While many of the points made by this article are valid, it fails to address important questions like: how can we remain informed and how do we decide what is important enough to be informed about?
I stopped reading the news on a regular basis many years ago. There were a few reasons for that. One is that most of the news is about topics that we have no control over, another is that news is highly repetitive in nature (few significant events are isolated to a particular day or week).
Yet the biggest reason is that much of what is presented as news is actually opinion. While the author suggest separating fact from opinion, that is usually only possible to achieve by reading the news. News outlets may denote a handful of prominent sources as opinion or analysis, but they aren't going to do that for a puffed up piece where the facts alone would barely fill a paragraph.
Is my life better for ignoring the news? Probably, but I will also admit that I miss out on many things that I should be informed about.
>While many of the points made by this article are valid, it fails to address important questions like: how can we remain informed
Well, an earlier question would be: why should we "remain informed"?
To have something to talk about with friends, or because it "matters"?
If it matters, it's not just news we get from media to us, but something we actively follow and do something about it (e.g. it might be labour laws and we're a union). If that's the case, news will get to us one way or another, and with more primary sources and higher quality than what we'd have learned from the media.
>and how do we decide what is important enough to be informed about?
Did anything you were "informed about" in the past by news made any real difference in your life (you having been informed, not the news item itself).
> >While many of the points made by this article are valid, it fails to address important questions like: how can we remain informed
> Well, an earlier question would be: why should we "remain informed"?
IMHO you hit the nail on the head here. Everyone has been conditioned by the news media to assume that we need to follow the news, which they then conflate with "remaining informed".
I go after the information I'm interested in or lacking as needed, like financial or housing market info. Then other info comes to me if it's relevant, like local elections or topics of mutual interest with my friends (or places like HN).
I understand how you seek financial info, but how does Hacker News come to you? How does local election info come to you?
And I don’t mean what device or medium, but literally _how_ if you aren’t actively clicking or tapping to access it by way of a bookmark or otherwise?
I feel like the original post really wanted to say “control your FOMO and critically consider what news sources you value”, but became too wrapped up in some anti-mainstream media emotion.
Submissions by other users come to me through HN. I don't have to search through dates, topics, countries, etc. I just click enter and it all comes to me.
> How does local election info come to you?
I get emails about it for my state, I get physical mail from my state, I get emails about it from my employer, I hear friends/family/coworkers talk about it, I see signs out and about.
Not being flippant, but just because these things don't happen to you doesn't mean they don't happen to anyone. I even learned about some recall election in CA while on vacation there that I made zero effort to learn about. I just saw billboards, flyers in grocery stores, etc.
Clicking Hacker News is seeking news the same way as clicking CNN.
Signing up for emails (presumably) isn’t organically hearing about it via billboards or voluntary conversation; it’s willfully agreeing to have news appear in your inbox.
How does this differ from the person who visits Fox News or CNN and follows a group on Facebook to see their posts appear in their news feed?
> Did anything you were "informed about" in the past by news made any real difference in your life (you having been informed, not the news item itself).
On the recent past, vaccine availability, COVID related restrictions, and when to relax a little bit on the extreme safety conservatism because hospitals actually had any room. Of course, those were on local news, that is much more useful than national or the completely useless global one. "The news" is basically the channel any large institution use to communicate with people, so any general institutional information comes from there.
Also, a big constant is when to buy or sell government bonds (for other, more volatile and specialized things, the news is useless).
I think the distinction here is actively seeking out information when it becomes relevant to you personally vs. passively absorbing information through the news in case it might be relevant. Being armed with information that is pertinent to you is useful, but 99% of the information you receive in the news doesn't meet the standard of pertinence, even if you initially think it does.
It would be impossible to miss information about Covid even if you were living under rock. Once you become aware that there is a potentially deadly pandemic underway, you can go and look for information regarding steps to protect yourself, notifications from authorities, etc. You will still get the same important information. But what I've found over the last year or so is that passively scrolling regarding updates inundates me with information that feels important, but ultimately changes very little for me personally, other than heightening my sense of anxiety and uncertainty, and messing with my ability to make judgements regarding risk.
Very little of the world's ills seem to be improved or altered at all by the fact that individuals are bombarded with news more now than ever before. But our ability to cope with those ills seems far lessened due to this deluge of information.
> but 99% of the information you receive in the news doesn't meet the standard of pertinence
Oh, no doubt about that. Maybe add another 9.
It helps to consume it written, so you can jump over all the trash.
> It would be impossible to miss information about Covid even if you were living under rock.
But this is not the case. I know people that missed useful information because they were living under a rock. And yes, after you know what to look for, it's not hard to go get high-quality information elsewhere. But a channel for "notifications from authorities" simply does not exist... or rather, it exists, it's called "mainstream news".
Anyway, I agree that a short news cycle does indeed not help anybody and harms a lot of people.
