I fully agree with this. Scanning Google News or a couple of the more professional international news services like BBC / Al Jazeera / Reuters I still feel pretty well informed (and confident that there's usually nothing of immediate consequence to me) but it doesn't grow into "expert analysis" or impact my feelings much. Here's another thing I noticed: how manipulated / manipulative it is. And not just news and I don't just mean politically - I know everyone thinks that news that doesn't align with their politics is just brainwashing. Broadcast TV is just generally awful now IMO.
We went quite a few years without ever seeing cable. My kids would stream shows and consume other media on-demand, but any advertising was minimal and fairly non-intrusive. And then they were watching a kids show at a hotel once and the ads came on and the effect it had on them was crazy. They suddenly desperately needed all the toys in the commercials and were repeating catch phrases from ads after only seeing them a couple of times. The contrast in their behavior was insane. And they HAD to keep watching it like I hadn't seen before. I spent a week off-grid with my parents a while back and it was great. We came home and my Mom put on the news suddenly everything was terrible and she was angry, but she had to keep watching.
Just awful for mental health if you can't separate yourself from it.
I'm a firm believer in quality over quantity when it comes to news. Google News has gotten increasingly annoying though, forcing me harder toward the "personalized" results, the kind of filter bubble I'm intentionally trying to avoid.
What worked well for me was getting a print subscription to the Economist. They definitely have a bias (particularly in their editorials), but it's mostly of the "free trade" variety, which is pretty easy to account for. On the other hand, their world coverage, particularly Africa and Middle East, is leaps and bounds better than anything you'll get online for free.
Plus the print medium is well suited for the wind-down time before bed, when I'm trying to disengage from screens. As a bonus, there's an exactly 0% chance you get click-baited into reading something inflammatory when you're consuming news on a piece of paper. Sadly they recently force-bundled print with digital, so you're stuck paying ~$80/year if you sign up during one of the frequent sales. $1.50/week is still well worth the cost of admission for me.
My personal favorite recommendation in this vein is The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ . They've got some great writers and editors and often deliver pretty unique insights. Their articles tend towards long-ish-form, but not nearly as long as e.g. the New Yorker. They're a little less world-focused and more US-centric, but not completely. There is some bias (isn't there always?), but I've seen them cover a single issue from multiple POVs using multiple writers before. They have a print edition as well, for ~$70/year (includes digital access as well).
I friggin love the Atlantic even though most of the time they have a way different political view than me. They don't hide their view but instead of assuming it's universal they give details and context for their views, where as the Economist seems to hide their agenda and present the underlying story to lead you to their point of view based on the facts and details they choose to report. The Atlantic has discourse and discussion, which is what I want. And they are not afraid to challenge their own core ideas. They are like my liberal hippie parents raising me with critical thinking skills, "you are free to have your opinion, here's ours and here's how we came to them". It's hard to explain the difference, especially as I agree (or I should say want to agree) more often with the Economist's politics.
I think that they are pretty clear about their agenda to be honest. E.g. they explained and even gave a name to their stance ("extreme centre"), they openly endorse candidates in many elections worldwide, they often include sentences in articles such as "this paper believes that..." etc.
I don't agree with some of their points, but by making them explicit they also make them easy to filter out IMHO
The Economist has a Prospectus which spells out its ideology.
I'd known of and read the ... newspaper ... for three decades before learning of this and reading it.
PROSPECTUS of a weekly paper, to be published every Saturday, and to be called THE ECONOMIST, which will contain— First.—ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day—political events—and parliamentary discussions; and particularly to all such as relate immediately to revenue, commerce, and agriculture; or otherwise affect the material interests of the country. ...
That is, The Economist is, and always has been, overtly free-trade propaganda. (Though one might argue that the meaning(s) and connotations of that term have evolved since first proposed in 1843.)
The Wikipedia article is quite misleading; the current neoliberal movement absolutely leans left. In modern usage, neoliberal refers to a particular type of liberal/Democrat.
>They don't hide it. I think that they are pretty clear about their agenda to be honest. E.g. they explained and even gave a name to their stance ("extreme centre")
My point exactly, that's anything but clear and honest! Calling their views, which are objectively right-wing neoliberal capitalist, calling them "centre" or "moderate" is part of an attempt to naturalise (if that makes sense) their worldview into something that is objective, common-sense, and neutral.
As in an old joke that rings true to anyone living outside the US, in US politics you have, on the one hand, an extreme right-wing party, far to the right of anything in other countries; and on the other hand, you have the Republican party.
It's absolutely true that on cultural issues (particularly rights of minorities), the Democratic party and even the Economist is actually left or even far left compared to many world countries.
But on economic matters, the Economist's positions, and indeed Democratic party positions, are indeed far right-wing of what you'll see virtually anywhere else (maybe other 5-eyes countries are getting closer?).
Also, on foreign policy, the media and political parties in the US almost speak with a single voice, which is often, again, far outside mainstream opinion in the rest of the world.
Yes, left and right are used in many different senses. They're impossible to pin down as they mean different things to different people.
I sometimes think it's useful to consider political ideologies as existing somewhere along a spectrum of collectivist to individualist.
Communism would be far to the collectivist end of the spectrum. Socialism less so.
Most neoliberals wouldn't subscribe to an extreme form of libertarianism as they are predominantly concerned with free market capitalism. But neoliberalism is definitely on the individualist end of the spectrum. An example would be promoting privatisation and discouraging government (collective) ownership.
Personally, I think that a mix of individualism and collectivism is best, and this is indeed what you'll find in many places (including, to a large extent, the US).
From this perspective, you can't call yourself both the "extreme centre" and neoliberal. It would be like calling yourself "extreme centre" and socialist.
Right: conservative. Policy designed to preserve corporate interests and wealthy elite. Often masquerading as “looking after the middle class” - when really at best they get some trickle down benefits. Selfishly You should be right leaning if you are a significant owner of capital or have a very high chance of that (they will convince you that everyone has this chance).
Left: Progressive (in that it looks to reform the existing structure). Policy design to assist the working class (wage earners). It typically looks to take from corporates/wealthy elite and redistribute. Selfishly You should be left leaning if you don’t own significant capital and derive most of your income from wages.
Unselfishly you should err on the side of the left as it is aiming for a “greater good”.
It basically oversimplifies "right" to selfish ideology
and "left" to ideology of "greater good".
For once I would argue, it is for the greater good, if "selfish" individual rights are increased - and apart from that, I think using the left right spectrum is not very helpful for anything, but dividing society into tribal thinking.
Capitalism, or more specifically inequality created the tribes. Denying their existence is to purposefully avoid looking for a solution.
It’s not an ideology of greater good. I mean it literally in the utilitarian sense: left thinking, focusing on improving the plight of wage earners literally effects more people and is a greater good.
Improving/preserving wealthy elites will naturally benefit fewer people.
These are facts, with evidence. I can go deeper if you find this simplification too blunt. It isn’t overly simplified it. It describes what the left right spectrum means, and yes I’m applied a value judgement, but I can back up my value judgement with facts.
I’m not an extremist in my views though, and I will accept democratic processes, and there is benefit to floating around the spectrum, rather than committing to a single point.
"Improving/preserving wealthy elites will naturally benefit fewer people.
These are facts, with evidence"
You are implying, that it is a fact that right leaning people want to preserve wealthy elites.
But this is not, what I heard from right leaning people as their goals.
"Capitalism, or more specifically inequality created the tribes."
And I believe, tribes existed way before capitalism.
So I believe, that you are indeed quite extremist in your ideology, if you know as a fact, that left is good and right is bad.
There are many, many different contradicting views and concepts on the right as well on the left. To some I agree, to many I do not.
But as an example, the nazis are considered quite right usually. But it is nationalsocialism. The concept of the greater good for the people (of one race). So they are left then?
I rather think the whole left right concept is flawed and not helpful.
There are not contradicting views. If you look at them with a lenses of preserving wealth they align quite neatly. I’d like to see a counter example.
Nazis are the very definition of preserving the wealth of a few. It’s just you have seen the words “National Socialism” and assumed that meant left. You’ll find the labels are high jacked quite often. But left and right remain more consistent.
Are you saying that trying to bring more benefit to wage earners is not good?
