“The daily news I find to be a lot of noise. Generally newspapers seem to try to answer the question, ‘What is the worst thing that happened on the Earth today?’”
The first time I really lost faith in the news was during the Oslo Peace Accord Talks, when CNN hosted a debate between a Palestinian and Israeli spokesperson. It seemed to me that it was quite a delicate political situation, and that simply reporting on it while leaving the top politicians to discuss would be better, but CNN really wanted a live TV debate about it. Well, it turned out that they'd specifically chosen polar opposites to discuss with one another. Now, since I've been working in media, I know the attendants weren't an accident. They are always carefully chosen. So if CNN really wanted to help the peace talks (they did after all speak highly of it), they would have invited other people, but I gather that would also have made for more "boring" TV. Obviously it was very "entertaining" to watch these two debaters have at each other, but it quickly turned so bad that the host had to intervene. During the debate I remember asking myself, "Is the CNN intentionally trying to disrupt the peace talks by inviting these two idiots to debate each other?" CNN's outreach is big and international, so this would be noticed both in Israel and Palestine. While possibly "entertaining" it did absolutely nothing to help the already bad situation. On the one side, you could perhaps claim that it's not in CNN's interest to "help" anyone (actually a certain level of conflict is what keeps most journalists fed), but in this instance they were clearly firing up people in the worst way, and thus disrupting important peace talks.
I think that captures it quite nicely. When you read the regular news you have to think critically - particularly now that so much traditional journalism has been replaced with thinly veiled opinion pieces.
If you know anyone who gets really depressed or anxious when reading the news there are sites like https://happynews.com/ that can really help them though it can be tough to ween people off the regular news. The constant stream of doom and gloom has an addictive quality I don’t quite comprehend.
Nassim Taleb, also makes many allusions to this in several of his books.
Particularly jarring is the constant fixation that is going on in the news with Daily COVID-19 data. There is simply too much daily variation that has nothing to do with how the virus is spreading and affecting each location. A huge waste of attention and resources with titles such as "Largest number of new cases in a day since March!"... so what?
“[…] they think these are aberrations; that underneath all this, the news is worth saving. I simply go one step further: I think none of it is worthwhile.”
“The daily news I find to be a lot of noise. Generally newspapers seem to try to answer the question, ‘What is the worst thing that happened on the Earth today?’”