I've remained informed about these issues without frequenting any "news" sources. Government, hospital, pharmacy sites all provide that without the "clickbait" factor (or at least with much less).
I will note that CSPAN / the debate on the US Congress (both the House and the Senate) are surprisingly well informed about politics.
Its a bit of an investment: it takes a while to learn the "rules" of discussion (and the rules are different for the House and Senate). And its highly opinionated as well. But if you want to know what the big issues are on any given day, its hard to beat Congress.
Seriously. Give CSPAN a try. Its boring as heck but welcome to reality. Do you want to know the opinions of some random blogger with no power? Or do you want to know the opinions of the literal lawmakers of this country?
If you're going to read / study opinion pieces, its clear who's opinions are most important. Its not a pundit on NBC, its not the pundit writing articles for (insert paper here). Those people have no power and are basically armchair quarterbacks.
> Do you want to know the opinions of some random blogger with no power? Or do you want to know the opinions of the literal lawmakers of this country?
Congressmembers are not giving their unfiltered opinion in floor (or committee) speeches, they are very conscious of the public eye and are saying what they think they need to be heard saying to achieve their goals. If you aren't following other information sources to contextualize what you are hearing, this is equivalent to getting your news about an industry exclusively from the press releases of the two biggest firms in the industry.
The bias is obvious however: you can instantly pick out Democrats from Republicans.
I don't read / watch opinion pieces to know how to think. I read / watch opinion pieces to know _what other people are thinking_.
And I don't really care what a politician thinks/feels deep down inside. I care about what a politician is calculating in their public image: why they're voting for (or against) particular measures. Sure, they might change their opinion a year or two from now, but if we're talking about the important issues affecting our country today (ex: debt ceiling and its knock-on-effects)... what these politicians are saying today is the opinion that matters.
-----------
> this is equivalent to getting your news about an industry exclusively from the press releases of the two biggest firms in the industry.
The issue is that far too many people don't even use this source of information at all, and are instead getting their opinion / reviews from pundits who really don't matter at all in the great scheme of things.
Today's citizen is more likely to be "informed" by some random talk-show host, or crazed nut over the radio that no one gives a care about... rather than know what our actual leaders are doing.
--------
In any case, the infographics / arguments used by people in Congress are pretty compelling in general. Yeah, there's some complete crap here and there, but its important to also know the bullcrap some people think.
A lot of information is from very solid sources: they interview Generals / Commanders from Afghanistan, so we get to hear the direct witnesses / decision makers to various events. They can pull in statistics from CDC, FDA, BLS, Fed, State Department, etc. etc. Think-tanks are commonly quoted to various degrees of success (some think-tanks are fine, others are clearly biased).
The quality of information presented is just head-and-shoulders above the average newspaper / blog / radio host.
There's SCOTUSBlog for the Supreme Court. People often mistake it for being from the court, but it's independent. Legal Eagle on YouTube is good if you don't mind video.
The problem is that this kind of useful information may come from a huge amount of sources that you can only know to look after you have some of the info.
We're beginning to decline overall as a country, but I do live in one of the areas that's seeing an increase in COVID19 cases. National-level newspapers tend to focus on the overall average, but the overall average is meaningless compared to county-level information.
COVID19 cases are +20% in my area where I live, but maybe -10% as a country since last week. The local-case count is far more important to me than what is going on 10 states away.
----------
Both national-level and local data is important: I have friends all across the country, and its important for me to know how they're doing. But local data is _far_ more important and far more relevant.
Well, I don't live in the US, but that's not the point.
Recent times were very weird in that all the important information was about the same single subject. You don't know if that trend will continue until tomorrow (literally), and historically the world has almost never behaved like this.
I agree with you but today's "news" is really just infotainment designed to outrage. When was the last time you read a headline that wasn't click-bait? The issue is that we want news to match the speed of Twitter and FB. Most people will never go read 4 articles with point/counter about any topic. No one has the time and the world is too complicated. My approach is to wait until I hear enough other people talking about something that maybe I should get up to speed. Otherwise, I don't bother. This will continue until we make fear-mongering less profitable.
As you said how do you separate fact from opinion? In some cases, certain details aren't even available. Take the following statement/headline, it is 100% true but likely will invoke different feelings and opinions depending on your position: "Prior to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the President negotiated the release of 400 Taliban leaders from prison". This is super click bait and if you did the research into this statement, you are likely to count it as fake if it disagrees with your current position.
I just wish as a civilisation we could simply reject "enragement is engagement" for the foul influence it actually is. That entire repulsive concept has done so much harm to society, instead of turning our anger on each-other over opinions that are barely our own to begin with we should reserve it for those who profit from tearing apart the relationships of friends and family by making people as angry as possible in order to consume their content. They're the real cause for anger here, not our neighbours with different opinions.