Could you give an example of right wing policy that wasn’t focused on preserving wealthy elites?
"It’s just you have seen the words “National Socialism” and assumed that meant left."
No, I just happen to live in an area (in germany) with lots of nazis and had to engage with their ideology a lot.
There definitely exist anticapitalist, socialist fascist today, as did back then. Those are the ones, that were put down in Nazi germany in 1934 in the Röhm Putsch, so they did not rose to power, but nevertheless exist.
They do believe in a socialist aryan society. So the greater good and negating of the individual, but limited to a certain race.
So how do they fit in, in the left = altruistic, right = selfish metric?
They are not individualists. They are willing to sacrifice themself for Volk und Vaterland.
"There are not contradicting views"
And with contradicting I meant in general. The socialist pagan Nazis do not really agree with the capitalist, catholic fascist of spain for example, but both are labeld right.
While anarchosyndicalist do not really share much with stalinist, yet both are labeled left.
Seems you’ve applied values of your own. I didn’t frame one as selfish and the other as altruistic. I framed one as spreading wealth and one as consolidating it. I gave “selfish” examples for both.
If you care about preserving wealth with elites that is right wing… whatever weird political label you give it.
If you care about distributing it to non elites that is left wing.
Stalinists are not “left” they were about wealth and power consolidation.
This is why right and left are useful measures because it sees passes all the bullshit names/political measures and provides a simple scale: are you redistributing wealth (left)? Are you consolidating wealth (right)? Are you doing something in between (centrist)
No, they wanted to move wealth, and consolidate it. So you could be fooled into initially thinking it was a leftist agenda when it was “take wealth away from rich bankers”. But it quite quickly deteriorated to something else.
It’s important distinction that at the extremes both left and right don’t look that different. It is essentially use extreme violence to achieve wealth distribution/consolidation. Typically once someone is in control of such power even if they set out/pretended to distribute they pivot to consolidation. I guess this is what is meant by “power corrupts”
So 17 levels below a comment I made about the news just making everyone angry and addicted to it, people are still commenting about whether Nazis are economically left or right. I guess that tracks.
Oh, people can always fight about and against nazis.
But I am not angry, just mildly annoyed, that my point does not get through.
(my point was the left right metric is not helpful - but when applied, you will find not a homogenous group, but right leaning nazis, as well as left leaning nazis, when defining right or left with distributing or conserving wealth. Another common definition would be racist, or not.
Perhaps we were talking past each other. You were saying left and right is useless because you can have left and right nazi's or left and right socialists. I was saying left and right is useful: Nazi and Socialist are the meaningless label.
I mean, it's true if you reinterpret "selfish" as "individualist". At the end of the day its "prioritize concerns of the individual at the expense of society" versus "prioritize concerns of society at the expense of individuals".
I disagree. Because in your statement you are hiding the fact that the “expense of the individuals” is a tiny number compared to the number of “members of society”.
Not American, so I wouldn’t know. But from outside the Democratic Party looked more right than left. Though I guess it’s mostly left of the republicans.
It's an effort to distance themselves from those left/right labels that are so thoroughly debased as to afford little meaning[1].
The term "extreme centre" is far from new. It was used in 1955 by Geoffrey Crowther, editor at the time, when he said "the extreme centre is the paper's historical position"
It's fine to be upset about the Overton window of American politics, but I don't think it's too egregious that an American publication describe their politics within the usual political language of their country.
Or, at the very least, it's not deceptive to call themselves "centre" as neoliberals in a country where the majority understand "centre" to mean "neoliberals" (even if they don't actually know what "neoliberals" means.)
The Economist is absolutely not "right wing." In fact, it's anything but right wing. So that you say that is obectively true makes me wonder about your agenda here and whether you're making these statements in good faith.
The Atlantic is superb. Their pandemic coverage has been my go-to for that subject since the beginning. They’re consistently one, two steps ahead on best mitigation strategies for public policy and have been since the beginning. They were talking about things like HEPA filtration and open windows when everyone else was stuck on masks and hand-washing, for example.
At some point the employee wellness budget is just burning a hole in your pocket and so you put it to a vote. I wouldn’t feel too bad about it. Deepak is a charlatan and everyone knows it anyway :)
Deepak Chopra is a prominent and controversial figure in "wellness" and "alternative medicine", promoting "quantum healing" and claiming that it can cure cancer and so on. It's widely accused of being psuedoscience.
The Atlantic. The New Yorker. The Economist. These are neutral to left facing. In a feeble effort to avoid being put in a different bubble, does anyone have something that an educated republican/conservative would read?
> That someone can honestly say with a straight face that "the Economist is left-facing" speaks volumes to the sad state of the Overton window.
Or that they are viewing things entirely through the lens of American culture war dimension of politics (where the Economist might fit in the neutral to left-facing description), rather than the usual left-right economic spectrum, where it is agressively center-right.
The Economist is old school liberal: let companies do what they want (US "right-wing"), let people do what they want (US "left-wing"), but unlike US libertarians, also have some regulation and support in place to prevent the worst abuses.
You keep repeating the Economist is rightwing in this thread, but it seems most here disagree with you. I mean, Fox, Breitbart or the NY Post are pretty much rightwing, and the Economist does not even compare, both in tone and in content. What puts them in the right wing camp according to yo?
Growing up in NZ, If you championed free market capitalism and privatisation, you would definitely be considered right wing. That is the Economist's bread and butter.
That NZ's major left wing party was and is still a big proponent of these policies didn't change that.
Today, it could be argued that neoliberalism has moved the overton window, but many, many people still don't buy it.
I'm not sure it does "champion privatisation". I've read some pretty damning reports on bad privatisation, for example about the problems from rail privatisation, as well as on monopolistic practice by big companies. I would say it's rather more nuanced than private good, public bad.
What is "left" and what is "right" is a question of consensus, of course. The Eke is surely considered right-wing in Britain, and likely in most of Europe.
Wall Street Journal - there's a quip from someone that when he wanted to read things he agreed with, he opened Jacobin, when he wanted to know what was going on in the world, he went to WSJ. Being based entirely on serving money anchors you to a certain reality that can't be swung to far left or right. The journalism has had some really great scoops these last few years - they broke a lot of the Facebook drama, and some tax evasion shenanigans - while the editorials tend to be pretty principled conservatism ("we'll give a voice to anyone, but we'll put a letter from the Editors in where we call them liars" seems to be their approach to Trump and co).
National Review is similar to The Atlantic in that their long form pieces meant for print publication are wonderful, and tend to be rather nuanced, whiletheir short pieces meant for immediate internet consumption are heavily biased. They're interesting in that they take a "big tent" approach, and will allow a lont of dissenting voices to appear under their mast head - this was always true but became really rather evident during the 2016 elections.
The Dispatch is made up of authors and editors who didn't like that Trump supporters were allowed under the "Big Tent" of the National Review. It's edited by Jonah Goldberg, and David French, who shows up as a guest writer for the Atlantic every now and then.
Agree there. Econlib podcasts by Russ Robert of the Hoover Institute are fantastic. He has a range of guests on, seeks to understand opposing views and it’s more of an academic discussion.
His podcasts about the 2008 financial crisis were fantastic.
None of those publications are leftist in the least. However, they do all happen to share a very strong neoliberal bias—which would put one in more of a corporate centrist bubble—akin to watching just CNN and MSNBC on cable. If you want news without extra commentary, just go straight to Reuters and/or AP.
Realclearpolitics has started providing some original content to go with their aggregation. Tends to be non-reactionary 'traditional' Republican leaning.
Here's another vote for The Atlantic. They are also the only online website (AFAIK) where, once you pay for a subscription, you actually get an ad-free experience.
Atlantic truly is all over the map. They'll have articles like the watershed Coddling of the American Mind from 2015, but then shortly after it's nothing but Trump 24/7 like every other outlet.
I can fully attest to the quality of the Economist but I caution anyone to subscribe because they don’t provide any way to easily unsubscribe.
It’s either to call some phone number or attempt it via live chat.
I tried the second option and the representative just went on with the script trying to fatigue me out of it, no matter what I said.
My local library has a certain number of electronic subscriptions, so I am able to read The Economist on my iPad with the Libby app for "free" (i.e. paid for by by local taxes).
