait has simmered down.
Actually I do more like quarter in review or year in review. For example, I know Obama and Bill Gates do yearly reviews on big things that happened.
For events like Jan 6, I tend to stay away from the coverage and what for the official hearing where it's laid out structurally.
As long as the info comes before the next election, it's fast enough.
(And, of course, the information was laid out structurally, but one might reasonably be concerned with potential insertion of bias by the people setting the structure and filtering the information–which I don’t particularly think was a problem in that case, but it certainly would be something to be reasonably concerned about—a problem that can be mitigated somewhat if one does not rely on that presentation as the sole source of information on the event.)
Considering that even “The Experts” who many claim hold “The Truth” are subject to the same echo chambers and powerful tribal allegiances that everybody else is… you cannot really trust them either. Many will be more than happy to bend things to suit their political affiliations or sometimes even lie to you face if it promotes their narrative.
The most important skill, I believe, is question everything you hear. Only you can determine what is true and isn’t. Outsourcing critical thinking to others is setting yourself up for manipulation. It’s sounds ridiculous, but based on the events over the last three years I believe that is as good as it gets in modern times. There is no such thing as “The Expert”. It’s your brain against the endless tide of information and only you get to decide what makes sense and what doesn’t.
You guys gotta decide if you like democracy or not. Is it still acceptable when the results are tainted by voters watching watching the wrong, untruthful, bad, fringe news instead of the good, right, truthful, mainstream kind?
There isn’t a major news source out there for me. I don’t want my own political beliefs confirmed and be told how bad the other side is so I can feel superior. I want facts, and not just those I agree with. That largely doesn’t exist anymore.
Disenchantment with the news is not a new thing. More people are figuring out how useless it is and are disconnecting.
So I've started to teach my kids instead how to read news critically. To spot logical fallacies and the signs of manipulation. To understand when someone is sharing an opinion rather than a fact, and to be aware that a lot of the information buzzing around the world is usually directed towards convincing you of something more than it is about educating you.
There's still solid journalism out there, and I think a lot of people enter into the field with a desire to serve a public good. But sadly I think the majority of news has become like food from a vending machine. The signage might say Food™ but its got the nutritional value of a plastic toy. It's junk, filler, an extension of some corporate PR department.
It’s heavily filtered and spun stories from a small group of heavily biased and like-minded individuals.
This is true of mainstream media, social media*, and even small circles of friends.
It’s hard to find single sources of unbiased news where there isn’t bias or an agenda.
*Yes, this includes HN, but I believe (hopefully) to a lesser extent, or I wouldn’t be here either.
And I'm still well-informed. I peek at TV news occasionally, and glimpse at online news too. But I avoid editorials and sources that add a lot of spin. Give me the as-raw-as-possible news so that I can decide if/how I feel about it on my own.
I mostly just eyeball the headlines of various news orgs and then try to deduce "what really happened if you strip away the clickbait, sensationalism, and fearmongering".
apnews.com is pretty good.
I'll even visit bullshit places like foxnews, not to find actualy news or facts but instead to see what is currently being planted into the smooth mushy brains of many Americans.
Even so, I read the Post, Atlantic, BBC, and Al Jazeera. Sometimes listen to NPR, but they seem to have been infiltrated by the Koch brothers schemes.
I also try to have deep discussions with a diverse, educated, well-traveled set of acquaintances.
All of this leads to, I hope, a well informed perspective.
Many stories told for entertainment describe tension and release, but very few describe paradise. The difference might be, that the news lately has been all about increasing tension, and nothing much about the release, or resolution, of that tension.
We need good news, especially about topics like Fukushima,and the war in Ukraine, for examples. Good news on other topics can't cancel that lack of good news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
News media has had completely dissolved all sense of morality in reporting. They've killed the goose looking for golden eggs.
The result page is very simple html that I customize to a larger easy to read font with no visual clutter except the source abbreviations and a bold sequence number. It is presented in a single long scrolling paragraph without whitespace, and I will typically keep the tab open and skim and through it over one or two days. An example of a recent page is here ( https://ia902708.us.archive.org/2/items/news-aggregation-dem... )
First and foremost, there appears to be a conspicuous lack of innovation, with many outlets relying on reprinting or repackaging press releases, tweets, or even direct government propaganda rather than delivering original content. This absence of creativity is closely tied to a perceived decline in quality, with some journalism bordering on mere repetition rather than insightful analysis.
Furthermore, there is a troubling lack of serious investigation and critical thought by reporters, which is essential for a functioning democracy.
Lastly, some media figures seem to be increasingly out of touch with the real issues, sometimes even bordering on activism rather than unbiased reporting.
The reluctance of traditional media companies to fully embrace the opportunities provided by the internet has led to significant consequences. By failing to innovate and adapt to the digital landscape, they lost out on revenue streams such as job postings and classifieds.