As long as people stick too rigidly to any orthodoxy, there will always be morally weak people willing to sell them firewood to burn their heretics with. In this case, that firewood salesman is simply called "the news industry". What would stop this in its tracks would be to promote a new social attitude that sees the intrinsic worth and dignity in all human beings regardless of their differences, a deeply non-sectarian philosophy that says "you and I disagree and that's okay, neither of us are inherently bad people because of that".
I agree. I think the only plausible path forward is taxing digital advertising revenue. People wouldn't pay for this trash infotainment and it is only free because ads make it highly profitable. I think this is the great trick that the oligarchy has pulled off: they have convinced us that our neighbor is the cause of our ills and not them. I think the other problem remains that the world is too fast and complicated now. It is impossible to be up to date on a single issue let alone all of them. We are so fatigued by all the yelling and just want to be with our families and make it through the week. We don't have the energy left to be watch dogs or organize protests against injustice.
>I think this is the great trick that the oligarchy has pulled off: they have convinced us that our neighbor is the cause of our ills and not them.
I couldn't agree more, I think the other great trick is making a significant proportion of people think this kind of talk is somehow radical or dangerous! It's a lot easier to sell division and hatred than tolerance and forgiveness, but given the vast amounts of human ingenuity that go into deliberately hurting society with these things I'm sure we can figure something out with even a hundredth of that effort.
I agree that taxing advertising revenue is a good start and absolutely should be done, but I'd argue that's only one part of the picture. Governments can be bought and sold so we can't rely on regulation alone, we need to educate the people as a whole on the dangers of anger-driven reporting. Talking about things that are common knowledge among programmers and other tech industry professionals gets at best an "I have nothing to hide" or "ads don't work on me anyway" from the layperson, and at worst a "you're a loony conspiracy theorist".
History will undoubtedly rank the infotainment industry of today with the tobacco industry who knew full well smoking causes cancer, or the fossil fuel industry who knew full well they were damning us all to ecological catastrophe.
I stopped reading news somewhere in 2011 while working at a news site. I was already jaded but the medias handling of the Breivik attacks in Norway pushed me over the edge.
From my experience over the years, if something is important enough for me to know, it reaches me eventually one way or another. Yes, I'm no longer the first to have heard something happened, a new music album coming out or a new version of some technology being released, But I also felt this had very little negative impact on my life beyond small talk topics being a bit diminished. There is some fear of missing out to deal with in the beginning, but I can't think of a major thing I really missed.
But that doesn't mean I don't read news sites at all, just not the "news" section. Whenever there is a significant event, one feels the urge to want to know more now, but in reality there is just not going to be any really useful information available for the first couple of weeks while everyone rushes to generate the most clicks from it. So it is better to wait until some more profound and evidence based articles are being published.
I also adapted the position that I either want to have a strong or no opinion on any given topic. I rather concede ignorance on something instead of arguing on shallow information. If I actually care about it, I do put in the time to try to understand it deeply.
I agree that when the news is important enough, it will reach you somehow.
I also noticed that when something is in the news, it's actually already "old news" and so the benefit you get from it is very small.
If you follow niche news sites such as HN, it gives you more advantage than any generic news can give you. Because you will know things in your niche long before it reaches mainstream.
Agreed. But even on HN I don't follow the news items that much. I enjoy the more timeless topics much more. But I like the aggregator style because with a quick glance over the title I become aware of things. For example, oh, Python 3.10 is out, cool. I don't really care right now, but it is good to know to check it out in say the next 6 months.
Hopefully you've stumbled across the fact that one of the recent low-level simmering news stories is more supply line issues. So it'd probably be best to have a week or two of daily necessities handy, like during the pandemic, just in case.
This is actually a big reason I want a house. Having an apartment is cramped enough if you have a lot of hobbies, but if you want to have survival supplies (which, as you said, the pandemic showed is always important), it just doesn't work in an apartment unless you have a spare bedroom.
On top of the many reasons I already had for wanting a house, I now also want one so that I can use the basement or even just a pit in the backyard to store some water, canned food, etc. for emergencies.
I don't think it is necessary to devote a whole room to it, just get long-lived and compact stuff like beans and rice. Although eventually one does get tired of beans and rice.
I don't get tired of beans and rice, but I do get tired of keeping a significant volume of beans and rice in my tiny apartment kitchen. I already barely have room as it is without a box of emergency supplies. For day-to-day quality of life I have to just hope that my normal supply of food and the American supply chain will back me up until I'm able to get a house.
I'm aware of ongoing issues with it, bit given that the impact of it on my life since beginning of pandemic has been practically zero (e.g. there were no toilet paper shortages were I live), I'm not terribly worried.
I think I could survive up to a month with the things I have in my apartment, except water. Have stockpiles not because of disaster preparedness, just because it is convenient.
A lot of it is just not newsworthy, too. My spouse is currently obsessed with this latest "random white girl found dead" story. Why on earth is this considered nationally newsworthy enough to be on the front page of every major non-finance news site I've tried? Every single day, there's something about it. Really? This is one of the single-digit number of important topics to put above the fold on every page? It's even on BBC news, so I guess someone decided it's actually world news.