I would GLADLY pay for a print subscription, because I greatly prefer physical magazines over digital. But whether it's magazines, satellite radio, or whatever... I'm just not subscribing to anything known for not letting people go.
The economist cancellation process is an email last time I did it (I subscribe in spurts). Not as ideal as a button but not as egregious as requiring a phone call or something.
When it comes to magazine subscriptions, I just cancel payment via credit card dispute, it auto-resolves itself. Generally I frown upon this kind of thing but yeah it's so hard to cancel that you sort of have to pick the nuclear option with them.
Same here, but I have no ethical qualms about going nuclear. I don’t have time to run the maze of bs dark patterns that companies concoct to try to force me into paying them.
Whenever I’m trying to cancel anything, if there isn’t an obvious and easy way to do so, I just send an email to whatever customer help/etc. mailbox I can find notifying them of the cancellation with 30 days notice. In the mail I tell them that after 30 days I will claw back any payment via my credit card.
I’ve only had to do it twice, and only had to claw back 1 payment, but I’ve never had an issue.
I've always subscribed through a third party (DiscountMags) and it's been painless. In fact I've had the opposite problem, where my Economist doesn't show up one week and I start cursing the USPS until I realize it's because I forgot to renew.
Hopefully the FTCs actions last year will put an end to the kind of cancellation hell you describe. At least for US customers anyway.
I also subscribe to The Economist through DiscountMags. They have a price lock feature now where they will auto-renew you at the same price as the previous term. I locked in a print+digital deal a couple years ago and now it's set and forget. Typically, they renew you about 2-3 months before the old expiration, so there's no risk of missing issues and any leftover time gets added onto the new subscription period.
I subscribe to the Economist. My subscription lasts one year, and doesn't automatically renew. I get renewal reminders and renew at my leisure. None of that arguing with people on the phone.
My favorite Saturday night activity when I was living in Lausanne was to go to McDonalds with that week’s economist and just read it over a prolonged dinner. With was 2006, and both the magazine and meal cost me 10 CHF each! The Economist’s BigMac index was pretty accurate and, at the time, very ironic to me.
Be careful with that. There may very well be fine print that allows them to continue taking funds after the initial period, same as with a credit card. A personal check (in the US) contains all the info a company needs to debit your bank account.
I actually switched from google news to bing news, just because their user preference algorithms are so underdeveloped. So it's essentially like not being in a filter bubble.
It seems like that still runs into the issues that are outlined in the blog post, however (not accomplishing anything, shallow conversations about current events, better ways to stay informed, and feeling like you're doing something when you're not). In general it's hard to overcome these issues as long as you're still reading something considered news.
I think a good exercise is to spend a few weeks using archive.org to read the news from a few years back (or old back issues of The Economist, if you like). It's useful to see how many things people were obsessed over are now forgotten, and how many predictions ended up failing to materialize.
We should also probably be honest with ourselves and admit that reading the news is mostly done for entertainment, and it very well might not be any better than people who spend their time reading celebrity gossip rags.
The article leads with drawing a distinction between pop news and more traditional journalism:
"To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole."
Good print journalism does go into depth, it does give useful background, and it does teach you about the proximate causes of events. It is not full of pundits trying to score internet points or stoke outrage/fear for views/clicks.
I think there's still value in having an informed population. If you don't have a good understanding of the state of the world it's going to be very difficult to change it in a deliberative and positive way. If you're informed you can make rational decisions on things like giving and voting. I don't know how you can do that otherwise.
I'm not convinced there's a better way of getting an understanding of what's going on in the world than reading a well-curated digest of what's going on in the world. You can certainly go deeper on a subset of the topics via specialized outlets, or long-form books and articles, but good journalism should give you more than the superficial understanding of the issue.
That said, I don't dispute that well-crafted journalism can be stimulating intellectual entertainment. If I didn't enjoy it, I probably wouldn't read it.
> The article leads with drawing a distinction between pop news and more traditional journalism:
Sure, but I don't think it goes on to justify why that distinction is there. Particularly points 2 to 5 seem to work just as well as criticism of written media as TV.
> If you're informed you can make rational decisions on things like giving and voting...I'm not convinced there's a better way of getting an understanding of what's going on in the world than reading a well-curated digest of what's going on in the world.
I used to work a lot on politics at the local level and can't say that's been my experience. Much of the time, the things people's votes have the most impact on are barely covered in the media, or in many cases not covered at all. Including fairly important things, such as when our state party leadership suspended elections for two years and staying on past their terms. Almost zero news coverage.
If you want to be informed and involved in ways that actually impact those around you, I'd say involvement in community organizations is important, reading the news not so much. As his fifth point says, it's easy to pretend you're being an informed citizen by indulging in a media habit when you're doing nothing of the sort.
Another issue is that everyone can see how new organizations they don't like can leave people misinformed, but never consider that news organizations they like can do the same. Again, from what I've seen, misinformation is fairly common. It's not even necessarily done for nefarious purposes. A busy reporter might just have time to look at a press release, while local organizations will have people that often go into much more depth and look at the actual meeting minutes or the exact wording of particular pieces of legislation.
People should think of concrete things they're trying to accomplish, not just vague notions of "being informed." I bet that someone who ignores the news and spends an hour looking at Vote411 and reading about candidates on the web before they fill out a ballot is going to make more informed voting decisions than a news junkie who follows national and international news 24/7, already knows who they're going to vote for at the national level, and completely ignores downballot races (a surprisingly large portion of voters fit this description).
Also, focusing on people/orgs who must try to accomplish something in the face of significant news is a good non-inflammatory way to get the real story on any current event. Visit professional organization websites, professional trade rags, actual financial newsletters. You may not be able to sort out real signal from the noise of Mainstream media, but manufacturers, military, diplomats, maritime, etc. can’t themselves afford to be confused nor do politicians want them confused. Those “essentials” will get the real facts and report what they can through their professional organizations and trade publications. Read them, listen to them, and watch what they do. They don’t get flustered and don’t make their money by inflaming or distorting.
And remember, there is no such thing as “The News”, only “some news”.
Honestly I think people put too much stock in (a very flawed notion of) biased vs unbiased. Everything has a bias. Everyone has a lens they perceive events through and you can’t write without that lens having an impact. I challenge anyone to present a truly “objective” piece of historical writing or news from any era.
In general, I agree with you, and often make the same point whenever the notion of "objectivity" in US news media comes up.
However, just within the last couple of days I read an article (it was linked here on HN but immediately flagged) called "Why Progressives Hate Black People", published on substack.
Now, the article itself contained quite a lot of interesting factual information about homelessness in the SF Bay area, some of which I was not aware of (and checked out to verify it.
However, the overall framing and the tone throughout the writing was just a completely unnecessary and even misleading hack that tried to prove a point that doesn't really seem particularly relevant to the story, only the agenda of the author.
Contrast this with reporting in an outlet like the NYT. Complain all you want about the NYT's egregious journalistic errors (and there are many), the overwhelming majority of their reportage does seem to me like a good faith effort to inform the reader about something. It may get the details or even the entire story wrong, but it isn't engaging in outright and unnecessary polemicization on the topic. Yes, the writers and editors still had a point of view, and perhaps even a desired conclusion, but don't feel it necessary to bash you over the head with "LOOK AT THIS! LOOK AT THIS! THE HORROR!"
Consequently, even though I continue to not believe in "objective news" or "objective journalism", there is still "hack journalism" and "good faith journalism" (not sure about those terms), and they are not the same.
Objectivity is an ideal to be stived for. It's a reasonable point of view to suggest that striving for that ideal is worthwhile. When I think about no engineering design is a perfect trade-off, it becomes obvious that acknowledging this inevitable flaw does not make every trade-off equally useful. Some get closer to an ideal for the circumstance, usually they have to sweat to get there. And so it is with history and news reporting.
The next error becomes "If these biased, partisan sources agree then it must be objectively true." Which leads to Raytheon being absolutely above criticism and disagreement with anything they're pushing as in their financial interests as worthy of being totally dismissed as "Being in league and on the payroll of Stalin or Bin Laden or Sadam Hussein or <insert latest evil bastard here>" Rather than being anlyzed on its actual merits or lack therof. In league with the enemy while showing zero evidence of it should be disqualifying as so biased that the source is totally compromised (by sheer idiocy if nothing else).