More than that, their continued reliance on outdated business models has resulted in products that often resemble mere copy-paste versions of their former selves. This lack of adaptation has left a vacuum in the market, allowing platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and others to fill the gaps.
It's going to take a major shift in thinking for the news media to make up for 30 years of lost time in terms of innovation and survive as social media matures as a service.
Ignoring whether it's bad or not, if Americans want mostly unbiased news, they have easy access to it on the web:
Americans choose other sources for news... they're not forced to consume it. The "blame" lies with the people.
Edit: Notice above that I wrote "mostly unbiased" not "totally unbiased." If you want to order all news sources by least bias, AP and Reuters are usually toward the top [0][1].
[0] https://adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/MBC-Jan...
I don't think any news is truly unbiased. There is always some form of bias and it's up to the consumer to be able to determine what that bias is and the impact of it and seek altering sources.
It's a skill on its own, but there is always bias.
Those might be better than, say, the New York Times or Fox News, but they're hardly unbiased.
People are getting tired, and so am I. I used to check my local and intl news sites a few times every hour but its just a waste of time to be honest.
The same news will be available at a later stage, if its important enough. I have just blocked the news sites on my work pc for good and it has really helped me.
I wonder what the next trick might be. Manufacture the news! Someone goes out at night and spray paints some obscenities on the main street intersection, then in the morning they report on it "everyone get angry, look at what just happened". I am joking, of course...
To be serious though, they reap what the saw. And I guess found out that selecting on what to report and how is not too far from "manufacturing" the news. They found in the short term getting people enraged/engaged (there is only one letter difference!) with and divisively selected headlines was great for business. In the long term, people become disillusioned because they see through the dishonesty, hostility and bias after a while.
Today, the news is a battlefield for information warfare. Treat it like the adversarial environment that it is. Understand the leanings, biases, and agendas of the publications you read (these can change over time). One of the most important parts to consider is what is left out? Which questions aren't asked? Which stories are ignored by one publication but not another?
Only once you understand all that, can you get an idea of what is going on in the news landscape. After all that still take with a grain of salt.
Jokes aside, I think it is partially disingenuous for others to claim they avoid news on this site. It might not be the front page of a major news site, but there's plenty of politics and doom here too. Perhaps it feels less like news to others since it better fits the beliefs/expectations of the in-group.
Honestly I click maybe less than 10% of all articles I see on this site. Usually I like to read the ones that are about interesting new studies or computation breakthroughs, and I do like to chime in on some controversial topics from time to time when they pop up and I think my input could be beneficial to someone reading it.
It defies a certain logic that audiences can tire of Marvel movies that come out a couple times a year, but daily coverage of such an asinine topic for nearly a decade is supported by the market?
Certainly this has to be culturally damaging, but everyone sort of pretends it's normal for the country to focus on the antics and tribulations of one person.
TV runs the country for now but I am optimistic their vapidity will drive the next generations to the internet. There appears to me a growing number of young people growing up online.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/742225/frequency-of-watc...
This one puts the average age at about 60 for all primetime viewers.
https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/the-cw-age-average-viewer-b...
Core problem with Twitter or LinkedIn — almost everything is calculated to self-promote the authors. Granted there are many “interesting” things that pop on Twitter. However that is also a problem — things are often too interesting, and if you’re a builder you’ll never build anything if you follow every rabbit hole.
I found this page from the National news agency that leaves out the picture fluff and makes it a bit like HN: https://nos.nl/nieuws/archief
It's just what I wanted! There was a commercial site too that was mostly headlines (nu.nl) but those idiots now require an account to read most articles.
But, news today is not the bulletin headlines and long-read newspaper investigations we knew news to be in the 1980s and 1990s. News has now morphed into an amalgamation of the worst elements of social media and reality television.
By reading a publication such as The Economist once a month, you can attain a more comprehensive understanding of global affairs than you would by watching daily news broadcasts.
Other than the fact that its not anymore from a mostly-uniform set of corporate owners with mostly-uniform biases imposed on it, yes, actually, it is (and that had actually started to break down in the 1990s, anyway.)
(There are qualitative differences by specific outlet and medium, sure, but that was true in the 1980s and 1990s, too, with studies then showing, IIRC, quantity of radio and TV news consumption – unlike newspapers and newsmagazine consumption – inversely correlated with knowledge of current events.)
In about 5 minutes I can get caught up without doom scrolling.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131
I'd rather read about the US from another source, in tagesschau (https://www.tagesschau.de/), for instance.
The US news was so unreliable on that topic, no room to learn anything or have any perspective aside from what was presented verbatim
and then that expanded to more topics and politics, and then “everything is political” so its just useless
I just read macroeconomic news and trade sometimes. I feel like richer people have been doing that and immune to any geo/political outcome for hundreds of years
News, without making money, are boring. Consumers are trained to obtain news in entertainment.
Some is interesting though - it's good to be selective.