The Real News companies continue to kill their own credibility with this stuff, so it's no surprise that people are seeking out other sources, which tend to be even less reliable/credible.
> how can we remain informed and how do we decide what is important enough to be informed about?
I stopped reading the news several years ago. I replaced it with becoming more informed about the world. I read a lot of books about the sorts of things that pop into the news. That serves as the basis for "evergreen" knowledge about what's going on.
Once you have that, you can occasionally glance and headlines to get a diff/update.
By experience, if you don’t pay attention to the news somebody will tell you about it soonish and for the most part there is not much you can do about it anyway.
Sometimes you can mitigate it (incoming hurricane, upcoming pandemic lockdown), very rarely can you fix it. For mitigation and fixing, getting the information in a timely manner is important.
Of course most of the news has no relevance anyway.
My personal plan is to pay attention to hyper local news, things that impact my job and, once we move on from Covid-19, as little as possible to anything else commonly called news.
> most of the news is about topics that we have no control over
> news is highly repetitive
> what is presented as news is actually opinion
Agreed on all points.
A few years ago I went through a period of wanting to get down to the truth on major stories in the news. Almost on a daily basis I would watch/read the same story form sources with different political biases. After that, I would look for actual source documents to verify claims. If it was a crime story, there would be police reports. If it was about a law or treaty, there would be a document trail. Etc. I kept notes.
I would then report my findings, in detail, to friends, mostly on FB.
What I discovered was that nearly 100% of the news stories out there fell in a range between absolutely fake and seriously distorted. It was very rare to find objectively accurate reporting on anything. I would venture a guess that the only thing that is reported with some accuracy in news broadcasts are road conditions and traffic. It's that bad.
The amount of work it took to do this was surprising. One thing became certain, this was not sustainable. I took it on as a hobby/learning-experience. I think I was done in about a year. Even that was too long.
The other surprising finding was how otherwise-intelligent people received the reality that what they believed to be true was, in fact, either distorted or a complete fabrication. This is the part that hurt me the most. I lost friends over this. Seriously.
What is it that makes people, even those holding advanced degrees in the sciences, simply refuse to accept reality when presented to them in very clear detail? I don't know. It is incredibly frustrating to run into an "emperor has no clothes" situation with people you have thought to be capable, intelligent, analytical and objective for decades.
I try to hold no political bias and do not label myself with a political party at all. I think that's truly dumb, no political party can be right 100% of the time or about anything, I don't care who they might be. And yet, some of what I saw was the kind of deep attachment to ideology that you can only label as being a result of indoctrination.
This is what I think the algorithms that present information to people surfing the web, FB, whatever, have caused a lot of damage to society. On FB, I watched, as two family members went at each other from different sides of the political spectrum. One became extreme left and the other extreme right. Prior to spending a lot of time on FB they were the best of friends (siblings). After about a year of being very active on FB, each having made a descent into ideologically opposite resonant chambers, their relationship suffered serious damage, perhaps even permanently.
News of this kind does not deserve that label. And, in my opinion, does not deserve the protections afforded in the US constitution through freedom of the press. I don't believe the intent was to protect liars and manipulators. I think this has to change, I just don't know how. If someone like me can spend a few hours on a story and get down to the truth, news organizations, with their staff and resources can do the same or better.
From my perspective, after having determined that nearly 100% of what we are told is twisted garbage, this kind of thing needs to be criminalized. The reason I say this is that today's technology has enabled powerful lies to reach hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, around the world in an instant. This is the major change that has, again, in my opinion, tilted the scale from being lax about misinformation to having to be very strict.
From my perspective, lies and manipulation should not enjoy legal protection at all and they should come with severe civil and potentially criminal consequences based on scale. A television network has the kind of scale that would require them to be factual in their reporting. A local neighborhood newspaper or an individual without much reach is a different matter. What I say to my circle of friends is very different from the constitutionally protected category represented by major global and international media networks.
How about opinion? Sure, no problem. However, when purported news outlets engage in delivering manipulated opinion pieces nearly 100% of the time they should no longer be able to hide behind constitutional protection. If they cause someone, anyone, damage, they ought to be legally liable for it. In other words, you can't say someone is a murderer and spread that into the minds of tens or hundreds of millions of people and then claim it was just opinion. You've done damage. The laws should not protect you from the consequences of your actions.
Anyhow, a bit of a rant, I know. It pains me because the internet was supposed to launch an era of enlightenment. Yes, of course, it has done great good for humanity, and yet in this one domain I think I can say it has been a massive failure. There's probably more misinformation out there (in terms of news) than factual reporting. The problem is that it takes hours per story to get to the truth and almost nobody has the time or desire to engage in that kind of research. Repeat a lie enough times and it becomes the truth, at least in the minds of those without the time, skills or inclination to try and challenge what they are being told.