Objectivity as an ideal often prompts people with otherwise good integrity to both-sides issues where one side is clearly malicious or dishonest. Objectivity isn't the goal of journalism and shouldn't be: truth and clarity should be.
You're using the word "Objectivity" with a very different meaning to me.
"Truth and clarity" - this as an ideal IS objectivity. Not some half-baked, half-way position between competing lies which is anything but objectivity.
Ah yes. “Objectivity” is often used as lacking bias. Truth and clarity require taking a position and advocating it. The only way that’s unbiased is if there isn’t anything at stake in the truth or clarity thereof.
Objectively the acceleration due to gravity on earth is 9.8 meters per second squared. The above statement is both true and clear within certain bounds on precision to anyone not playing sillies and who isn't very stupid. That example is a really easy one. It obviously gets harder the more complex the subject matter becomes.
This post-modern, "there's no such thing as objective reality" and one must take "a position" rather than striving to achieve objectivity is just nonsense and should always have been treated as such and should always be treated as such.
My point is not “there’s no such thing as objective reality”, it’s that for issues with more room for dispute than your example being objective in the sense you clearly mean sometimes requires rejecting ideas inconsistent with one’s understanding of reality.
As an example which recently came up in a local (to me, in Seattle) news context: it will soon be legal to ride bikes without a helmet. Unintuitively, this has safety benefits for cyclists. Pointing this out is often met with ridicule. But it’s true, and once known, a person with integrity must reject that intuition.
"Objectively I'm right and all the positions I hold and advocate for are beyond reproach. Objectively anyone making less effort than me to make the world a better place in the manner of my preference is a biased, bad faith actor." --Things not said out loud.
Striving for objectivity is allowing for ones own bias and acknowledging the validity of facts and arguments that do not support one's own view on the matter. In reporting it is attempting to make one's own view on the matter irrelevant to the content written. Objectivity is removing one's extreme loathing concerning a current or former president to acknowledge facts that show that person in a favourable light and the exact converse. It is not a half way point between two competing arguments among many, many more on the matter. It does not mean if R & D official or semi-official positions agree it must be correct.
It is utterly bizarre how often people don't understand this as a valid point of view or simply want to derail the point for something else they want to argue for.
> In reporting it is attempting to make one's own view on the matter irrelevant to the content written.
This is impossible. Part of the determination of what to report is what’s important to even report on in the first place. Omission, or emphasis of stories otherwise reported objectively correctly, is a bias too.
The rest of your comment… I sincerely can’t tell if you’re objecting to anything I said or just generally ranting apropos of nothing above. So I don’t know how to address that.
Yes. A perfect engineering trade-off is impossible. So flipping what. Do you want someone's best work? Do you want someone who is good at the job of engineering design's best work designing a machine you have to trust? Perfection is impossible as you point out.
Objective reality exists. I find those trying to achieve objectivity in their reporting of that objective reality worthwhile. You don't. Good luck.
Wow, coming back to this a few days later, you’re a jerk. A jerk who literally doesn’t care to engage with the things you’re arguing with. Objective my foot.
In fact, a good 50% of my feeds are 'World News' feeds from other countries. it's the best way to see alternate points of view I think, and then as a moderately intelligent[1] adult, I can form my own opinion on the current state of affairs.
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[1] I'm not allowed to call myself 'smart' on HN, I got told off for it on a previous comment ;)
As a point of encouragement don't let some random internet bully discourage you from using a perfectly fine word like smart or from diminishing your self image. For all we know you're the smartest person in the world.
After one year of subscribing to the Economist I like it, but would prefer if it was a monthly newspaper with 1/4 of the content. Reading it throughout each week takes quite a lot of my reading time and I have a feeling that dedicating this time to books would be better. Monthly with well selected topics would be enough to stay informed of important current issues.
I definitely get a sinking feeling when I leave on vacation and come back to a two-issue backlog! There's more content in there than I typically consume in a week, so I've gotten more discerning on which articles I read. Skipping editorials, Britain, letters, and most columns seems to get it down to a manageable amount for my reading patterns. I also tend to skip any political coverage that's about what might happen in an upcoming election somewhere. I figure when it actually does happen I can read about it then.
This is a question for the folks who have been reading the Economist regularly for a while. What do you guys feel like you get out of reading the Economist over time? This is meant as a genuine question. So for example, I consume my news only via my Google News feed, so basically just a fast scan of the headlines and maybe a few news articles in depth. Does the Economist provide more details, more nuance, more depth? Do you guys feel it helps paint the bigger picture better then "regular" news media, a more erudite perspective?
I find just skimming headlines gives me facts but facts are kind of useless. For example you could tell an alien that the average human drinks 1 cup of milk a day and the alien would have a fact but be completely unable to contextualize it.
Longer form articles help you contextualize it.
Of course, you still have to be careful that take into the account the unintentional bias of the source (i.e. a 3/day milk drinker would tell the alien that people don’t drink enough milk, and they’re not lying… they just see life through their own experiences).
So you really need a combo of regular news media for facts and a variety of longer form sources for contextualization.
Yojo's comment matches my feelings fairly well. I would add as a corollary to the better 'slow burn' coverage that they have less 'flash in the pan' coverage as well. I.e. the weekly format of their print edition tends to filter out the most ephemeral stories and gives them time to provide more in-depth coverage of the stories that still seem to matter a few days or weeks later. This, combined with the space constraints provided by their print edition gives me the impression that articles that make it to the print edition are probably worth my time to read, even in cases where I'm not particularly interested in the topic.
A couple things, a lot of which boils down to them actually having journalists on staff who go out and research stories in person. A lot of digital outlets are just regurgitating Associated Press articles with little/no value add.
1) Breadth of coverage. The Economist is much more of a world magazine. When I scan Google News I get basically no Africa coverage. The economist has a section for it.
2) Depth of coverage. The Economist will have journalists reporting on location in places like China and India. They get direct interviews with people who are experiencing the phenomenon being reported on. I rarely if ever see that kind of reporting on Google News, especially not behind a paywall.
3) Better coverage of "slow burn" stories. e.g. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening in Africa right now with infrastructure development. China has its big Belt and Road initiative that's more or less forced western governments to present a viable alternative or get boxed out. The west has bungled the response, and China is now dominant in financing new infrastructure projects throughout Africa. It will likely reap benefits for decades, both in economic and military positioning. There's no one "story" here to make a headline that would bubble up in Google News, but it's a really fascinating ongoing geopolitical saga.
4) Hitting interesting angles on stories. Last week there was an article about Russian troop buildup around Ukraine, but they wrote it from the angle of civilian surveillance technology. By stitching together private satellite imagery, TikTok and YouTube footage they were able to tell that troops that were ostensibly "withdrawn" had just been redeployed to other positions closer to the front. Using dash-cam footage posted to TikTok they were able to even identify specific armored divisions being moved up to the border. So I got a piece of current news (Russia is lying about its troop deployment), plus a piece of insight (in modern warfare citizens can learn about military movements without it being filtered through government entities).
5) This is not specific to the Economist, but the print format is so much nicer for me than digital. There's no temptation to check my email, or see what's on Hacker News (hah), or get drawn down some random digital rabbit hole.
Things like Private Eye and (even worse) The London Review of Books have this issue. It's like having a bad debt and it weighs you down when you know you should deal to it.
I used to feel vaguely guilty (in a "there-are-starving-children-in-Africa" kind of way) when I didn't read the entirety of the issue I had paid for, but eventually I realized it didn't make any sense.
Sometimes I read almost the whole thing, but there are weeks when I skip more than 80% of the contents because of no time. One issue I'll always read cover to cover, though, is the Christmas special.
I’ve been a subscriber for about fifteen years now. You triage the content. I rarely read more than half the magazine and that’s with spending >1hr on the subway every day.
I used to find the Economist great, but with the corrosiveness of everything this last bit, they seem to sneak agenda into articles now days in a way I feel like this whole post is trying to move away from. Maybe as a lost Libertarian who can't stand the control everyone's lives progressives I feel that has crept quite a bit into the Economist. It's funny it bothers me as I have reached a point where I feel Libertarianism just isn't compatible with the realities of the modern world as much as this child of hippies wishes it was and am looking for new understanding, but I always leave the Economist feeling like their American reporting on subjects I'm informed on is very manipulating which then makes me doubt their reporting on subjects I don't have enough context for deep personal understanding.