I used to be an avid receiver of traditional news media. I listened to BBC Radio 4 for about three hours a day, particularly Today on my commute into work and PM on my commute home. Then Any Questions on Saturday, and often The World at One at lunch.
I'm done with it all TBH. This site tends to surface most things that I find important or have an effect on my life. I honestly don't need to know what is happening on day X of the invasion of Ukraine. I much prefer reading about what's the latest going on with reproducibility studies of LK-99 than the political machinations of random ministers in parliment.
I'm okay with the unavoidable news.
OP is washington post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/04...
or
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/...
These are not possible to reconcile, obviously Bernie Sanders was not the liar. The swamp beat Bernie.
I was very politically aware from ~12ish to probably 25 or so, and I had very strongly held beliefs and I was more than happy to evangelize. At some point I realized that most people really didn't care to live or be inconvenienced in furtherance of their beliefs (if they even got far enough to have articulable beliefs/standards) I just resigned myself to the reality that my sphere of influence is extremely small unless I dedicated more time than I was willing to activism/evangelism/whateverism and my time would be better spent improving myself educationally and professionally so that I didn't end up looking back on my lonely life, having not changed anything.
At the same time, if collectively "we" want something to change, "we" need to be informed from primary sources that haven't been focused through some self-serving lens, which takes time and effort away from immediate needs. And then further effort needs to be expended to turn "we" into "us" but there is a(n) (to some extent) artificial standard of living that a person (believes or has been indoctrinated to believe that they) need(s) to uphold that precludes effectively anyone from gathering enough of a common cause to effect change.
The people that make the real decisions have absolutely unfathomable amounts of resources/power/influence. The power comes from influence, and the influence comes from having the resources (money/destructive power) to create a situation of the carrot and the stick (blackmail or "bribes") for anyone with ambitions of upsetting the status quo. Hence the hubbub about epstein/soros or BigCorp, depending on your side.
"The News" is just another top-down adverstisement for one side or the other of the same effective outcome. Sometimes I hate feeling like I "gave up" but the^Wmy reality is that I realized I have zero control or influence over the broader situation, so for a good long time I have been focusing my energy on improving my own situation, living my beliefs and hopefully passively inspiring others to do the same.
I think Carlin (PBUH) said it best - "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"
teal deer: news is bullshit, everything that you haven't explicitly searched out and verified from first principles is an attempt at hypnotic suggestion and the only thing over which you have power is within driving distance.
thank you for coming to my ted talk.
https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Reading-News-information-overloa...
TL;DR: a PDF: https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21430337
So yeah, I dropped out. What of it?
It's not because it's all negative. It's because it's all bullshit. Almost all of it is someone who has an interest in changing my worldview so that I behave in ways that are beneficial to them. Often enough its a thinly veiled business funnel. Sometimes it's not like that, it's just noise that is inconsequential to me. But in every single case it isn't worth actively following; if something is important enough you'll hear about it from a person in your life. And probably you'll hear about unimportant things too, everyone knows at least one person who won't shut up about Trump this Biden that.
I'd say my life is better. I see these news addicts and theyre all just bitter, anxious basket cases constantly chewing their nails to a nub about some shit that their life would not change one bit if they didn't even know about, besides the anxiety they get from knowing about it of course.
After that I started to consume news with a more critical eye. Another story I remember was on NPR and the narrative they wanted to tell was that streaming music services were screwing the independent musicians. The example they gave was how a radio station might play an artist song and get some sum of money per play, but a much, much lower payment on a streaming service - of course they completely forgot to mention that a radio station is a broadcast where a single play could be heard by millions, but a single play on a streaming service was only heard by a single person.
At a certain point, after you catch a few of these stories, you start to wonder what other stories aren't true that you're not catching. And you lose all faith in the institution (it's super depressing) The question I like to ask folks who excuse the news is this - if a close friend of yours lied about something important to you and you caught them, how many times would you have to catch them lying to you before if you'd stop trusting them all up? It's not many 1 maybe 2 times. The news has done this to us all over and over.
What's the solution? Like it or not, we really need journalism in this country. I tell folks that the collapse of the news industry is one of the greatest problems in this country that nobody is trying to fix.
The only solution I've been able to dream up is this. Create a tax on digital advertising and cloud computing (these are arguably one of the biggest causes of the decline in journalism). Then use that money to create 3 quasi governmental news organizations (like the post office or amtrak). Make it pay journalists like software engineers, with the expectation that they waive their voting rights for life. (note that Bob Woodward once said he doesn't vote to mitigate bias). Then set up an system where each news agency is incentivized to monitor the other news agencies for accuracy. If they think they're misrepresenting the facts, they can present that to collection of ombudsman* to judge. If it's deemed that they misrepresented the facts, they lose budget. Do it enough, and they're out of business and and the money is used to form a new news agency.
*Note ombudsman, once a mainstream in the news, seem to have all but vanished.
Anyway, that's my story and my idea. What's yours?