As a news junkie, my life has been improved somewhat by telegram channels. I like that they are hyper-focused on specific topics. There's even a telegram channel for HN stories that get more than 100 upvotes.
I've settled on periodically glancing at NYT headlines, but with a very high bar for whether to actually click and read the article. If you've read the news for long enough, you can develop a spider sense for whether they have anything new to say. To oversimplify - if they had anything new to say, they'd put it in the headline. So if the headline has no news, i.e. if it sounds like something you could reasonably predict based on your existing knowledge, the rest of the article has no news either.
Example 1, no news: this morning, nytimes.com has the headline "Pressure Grows on U.S. Companies to Share Covid Vaccine Technology". Does it make sense that people want Moderna and Pfizer to share their Covid vaccine secrets? Sure, that's not news. Is it likely that "pressure grows" actually means anything specific and important? No, because if it did, they'd put it in the headline. Most likely, this article is just a boilerplate reminder of how people still want Moderna and Pfizer to share their Covid vaccine technology, and how mad they are that they're not sharing it. So I don't read the article. (Feel free to read it and correct me if I'm wrong!)
Example 2, real news: on the right half of the page on nytimes.com, there is a much smaller headline which says "Moderna vs. Pfizer: Both vaccines are highly effective, but one seems to be more protective over the long term." Which one is it? I have no idea! Worth a click. (This is an example of good clickbait: credibly signaling you have something worth saying without saying it right away.)
Also, there's no point in being constantly reminded of bad things you can't do anything about. Like, yes, I know bad things are happening in Afghanistan. I vote against people who support pointless wars. I don't know what else to do about it. So I don't let it take up space in my life.
With these filters your counterproductive news consumption can be cut by up to 99% without the feeling of missing out.
Things that I speculate might help further, but I haven't actually tried:
- Reading a wire service's website like Reuters or AP instead of NYT
- Relying on local news. I don't because paywall, but I'd probably benefit more from knowing what's going on in my community
> I've settled on periodically glancing at NYT headlines, but with a very high bar for whether to actually click and read the article.
I can't speak to the NYT in particular, but in my experience, the headlines are often more misleading than the article. Mostly overly exaggerated, but I found several cases where the headline was false, and the article had the truth.
The lesson I learned is that perusing headlines is more likely to make on misinformed.
My personal rule is that I only consume news in a language I don't speak well.
It's tiring, which discourages doomscrolling and the like. It tends to be less psychologically troublesome, because reporters tend to be less melodramatic about news that doesn't directly involve members of their core audience. And, even when it's crap journalism that has absolutely no other merit, it's still good language practice.
That is an interesting approach. Being a non native English speaker I sometimes feel that a lot of language games in news do not work on me. It feels a lot like what Scott Adams meant by “watching two different movies on the same screen”
Le Monde diplomatique is not strictly a news publication but is a rather interesting read. It also has editions in Spanish.
If you can read Chinese well enough, some of the Hong Kong press is still quite vibrant and interesting: see e.g. the Hong Kong Economic Journal and Ming Pao (that’s probably about it, alas.)
There are some good public broadcasters mentioned in another reply. I’d also recommend the output of Arte (Association relative à la télévision européenne), France Culture, and France Musique.
I have occasionally listened to Radio Liban 96.2 to listen to other accents but to be honest the presenters sound like they speak perfect Parisian French to me (if not the interviewees). Some of their programmes are interesting.
Not OP but most Western European countries have a public broadcasting company that can be a good source (e.g. France 24 for French, DW for German) if you are learning one of those languages.
edit: I also asked for something international and with only titles, without images, like HN. But reading other comments, I could configure an RSS client for that. So, any news recommendations for italian?
If we go back hundreds of years, to the days of the first newspapers, consuming news had more importance. Financially and health-wise. It probably also gave a greater sense of belonging and something to talk about.
I'm 40 and I cannot think of a single instance where consuming news (the of the moment, ephemeral kind we're talking about here) saved my ass in some way. It never had a direct effect, not even the extra-extra-read-all-about-it! news.
News of critical events, the 22/7 (Norway), 9/11, and gas leak type of events, always reached me through a phone call from a friend or relative before I read about it anywhere.
And certainly, other types of news, non-critical events kind, was never important enough to hear about right after or during the occurrence. Then again, I'm not a have-to-watch-it-live kind of guy, I can enjoy the replay.
Whether consuming the news causes more stress like some studies claim, I don't know, but I certainly think it a waste of ones time.
As for having something to talk about, hell, I have more than enough to talk about without knowing what happened in the world the last few moments, or even yesterday.
Not consuming this type of news is not choosing to stay uninformed. I read analysis, editorials, history, etc.
I never saw news consumption for having something to talk about.
Obviously as a voting citizen, my vote ought to be informed.
If there is something IO should be outraged about, outraged enough to take to the streets and protest about, I want to know about it.