I haven't noticed this kind of bias in the US reporting, but my personal views skew moderate liberal so it might be hitting a personal blindspot.
The main stances that seem to go against coastal US media I've seen are:
1) Trans rights, particularly with youth transitioning. The Economist seems to have an article every week or two talking about health implications, controversy in female sports, or detransitioning.
2) Free speech. The Economist is very critical of any perceived censorship, and will frequently cover perceived excesses from the left in the US, particularly in higher education.
Generally I do not think the Economist does a great job of visually separating their editorial content from their news content. In many cases visual treatment of a column looks very close to a regular article, and the editorials at the front of each issue look (at a glance) indistinguishable from news stories. Each issue will also have a larger "briefing" on a prominent world issue that definitely blurs the lines between news and opinion. As a reader of many years, I've taken to skipping the editorial content, skimming the briefings, and taking the columns case-by-case. But I can imagine occasional readers having a different experience than I do.
Hmmm ... they are certainly right of center afaict. If they are quite liberal, what do you call the vast landscape to the left of them? Who is a centrist?
I agree. The Economist is like NPR for rich people and diplomats. Head out to the parlor with your cigar and jacket and enjoy it.
They are good in that they are informative and not subtle about the voice of the paper. But it gets a little boring to me if I read it for a few months.
> I have reached a point where I feel Libertarianism just isn't compatible with the realities of the modern world as much as this child of hippies wishes it was
How did you find them? Do you know who reads them or where they are popular? I came across them recently and was both impressed and puzzled that I'd never heard of them and never head anyone discuss them.
I haven't read that particular essay, but maybe submit it?
I have no idea what you are talking about. There is not a definitive / clear line between classical liberal and libertarian. The comment seems to be unnecessarily divisive and seeking for flame war.
I'm puzzled by that reaction. In my head at least, the distinction is pretty deep, and describing The Economist as "libertarian" in any sense would be clearly misplaced, other than to say it sometimes supports positions libertarians also agree with.
Historically, when The Economist was founded, libertarianism would have been associated with French anarchism. The core, consistent theme of libertarianism is that individual rights trump arbitrary interference by a collective. The various forms of anarchism are sort of natural "extreme" forms of libertarianism. Intellectually, libertarianism starts with a negative claim that except in extraordinary cases, the collective has no right to interfere with individuals. This remains true today. Core items (legalization of prostitution, drugs, elimination of many taxes) begin with the pretext that the collective has no right to regulate individual behavior in these domains.
Classical liberalism emerged in Britain (Locke, Smith, Mill, etc.). It has roots in a blend of English utilitarianism and enlightenment-era attempt to root the form of government in reason. "Rights" in classical liberalism are important, but they aren't necessarily more foundational than well-being. Anarchism is seem as trivially untenable (Hobbes' "nature red of tooth and claw"). Liberalism tries to identify a core set of functions (security, laws and their enforcement, public infrastructure) and a set of mechanisms (constitutions, elections, courts, etc.) to implement them, and has a very enlightenment-era emphasis on building institutions that are robust to "bad" actors. It does cleave towards a minimalist view of government, and does elevate rights like freedom of speech, but these are seen as intrinsically grey and are framed much more in terms of limiting the power of government institutions to ensure that they remain true to their mission/function.
I don't think that's flame bait, or super controversial.
This is all true, but in 20th century America the term libertarian got re-applied to a right-wing, small or no government, free-market approach. Now days most Americans are completely unaware of the French anarchist usage of the word. The origins of this are mixed, but I think it's safe to say the Hayek/Friedman wing has roots in classical liberalism, for example Locke's theory of private property.
If you read your own words carefully, you will agree with me: There is not a definitive / clear line between classical liberal and libertarian. The core values are the same. The historical context of French anarchism has nothing to do with the common use of the term libertarian in the modern (American) context.
Your own words "They represent the classical liberal position, which is not Libertarian, and never has been" make it seems like there is a clear cut difference between classical liberal and (modern) libertarian. Which is simply not true and unnecessarily divisive and seeking for flame war.
It is the mainstream view that classical liberal and libertarian are mostly equivalent in the modern context. The clear cut differentiation between classical liberal and libertarian is your own personal opinion. It is ok to have your own personal opinion, but it is exaggeration to state it as if it is the objective fact.
Your two positions are really not far apart from a third party perspective, but throwing in claims like "unnecessarily divisive and seeking for flame war" just seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
To be clear, I was not the person you were responding to, simply someone describing a relatively old set of philosophies.
We're talking about the classification of a 170-year-old journal that operates out of the UK. I don't think the suggestion that libertarianism (particularly American libertarianism) is largely irrelevant when discussing The Economist is surprising, or shocking, or even terribly controversial. The suggestion that it would start a flame war is particularly odd as far as the content of the suggestion was concerned, although the tone of the comment you were responding to was a little blustery.
I'm sure a lot of the staff of The Economist and a lot of libertarians hold, say, Milton Friedman in high regard.
The clear cut distinction between classical liberalism and libertarianism, however, is not merely my own personal opinion. Although the intellectual landscape is complex and variegated, there's a fundamental difference in how the two lines of thinking argue, and what they accept as first principals. Classical liberalism is an institutionalist view that derives policy decisions using a utilitarian set of values that balances rights against other measures of well-being and sustainability.
Libertarianism, conversely, uses a first-principals rights-based way of approaching decisions. Just as an example, here's the front page of the Libertarian Party in the United States:
"<The Libertarian Party> is the only political party that respects you as a unique and responsible individual. Our slogan is that we are 'The Party of Principle' because we stand firmly on our principles. Libertarians strongly oppose any government interference in your personal, family, and business decisions. Essentially, we believe all Americans should be free to live their lives and pursue their interests as they see fit as long as they do no harm to another."
This is pretty close to antithetical to classical liberalism. Classical liberalism explicitly seeks to suborn individual rights (which are not enshrined as intrinsically valuable) in a way that doesn't make us worse off than we started. The minimalism is classical liberalism is about outcomes, not about rights.
Obviously that's just a cheap banner page and not representative of libertarianism to everyone. I was surprised to find that it was closer to the original French meaning than I expected (which isn't important, but might be interesting).
Thank you, jknoepfler, this is essentially what I was thinking. The Economist is quite supportive of institutions and their value, in a way that American Libertarians are not. While both groups have important and useful things to say, and they sometimes share or advocate for the same positions, it is important to understand their differences too.
I subscribe to the Economist too and perceive their reporting as still being reasonably libertarian without venturing into tinfoil-hat territory, but being in the UK I guess I get both a different balance of articles and also have a different perception of libertarianism.
Particularly with NPR, you have to focus on particular shows and stations. There's no central editorial staff for the content that comes from their member stations. For example the Takeaway has quite different editorial standards than All Things Considered or Morning Edition.
There's a game that's fun to play to see how sometimes ideological and vacuous the Economist can be - try and swap out the key operative term of a piece with something absurd and see if the force of the argument changes or remains persuasive.
This is a while back, and an extreme example, but the pinnacle for me was the editorial (https://postimg.cc/hhkmfgN3) on the 9th of January 2012 where one could swap every reference it had on defending banks and financiers with references to slavery and slaveholders and the force of the argument would not change one jot. This was because it made absolutely no recourse to the wider context of impacts that the industry might have besides being of benefit to a city. It was just a whirr of rhetoric and really opened my eyes to the biases in play. The magazine's prestige has never quite recovered.
Fun aside, many other cases of journalistic bias are more about very selective reporting and emphasis, see for example the Bolivian election of 2020.
NPR has a subtle, but fairly clear centre left bias.
"There's no central editorial staff" - there's no need to have a central staff if you hire the same types of people.
Hear it from former senior NPR Exec. himself [1]
I'm not supporting this man's views at all, other than to point out he gives a fairly clear articulation into how 'bias' doesn't remotely need to have some kind of central authority and that it absolutely exists at NPR.
