Do news outlets even make that distinction? Because I don't think they do. At least not in the broad sense of entertainment as "Content you consume despite complete lack of actionable information"
some news you find out and you're like "Holy shit, I gotta do X and Y and instantly change my behavior". Examples of such news are, "Tsunami barreling towards your city" or "Nukes detected en route to your town" or "Air raid incoming" or even "Draft starting for your target demographic". Or something more benign like "So and so VC is starting a fund for thing you're doing"
Most news, however, gets a reaction closer to "Oh, neat." or "That is outrageous! I must write a Facebook post about how this affects me so people don't forget that I exist in light o this tragedy". Examples of news like this: "Bowie dies" or "Terrorist attack in city 8000km away" or "US gets involved in yet another war that doesn't affect you" or benign things like "VC starts a fund for thing you have zero interest in"
> Most news, however, gets a reaction closer to "Oh, neat." or "That is outrageous! I must write a Facebook post about how this affects me so people don't forget that I exist in light o this tragedy".
Seems like getting most of ones news from "Twitter, Imgur, and HackerNews" would be the primary contributing factor to this myopic worldview.
The main reason I switched to "Twitter, Imgur, and HackerNews" was growing up with watching broadcast news every day. Never once did they report something actionable. Mostly manufactured outrage over things nobody cares about until they see them on the news and then suddenly it's a huge deal.
> News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind.
> —Rolf Dobelli
And a nice quote from Thomas Jefferson on the topic of news:
> “I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”
Why does information have to be immediately actionable? What happened to being generally informed and educated? Jefferson also said:
> > The cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate.
Celebrity gossip is attention spam, but terrorism and war seem extremely relevant to tax-paying citizens. The corresponding philosophical and ethical questions are also important to consider and debate, those discussions are what change our nation's policies (not elections).
I'll grant that cable news is largely fluff... "President tweets" turns into 8 hours of rehashing the same narrative with a dozen "correspondents" while ignoring the power grab by Venezuela's constituent assembly (interesting parallels in Turkey, and the US) or the progress of different legislation in Congress... but, low quality news still falls in a different category than the endless mindless Snaps and Imgur memes.
Dobelli is talking about that low-quality media: infotainment. The processing, sanitization, and refinement of news into bite-sized dopamine triggers. Hollow snippets that only serve to feed the Dunning–Kruger effect... magnified by commenting and social media, the worst of the worst.
My approach is just to cap the time spent on news. 2x 30 minutes a day I'll dedicate myself to reading news from reputable news agencies, often with a paid subscription, otherwise I just completely ignore news.
> Dobelli is talking about that low-quality media: infotainment.
Yep that's what I was getting at. Non actionable news/information is entertainment.
And I find that the "philosophical and ethical discussion" that comes out of most news is surprisingly shallow and mostly comprised of unchangeable predetermined beliefs and knee-jerk reactions.