Also, for things like the environment, financial health of the country/world, I like to be able to see trends (or think that I do) and am less likely to be surprised by either a positive or negative turn of events in the future.
All that being said, I do not need a daily stream of news — something much more coarse than daily would be more than adequate.
I used to be a big news consumer. Eventually canceled my NYT sub and quit all national news, except when something major is happening or when I’m about to vote. I read The Economist because it’s one of the last excellent publications and it does seem to help improve my thinking, especially with respect to understanding the macro landscape and investing. But yes, following every Congressional drama is probably a waste of your time.
I do think consumption of local news is not a bad idea — that’s the one arena where we could all probably benefit our communities by being more engaged. (Follow the zoning debates, not the murder mysteries.)
I could not agree more with this approach. The Economist is excellent, and because they are a weekly publication, their reporting can be more thoughtful and detached from the outrage du jour. They also have excellent podcasts: the daily Intelligence and, for those interested in US politics, the weekly "Checks and Balance".
Supporting local news has become so much more important here in the U.S., as more and more independent local newspapers are shutting down, even in medium-sized metro areas. In addition, a lot of "Local" TV stations are owned by, and puppets of, corporations with political agendas like Sinclair[1]. From the linked article:
> About 39% of Americans are within range of a Sinclair-owned TV outlet, most of them unwittingly, because local TV stations typically use the logos of national networks with which they are affiliated, like NBC, CBS and Fox [...] Last year 37% of Americans got their news from local television, according to the Pew Research Centre, compared with 28% who got news from cable networks [...]
I agree that local news is a meaningful exception. Watching my affiliate station makes me feel more connected to my community. Furthermore, it does actually cover things in my life: the state fair, exhibits at my local museum, maybe some kid hit a bird with a baseball and played "Taps" for it so the mayor's gonna give him a trophy which I can then steal and sell as scrap metal because I know where the trophy is because I watched the local news -- stuff like that.
The CXO of my massive employer once mentioned that the Economist was the only publication they still subscribed and read diligently. Do you find that yourself preferring the Economist on certain issues, and less strong elsewhere?
For some reason I'm really interested in seeing a positive-yet-balanced review or anecdote about print journalism. I think it's the novelty-cheers.
I prefer the Economist on all Issues. I think they tend to be the most neutral and even if they say something I disagree with, I am able to acknowledge their position and accept the points they are making.
Agreed, they’re consistently excellent on all issues. One minute you’re learning about Chinese domestic policy, the next you’re going deep on advances in particle physics. And they’re underrated for their humour —- occasionally there’s a bone dry joke in there.
Probably part of what makes it great is that journalists don’t put their names on their columns. Articles are pretty much all written with the same rigorously specific tone, and if they share an opinion they make it clear that’s what they’re doing and they generally do so on behalf of the magazine. It’s about the journalism, not anyone’s Twitter following.
> I do think consumption of local news is not a bad idea — that’s the one arena where we could all probably benefit our communities by being more engaged. (Follow the zoning debates, not the murder mysteries.)
The Metro section has always been my favorite part of the local paper and the one I read first on Sunday mornings.
In my view, ads are mostly to blame here. Just because the quantity of news is increasing and average quality of news is deteriorating, that does not mean all news is low quality and misinforming. I've read the NYT and NPR for years, they're still fine sources with actual experts and journalists, and they don't rely upon cheap ads.
If your goal is information, what you really need to avoid is entertainment masquerading as news. Cable news, YT, many podcasts, many subreddits or forums, they're all ideas submitted with little fact checking and little filter. They're shown to you by algorithms and TV executives because they'll captivate, make you fearful, make you react and keep watching more ads.
Is your attention truly worth a couple measly cents of ads to some media corporation?
Yeah, stop watching cable news. Take anything news related on social media with a helping of salt. Serious publications are usually more reliable even if they have a little bit of a slant.
I also like skimming memeorandum.com since it mainly just shows what people are discussing. Important to know that articles there are popular topics, but not necessarily accurate/objective.
80% of the news I consume is from AP or Reuters. The rest is probably divided up between The Economist, Axios, and NPR. If I watch the news on TV, which is rare, it’s PBS NewsHour, or local news.
I feel like this article is conflating “staying informed” with watching CNN or Fox News 24/7. Or reading obsessively every article published on National Review, NYT, Fox, WaPo, etc.
You can still moderately consume more objectively grounded news sources, and stay more informed than if you didn’t at all, while not being addicted to having the news on 24/7.
I recently discovered 1440, a news email which gives you a 5-minute summary of the day's news. They don't know or care how long I spend consuming, so they don't have as much incentive to be melodramatic. I open the email, read it, and that's pretty much it. Much less time, much less melodrama, and if something enormously important happened that day I will still hear about it. It's really a lot more like the financial model and incentives of print newspapers several decades ago.
Anything you know of that is not daily but weekly (and summarizes the week)?