In fact, for someone who doesn't see the bias in something like NPR, learning to see the bias in an otherwise fairly respectable institution which does have fairly high standards and isn't so interest in flame-bait such as NPR - would be a worthy exercise.
'Culture' is probably the root of all bias in most places, not some 'central committee'. People who don't fit the mood are pushed said, those who have 'the correct opinions' are promoted. It's a perennial feature of human organisations you can see this in corporate culture as well.
I never said whether I agree or disagree that bias exists or where it was, bias exists in all human institutions. Part of modern, respectable journalism is the active task of acknowledging it, even.
What I asked were for some concrete examples. Whenever the discussion comes up on bias at NPR (in particular) people tend to hand wave around "subtle, but fairly clear centre left bias."
In my opinion there is a bias, which I would call "radical centrism" (the Sisyphean task of trying to recognize bias and attempt to curtail it), and I could point to few in the past week as a regular listener, but whenever I hear "NPR has a liberal bias" I can't get anyone to give me concrete examples. It's taken as fact.
My overwhelming interpretation of the national NPR broadcasts are two part :
Firstly, the majority of it are human interest stories. They do not devote a majority of their air time to politics. I don't see how the Moth, Fresh Air, This American Life, or the handful of local shows I listen to regularly about local news stories trends anywhere but whichever direction is compelling to a listener.
And secondly, an opinion that I don't like articulating on HN or anywhere that might ruffle feathers is that facts have a liberal bias. You can argue until the cows come up about the role of government in society, but the cardinal direction of "reality" on the political compass is <- that way.
>What worked well for me was getting a print subscription to the Economist. They definitely have a bias (particularly in their editorials), but it's mostly of the "free trade" variety, which is pretty easy to account for.
On political issues they're also pretty firmly middle-of-the-road beltway, which is its own little bubble.
It's partly because it delivers fairly objective analysis, but also because it puts heavy emphasis on how geography shapes how countries behave which is a blind spot of the economist/atlantic and the like.
I've done exactly the same thing. Grew tired mid pandemic Y1 of the constant drone and misinformation, just a continuation of how it had been going already.
Print and digital sub to the Economist and then "banned" myself from reading 24hr/live news sites.
Has been interesting to see how many real life conversations I've been in ~18m in where I've been (anecdotally) better informed, or able to add colour (the recent events in Ukraine are a good example) that friends have totally missed hooked up to the daily drip. Interested to see if you find this also?
I'm a huge fan of the more objective attitude of charts and figures, and a clear subjective opinion, often explicitly stated as "we think...".
I've definitely noticed having more background knowledge on major events. My wife still takes all her news digitally (mostly NYT), and I'm able to add a lot of color to her understanding of events when we talk through news of the day.
What's actually really surprising to me is how "not behind" my information normally is. I work my way through an issue over breakfasts and evenings in the course of the week, so my information is typically 2-9 days stale. It almost never matters.
I would suggest subscribing to the Sunday delivery of a physical newspaper you like - when they know they can't just quickly update and edit an article online it definitely seems like they are more conscientious with what they are printing.
> I'm a firm believer in quality over quantity when it comes to news
When it comes to news, I'm of the opinion that one should strive for diversity of opinion rather than quality. As you noted, all media has a bias so you should see what everyone's biases are. You will never get truth from any single media outfit so cast a wide net.
> What worked well for me was getting a print subscription to the Economist.
Why would you pay for something that has ads? It would be like paying facebook for a facebook account.
Print ads are a lot less obtrusive for me compared to digital ads. It's literally just a piece of paper that I don't have to look at. They don't have inline ads, or sponsored content, or autoplaying videos, or any of the conventional web shenanigans that try to hijack your attention. They certainly can't track me. I can't speak to the digital side of the economist, as I do not use it, but the print ads are mostly for dumb luxury goods that I can easily ignore.
People paid for newspapers for decades, and they've definitely always had ads in them. The advertisers subsidize my news reading, and in this case at least the trade-off seems acceptable.
Ads without javascript are great, but they barely pay anything as it’s apparently harder to identify fraud.
Everything is moving, animated, etc. Blink was deprecated for a reason, it’s annoying. So is auto play, stickies, overlays, copy/paste interference, etc. The dark patterns make it miserable.
I agree that diversity of opinion is important! I made https://www.nabu.news for that exact reason. If I'm reading a NYTimes article and curious about what other sources might say, I just click on the Nabu browser extension to see what, for example, Fox News is saying about the same thing. Find it helpful for getting out of my echo chamber.
It's why I stopped watching football, baseball, basketball, etc. Used to be a huge sports addict. Such an incredible waste of time looking back. Now, I only watch ad free highlights, if that.
But peak level of lunacy are the ad-ridden movie trailers on youtube. I can't believe people are actually watching ads in order to watch an ad...
Quick curiosity question. Why do you find The Economist’s coverage of Africa and the Middle East leaps and bounds better than others?
Here’s why I’m asking. I find The Economist’s coverage of the US a 7/10 and Turkey a 3/10. Having lived in both for roughly the same time, The Economist’s coverage of the US feels vastly superior to that of Turkey.
Yet, when I talk to my friends here, they say they read it for the international coverage. That always came to me as curious.
Honestly it is the difference between having any coverage and none at all.
If I just read stories from the front page of Google News I’d have no idea who Recep Erdogan was. I definitely wouldn’t have any idea of Turkeys current inflation woes or his constant firing of people who disagree with economic reality.
I've been doing the World News at 6:30PM with Brian Muir on whatever channel 7-1 is on my antenna, the NYTime's morning newsletter, and then I read the print New Yorker.
Then I come on HackerNews sometimes, but have dropped all social media and even my favorite news aggregator site Fark.com.
Mainly the big thing is just not looking at the news on my phone which can be an incredible time sink, and also not looking at comments for news related articles. Even here on HackerNews which I generally consider to be a "wheat, not chaff, comment section" can get pretty low grade on anything with a political slant unfortunately.
My opinion is, if I'm not going to do anything about it except yell at the people near me whether that's near me online, or near me in person, than there's no reason to get flustered about something.
If I'm going to start calling my reps again, and hitting the streets, then it's good to be informed so I can express my view points and understand what I'm fighting for. Otherwise, it's just negative energy. I'm not going to fix the entire world, and having negative emotions about every single negative thing that's happening in a brutal world is... just too much.
Business oriented publications work well for news because their biases tend to be of the “how can you make more money variety” as opposed to something catering to their reader/viewer’s cognitive biases (their readers want to make money, not fool themselves). Fooling yourself isn’t profitable, so why bother watching ideological conservative foxnews when time spent reading the conservative biz newspaper WSJ is much more productive?
I've personally been enjoying the "Quartz Daily Brief"[0] as my sole source of news for many years. My favorite thing about it, besides the fact that it's relatively unbiased, is that it's also pretty light on the actual news part. Today's brief only has five articles of news, which is less than a screenful. Following that is a "deep dive" into a non-polarizing topic (today it's about Cricket), then a few "fun", non-emotionally manipulating, articles (e.g., a new Coca Cola flavor).
Highly recommend it! And this is coming from someone who despises news, generally.
> Google News has gotten increasingly annoying though, forcing me harder toward the "personalized" results
oh brother, you aren't kidding. I want top news of the day, but all I get is a hundred clickbait versions of two or three things I clicked on once a couple weeks ago.
Just wanted to respond and second the comment on the Economist. I have been reading it for a year, and it has really given me a much broader and more balanced view of what is going on in the world (including in the US). I really like getting a perspective on US events, from outside the US.
It particularly nice because its a weekly with a subscription, so they don't have to be as click baitey with the titles and articles.
For reference, I also read Washington Post / New York Time (not great, but some baseline whats going on), The Atlantic, Jacobin, Wired (not very good anymore), and when I have time National Review.
Google News' most annoying thing now is they implemented infinite scroll....
FWIW I have a subscription to a major news paper + local to avoid the filter bubble. The major is a little conservative leaning and local a little liberal.
I also got frustrated with overly personalized results in Google News. I tried following a variety of sources on Twitter but that didn't work as well as I'd like either. I made my own topic-aligned news feed, and made a browser extension too (if you're reading an article online, it shows similar articles from other websites). Primarily a passion project, but I find it useful! Located here: https://www.nabu.news
I took a somewhat "quantified web" approach to identifying quality informational sources. That included a number of media and news publications. Basis was the Foreign Policy top 100 global thinkers list.