I ask because, as the article suggests, a story can change day to day — giving news a week before consuming means you're more likely to get a cogent picture of the event.
I read the news in part to be entertained, and to have something to talk about with others in the way that sports fans always keep up with new players, stats, and upcoming games. We can all think of low quality, highly polemic news sources that turn our friends and colleagues into absolute monsters, but I'm not talking about that.
It's news like HN, stuff from my favorite quirky subreddits and blogs, news in tech and gaming, and a skim of apnews.com & WSJ from time to time. Sometimes when I do stuff I enjoy, I have no further motivation than the enjoyment itself. I'm not under the delusion that keeping up with breaking news is going to help me change the world or become a better citizen or something.
As a general rule the national news is intended to persuade and is only informative if persuasion happens to require it.
This becomes extremely obvious when one compares the national news to the local news. The latter is relatively more concerned with informing than persuading. This was particularly clear during the 2020 protests where the national news was observably tasked with persuading viewers that these were legitimate (mostly) peaceful protests and not violent riots. Meanwhile, the local news where events were occurring provided the exceedingly valuable service of keeping people continually informed via airborne footage about where they might prefer to not go at the time.
"Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about the media we consume: Is this good for me? Is this dense with detailed information? Is this important? Is this going to stand the test of time? Is the person writing someone who is well informed on the issue?"
Actually, I think most informed people are asking precisely those questions about the media they consume.
"To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter." ― Aleister Crowley
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
The news media is so bad in the US, I am seeing alternative news media in development. This new media is dedicated solely to criticism of the old media. Kind of like the original Daily Show but unfunny
I'll repeat what I always say whenever this comes up: subscribe to the Sunday edition of a major city daily. If your city doesn't have a very good one, then just do the New York Times (but note that the Metro section is one of the most interesting and useful parts of the daily paper and you'll miss out on that if you subscribe to a national paper). You want the Sunday edition because it's the week's largest edition and contains stories that ran earlier in the week, plus sections that aren't in the weekday editions. And you probably want real paper. The idea is to scan through it from beginning to end, getting an idea of what the major stories are and what's broadly happening in the world. Read it over coffee or while watching football or whatever.
Anything more than this is entertainment. It's not important and won't make you more informed. If you want to read more than that because you like it, then that's fine. Some people like The Bachelor. But they don't confuse it for an education. It's entertainment.
>but what's the point of watching(/reading) news? why bother?
>It's poor deal, it's not worth.
>Just because I may learn some small things that probably do not affect me directly and additionally receive some news that make my mood worse due to hearing some yet another negative news about bad stuff / politics / yada yada, what's the point?
>80% of the news I read is HN and some programming related websites and whenever I jump into "mainstream" media, then I feel like I'm reading some shit - click baits, tragedies, controversial stuff, drama seeking, celebrities
In a similar vein, I recommend Neil Postman's book "How to Watch TV News". It's a little dated, but his recommendations are still relevant to modern media formats. One of his most interesting (and obvious in hindsight) insights is that "news" is NOT what is happening around you; it's what someone else TELLS YOU is happening around you, based on a complex set of criteria that they use to prioritize, include, and exclude information, and is not in any way comprehensive. This is necessary due to the limits of communication, but can also have profound effects on the impressions we then carry with us regarding what we think about the world around us. The book is short, but rich; I highly recommend it.
It's important to understand that there's only one news. Rest everything that different news outlets publish are perspectives.
It's a classic example of the elephant and 10 blind men.
A news is a one time event observed in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person perspective. When news outlets start acting as businesses, the need for differentiation leads them to dig out the different interpretations of the same event and report those that have higher probability of capturing public attention.
Reading multiple interpretations of the same news could feel like something really big and noteworth has happened. In effect, it's the same news being reported everywhere.
I stopped reading news. Often, it just looks like gaslighting. When I read content on a topic I’m familiar with, it’s clear that many journalists don’t even Google things they cover. But most importantly, it isn’t actionable. It’s inactionable stress.
Consider elections. When I get a voting card, I can just look up the candidates or choices when I have the most information. Frivolous minutia like ice cream scandals (Trump and Pelosi have both had ice cream scandals!) doesn’t even show up.
Frankly my experience of the world is drastically different without letting an entire industry wind me up on purpose.
People I know personally who are overexposed to the news look, to me, like they have been mentally poisoned. There is a kind of rage and demoralization. Left or right wing. They’re just wound up by different people. It’s frankly disturbing.
I don’t have a solution to everything. But aside from researching when things are actionable, one thing we have in Poland is the government just texts you sometimes. For example I’d get a text whenever they’d change the covid lockdown rules.
Maybe that’s a good lead. Some kind of actionability oriented news aggregator with push notifications. Maybe I should code that.