>Google News has gotten increasingly annoying though, forcing me harder toward the "personalized" results,
I noticed same. While there is some relevance to personalized news they may or may not reflect what I am looking for at this point in time.
Hence, I found that showing both (most noteworthy and most personal) actually helps me read the news better.
I have to say this again for the Economist fan girls here. It's still news, it may be more objective in tone and content than other publications, but it still influences negative thinking. Negative thinking is part of the job of global leaders or actual economists, so unless you're one, you're not doing yourself a favor
I think it is a good choice, but you should also read other journals. Even the wrong ones or especially the wrong ones. Only if you can detach yourself from the message of course, but it is valuable to see another angle. At least from time to time.
The Economist is extremely biased. It's only that their bias is so "natural" to you that you don't even question it or even recognise it, it just seems part of objective reality. There's the "globalised neoliberal capitalism" bias you mention, but also the "US foreign policy" bias for instance. It certainly prevents you from seeing many things in an accurate light.
There is no escaping it: you have to consume plural sources in order to be well-informed, otherwise you're subject to biases. Personally I stick to Reuters/AP + various newspapers.
Can you expand on the “US foreign policy bias”? For the last couple years I feel like most of the Economist’s opinion of US policy could be summed up as “bungling”.
E.g. they’re critical of the withdrawal from the TPP, the introduction of protectionist tariffs, the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, the half-baked “Build Back Better World” counter to Belt and Road, pretty much all of recent immigration policy, etc.
I’m having a hard time thinking of a recent US foreign policy move they seemed in favor of. Maybe the tougher stance against China?
Or is the bias that they’re too critical of US foreign policy?
Family member of mine wanted to turn on TV news the morning of Thanksgiving just to get an update on "the weather". The immediate and visceral negative reaction of everyone under the age of approximately 40 was pretty hilarious. After not having cable for 10+ years broadcast news just feels like an incredibly arduous waste of time compared to what I can read in just a few minutes.
I started subscribing to a fairly large but local newspaper (as in, actual Sunday delivery) and I get a lot of weird looks but it is genuinely a mostly enjoyable experience. I tried to contact the newspaper to see if they could skip sending all of the extra junk adds (separate leaflet thankfully) but their support could literally not comprehend what I was talking about even after multiple reply emails. In their minds the only ads apparently are online.
The newspaper makes a ton of money off of those inserts and agreements about them happen at the top of the org chart. Nobody you can reach has any power here. In addition, if their support was young enough they'd have no idea what you're talking about.
"That crazy guy who thinks there's a conspiracy to print off ads and put them in his mailbox called again today!"
Well I would imagine any individual old enough to rent and/or shop at bed bath and beyond would be fairly familiar with the concept of receiving print ads in the mail. Those Valpack things are pretty common where I live and they're essentially exactly the same as the newspaper inserts, just like 50 of em in a branded envelope
The Valpack envelops make me so sad. I just take them out of the mailbox and toss them into the recycling bin. Think of all the trees used, energy wasted, and chemicals used in making the ink that are now in the environment for absolutely no reason.
Unrelated to my original post, but I have been on a quest to purge all the junk from my physical mail. It is a huge PITA, but in almost all cases you can email someone and eventually get them to stop.
I'm trying to imagine your state of mind when you asked a newspaper to quit sending advertisements. Why not give the number of a good law firm specializing in bankruptcy also?
It reminds me of a guy who wanted to start a company that would "help" the USPS by allowing customers to filter out junk mail in order to improve overall postal service. Yeah, no. Junk is their core business, just like the news.
> After not having cable for 10+ years broadcast news
You mean cable news right? Broadcast news preceded cable news, when you got your news at 6PM during the prime time news slot or at 11PM during the late night news slot, and was broadcast over radio/TV waves rather than cabled into your house.
About a decade ago I started reading law blogs instead of the news.
They're written for other lawyers, so they're well composed, often without excessive hyperbole. The writing is far higher quality than typical journalism. They're actually informational in terms of describing the mechanisms behind power in our society.
In terms of focus, if something is truly important there will always be a legal analysis. Celebrity fluff and nonsense about talking heads doesn't make the cut. Meaningful conflict and hard questions do.
I used to mostly read on my commute and it's been a few years, but the most approachable is probably https://abovethelaw.com/. It has quite a bit of fluff and humor mixed in.
Popehat is usually quite good, especially when there's some kind of nonsense narrative going around. Good debunking explainers https://www.popehat.com/
Volokh conspiracy has very good analysis of current events as well: https://reason.com/volokh/ (was at WaPo, was independent before that. I haven't read it in a while)
There's a lot of other really great stuff around as well, like the lw blog collection: https://www.lw.com/blogs
Popehat's Twitter is a really good source for "is legal issue x actually a big deal?" sanity checks on breaking news.
Sometimes it's "yes, this is actually quite big"; other times it's "this is a breathless depiction of something that happens 20 times a day and is entirely normal procedure".
What types of news do you follow? Some suggestions are:
- SCOTUSBlog
- Law 360
- Bloomberg Law
- ABA Journal News
- Courthouse News
The primary benefit to using legal sources for your news is that the legal news cycle does not match up with the 24 hour news cycle. For example, right now we're talking about SCOTUS's 2022-2023 case docket, and that doesn't even start until October. Also because lawyers like to cover their butts/believe in getting everything in writing, a lot of their back and forth is available to the public, which lets you get better context for arguments.
If you're talking about Law 360 and similar sites for legal news, sure.
If you're talking about political news, no. Some of the most hyperbolic, partisan, and bizarrely flawed takes on Trump, and the US political situation over the last 5 years, have come from lawyers. It's been embarrassing.
A fair counterpoint: some of the most hyperbolic, partisan, and bizarrely flawed takes have come from Trump's own legal team (looking at you, Giuliani).
But I'm sure we could find bits of embarrassment anywhere we look!
Same here, just scan news.google.com periodically, never watch anything unintentionally [0].
The incessant talking heads are such obvious brainwashers, whenever I get tricked into watching some in a clip or at a bar/taqueria it's utterly offensive and patronizing manipulative trash. I can't imagine how broken people are who constantly consume the stuff.
[0] youtube-dl is a godsend for maintaining this without totally disconnecting from contemporary culture
Google News is filled with spam and cheap attention grabbing garbage these days IMO. It’s also highly targeted leading to a bubble. But I agree with both of you otherwise!
I don't really understand where this comes from, if you're skimming the news periodically then the "Headlines" mobile app tab (or the "Top Stories" section in the website) is actually un-personalized. Google News explicitly pushes personalization in the separate and aptly named "For You" section.
I only view the main page with js disabled, but agree the quality has diminished since its earlier years. Castrating its use of js still retains visibility into the major headlines via the main page at least.
I noticed this problem is especially prevalent in US American news.
There is more opinion, opinions of opinions, and breaking news of opinions than news in the news.
Who cares if AOC slams Ted Cruz or Tucker Carlson reacts to Rachel Maddow. And that I know all of these names is already a crime in itself ;=)
My father tells me - "Why do you care what Andrew Cuomo is doing in New York city?" and it kind of was eye-opening. I really don't. I wish I paid more attention to local news, local politics, and perhaps check-in on international news on a weekly basis. The internet changed all this. When I was growing up, my dad read local newspaper daily. National and international news were briefly covered in the local paper. He'd delve into the Economist and the sunday edition to catch up with the rest. This is almost unheard of today.
Exactly. Now the major team sport is who you want for President, even though he arguably has the lowest impact on your life. As long as he doesn't hit The Button.
IMO people ought to put down social media, put down the national news, and pick up their local newspaper. Read about their own mayor, city council, whatever. And maybe even get involved -- depending on the size of your city, an ordinary individual can actually get involved at a meaningful level.
The president has a very significant impact on many people’s lives via judicial nominees. The biggest this year is expected to be the effects of the 3 Republican Supreme Court judges installed by Trump on many women’s access to abortions, but many other judges in the system are appointed by presidents as well that make decisions that affect many people’s lives.