Removing almost every blue check journalist from my feed certainly improved my Twitter experience. It is no longer about news, it is about stirring sht up. According to the news we have been living in parallel universe for ages
As the world gets crazier, people consume more news about it. I'd been talking to a smarter person than myself about this topic, and he observed that the causality may be in the other direction. That idea makes some sense. I know that, in my life, worrying too much and too intensely about something makes me edgy and drive me down cul-de-sacs. It's not unbelievable to me that something like that could happen on the scale of a whole culture, and if it did, it might look a lot like the world we're living in.
It's really easy to slip into news as entertainment. The same is true for politics. When treated as entertainment, I think it puts the proper perspective on its utility -- dubious.
I think the real advice is here "don't be irrational" and it's easier said than done. News sources obviously vary in quality and even the best are run by fallible humans so you're never fully safe. But really being informed is a net positive. So I think it's pretty silly to live in ignorance because you can't be trusted with more information.
Should we stop reading news, or stop reading opinions and reactions to news? One of the things about a print newspaper is the way that it brings in everything from local school board decisions to elections halfway across the globe. Of course, real news is the most expensive to gather, so it has tended to suffer over the years.
News do not give you an accurate picture of the world. Almost by definition, if something is statistically average (happens all the time) it is not news. So seeing all the murderers on TV makes people think there is more of it going on than if they simply looked at the statistics.
I find once a week news reading is the best bet. Read the Weekend WSJ, the Sunday NY Times, and a couple of weekly publications. This way you're not chasing and getting aggravated over the news cycle.
I think this speaks more to the issues of trusting online media than specifically the news. The incentives of the web and the incentives of conveying information are not well aligned (for capitalism reasons).
> If you must read the news, read it for the facts and the data, not the opinions.
This should have been the first sentence. It's not that consuming the news is bad, it's that often the way that it's delivered is emotional (which is sometimes valid, I think) or sensational. I'd also argue, with absolutely no data, that, at least in the US, the shift in how folks consume media in general (low effort, highly emotional) has pushed the news in that direction.
> > If you must read the news, read it for the facts and the data, not the opinions.
> This should have been the first sentence.
Quality news organizations distinguish between reporting, analysis, and opinion.
The author of the piece (and many people in the comments here) seem unaware of this or are just purposefully hopping on the "news is bad" bandwagon.
Take a look at the guy's twitter feed and you'll see his bread and butter is incredibly bland "knowledge drops." For example, here's a direct quote of one of his tweets: "Hiring a professional is expensive but hiring an amateur costs a fortune."
Any time you see people talking negatively about news organizations (ie "the media"), be on the lookout for fascism, because spreading distrust and disinterest in the news is one of the goals of fascists.
Even if we get past the emotional click-baitey aspect of mass-media news (and also your jab at capitalism), the fact remains that 99% of news is not relevant to the average person's day-to-day life and is wholly _unactionable_. Meaning, there is nothing you can read on the front-page of CNN that we, the people, can do anything about. (I'll carve out a small exception here for pointers to relief funds for disasters, perhaps.)
"Staying informed" for its own sake is just a hobby. The most utility you can possibly gain from it is arguing your point of view (politics) with other people online or in real life.
Real important events that directly affect me and my family either never hit the mass media, or will be relayed to me through my _actual_ social networks (not facebook or the twitters). National and world trends that might influence my long-term decisions (how to retire, when to invest, etc) don't reveal themselves by reading the news every day, these are things I actively research from time to time via my own means.
Me: I saw some interesting comments by Alan Kay on HN.
Troll: HN is garbage. Quit reading it.
Mutatis mutandis for the author's article. If you have so little idea of how to assess journalists' output over time that you don't even think to mention it in a critique of news, then you haven't really started to read the news yet.
Edit: ah, lemme protect against accusations of No True Scotsman: the author is literally reading the news but is doing so in a superficial manner that an intro civics class would correct.
I know this will sound like a product pitch, but please, bear with me. One of the reasons we set out to create our service Murmel(https://murmel.social/) was because we were pissed off reading the same crappy story retold by ten different sources. On top of it all, each story tells you the version its author wants you to see, but rarely shows you all sides of the picture.
What we wanted to give people was a little bit more context. We wanted to abstract away from stories being distinctly left or right-wing. Instead, we simply ranked the stories that a large group of people on Twitter thinks we should be reading, and mashed the Twitter discussion into each story.
This way at least, you can tell from the discussion whether a story is worth reading: https://murmel.social/top
I stopped reading the news on a regular basis many years ago. There were a few reasons for that. One is that most of the news is about topics that we have no control over, another is that news is highly repetitive in nature (few significant events are isolated to a particular day or week).
Yet the biggest reason is that much of what is presented as news is actually opinion. While the author suggest separating fact from opinion, that is usually only possible to achieve by reading the news. News outlets may denote a handful of prominent sources as opinion or analysis, but they aren't going to do that for a puffed up piece where the facts alone would barely fill a paragraph.
Is my life better for ignoring the news? Probably, but I will also admit that I miss out on many things that I should be informed about.