I think your example just highlights my point. Currently abortion rights are enshrined at the federal level. The SCOTUS is not going to ban abortions. They are going to throw it right back down to the state level. If you lose access to abortions, it is because your local politicians decided to ban them. This is exactly why you don't put your faith in the federal government and pay more attention to local government.
Love 'em or hate 'em, the Republican Party appears to understand this very well. They made state and local government a priority because they know that is where politics begins. Their success at the national level is disproportionate to the size of their voting bloc because they know how to play the game.
Anyone who opposes their ideals needs to remember that, and get involved locally.
Your claim was the President has the lowest impact on one’s life. As I showed, it is a reality that the President’s actions have a significant impact on people’s lives, probably bigger than a mayor or state senator or state representative probably has in the recent past.
Whether the President should or should not is irrelevant. The salient fact is that if the presidential election results for 2016 were different, then abortion access for millions or tens of millions of women would not be on the chopping block.
> Their success at the national level is disproportionate to the size of their voting bloc because they know how to play the game.
This is a trivial fact when the game is designed such that certain voting blocs in certain arbitrarily drawn boundaries have more voting power than other same size or bigger voting blocs in other arbitrarily drawn boundaries. Unless you live in a place that can be flipped to your candidate or party, there is not much to do locally.
>As I showed, it is a reality that the President’s actions have a significant impact on people’s lives, probably bigger than a mayor or state senator or state representative probably has in the recent past.
The president nominating a justice that decided to allow the Texas abortion law to remain in effect while it is being challenged has a bigger impact than the state senator who drafted the law?
Of course, the President has more power overall, but your ability to have any impact in that election is infinitesimal if you're in a swing state and non-existent otherwise. The fact Congressional districts are gerrymandered is all the more reason to vote for state legislatures. Even in local districts that are dominated by a single party, the real election occurs during the primaries. Chances are, if you get to know the candidates, there's going to be one you prefer.
People seem to forget that the purpose of democracy is to give a chance to make sure your own interests are heard, not to give you an opportunity to impose your will on the rest of the country. Our government isn't designed for the latter. You'd need a more authoritarian structure to do that. Trying to do so in a democracy just results in politicians who are more interested in virtue signaling absolutist positions than drafting policy that genuinely benefits their constituents.
I was referring to the expected outcome of the Supreme Court essentially overturning Roe v Wade later this year.
The rest of your comment is agreeable, but does not address the jist of mine which is that the President can and does have an effect on people’s every day lives in a noticeable way, hence people paying attention to them in the news.
> People seem to forget that the purpose of democracy is to give a chance to make sure your own interests are heard, not to give you an opportunity to impose your will on the rest of the country
As an aside, this is what the pro abortion choice position is. The people who want an abortion can get one, and the people who do not, do not get one. The abortion anti choice bloc wants to impose their will the rest of the country/state/city/whatever.
To further clarify the sibling's point, the reason for this is that the Progressive wing of the Democrats couldn't convince people to approve abortion access through democratic means as soon as they would have liked, so they decided to get a rather dubious Supreme Court interpretation of the Constitution that declared it to be a Constitutional Right. Now they are totally dependent on keeping agreeable Supreme Court justices in order to preserve that interpretation.
It didn't have to be this way. They could have left it to the states or local jurisdictions, and moved to a state with policies they agreed with. They could have (tried to) pass a Constitutional Amendment making it a clear and obvious Constitutional Right instead of a weird interpretation. Instead, they did this.
Living in a Democracy requires us to consider the opinions of our fellow citizens and try our best to accommodate them, rather than steamrolling them.
Consider the position of a Pro-Life activist. They will think that all abortion is murder, that the ruling is a grotesque twisting of the Constitution, and fight every inch of the way on every nominee. Does this sound like the way we were meant to resolve contentious issues? You may disagree with them, but they are also our fellow citizens, and will not be happy about steamrolling their positions.
Consider also the position of a Gun Rights activist. They will be outraged at how the courts have ignored attacks on an actual enumerated Constitutional Right, and fight every nominee on those terms, not particularly caring whether they are also likely to be anti-Abortion.
Maybe it's best if we resist using the Supreme Court to decide everything and try to pass clear Amendments for what's really important and broadly agreed upon. Though this goes back to how dysfunctional and useless Congress has become in their prescribed role.
> Living in a Democracy requires us to consider the opinions of our fellow citizens and try our best to accommodate them, rather than steamrolling them.
The majority of americans believe in abortion by a non trivial margin. The reason it's not guaranteed is precisely because the united states is not a democracy, but a democratic republic, giving significantly more political power to some voters based on where they live.
> The majority of americans believe in abortion by a non trivial margin.
That great, then you should have no trouble passing an actual Constitutional Amendment recognizing that right in a way that can't be interpreted away. I'll just sit here and wait while you go and do that.
> The reason it's not guaranteed is precisely because the united states is not a democracy, but a democratic republic, giving significantly more political power to some voters based on where they live.
You omit an awful lot of history in order to sound snarky. In reality, we started with a loose confederation of independent states. Some skillful negotiators tried to convince them all to unite into one nation. Naturally, the more rural states with smaller populations were concerned that their opinions and needs would be steamrolled by the more populous states, so to bring them all aboard, those negotiators biased a few things towards them a little bit. Everyone, including those more urban states, signed onto it, and everyone lived happily ever after*.
Now, making those states' concerns appear rather prescient, quite a lot of modern urban progressives seem to want to renege on that promise, primarily because they think they can get away with it, and they hate those people anyways.
> That great, then you should have no trouble passing an actual Constitutional Amendment recognizing that right in a way that can't be interpreted away. I'll just sit here and wait while you go and do that.
Would be easy in a democracy
Ergo the solution is rural voters count for much more than urban voters.
> Naturally, the more rural states with smaller populations were concerned that their opinions and needs would be steamrolled by the more populous states
What happened to respecting the wishes of fellow citizens? Why are these specific citizens more important because they live in a different plot of land?
> Now, making those states' concerns appear rather prescient, quite a lot of modern urban progressives seem to want to renege on that promise, primarily because they think they can get away with it, and they hate those people anyways.
Maybe its because the concept of losing a national election with millions more votes than the other side is bullshit? There are many divides in beliefs between people in the country. Geographical ones seem like the least interesting.
Who were almost certainly appointed long before any of those issues were of a concern to anyone. Exactly what are you attempting to prove by that statement?
You blamed it on the progressive wing of the democrats. It was the state of Texas that appealed to the Supreme Court. Not sure who you think the “progressive wing of the democrats” exactly were.
As tossthere put it: "Who decided that this was important to you, and why did you let them decide that?"
Can't help but think of this when I start forming an opinion about what Dr. Seuss should do with his old books, etc. All kinds of trivial issue the news and social media prompts me to think about. Why do I care? Especially since I'm not going to do anything about it. There are more important causes to fight for, and I don't have the time to take action for trivial things. If I'm not going to act, and cannot influence the situation, why bother even forming an opinion?
Personally, I've subscribed to several RSS feeds for local/state news outlets in my area. That helps me stay more in touch with local stuff. Then I just do a quick scan of AP News for international stuff.
Your dad's broader point is a really good one, but the example of Andrew Cuomo doesn't seem like the best to me depending on when it was said.
For a while there Cuomo was being talked about very seriously as the heir apparent to the Democrat presidential nomination. I agree with OP that "civic duty" is a silly reason for watching the news, but when it comes to voting to give people massive amount of power, that really does matter.
Now that Cuomo is out, I agree, for those of us not in NY his actions are less consequential.
This falls into a trap of preparing for every possible outcome when you have finite time and attention. If Cuomo runs for president, there will be plenty of time to make an informed opinion then.
The trap set by news is implying that something could possibly impact you when it probably wont.
maybe but in the end it turned out Cuomo was not going to be a presidential candidate and what happened to him never really mattered at all. I think this can apply to most news. You think a topic is important because it could be important months down the road. I would bet that 95/100 times what we think is going to be important ends up having no real impact on us at all and we would have been better served paying attention to our hobbies or families or friends.
I think people are fixated on Cuomo but just replace with _____ that constitutes most national and international news. A person in Indonesia shouldn’t give a shit about Andrew Cuomo, but they do. That’s the central point - NYT and others have way too much influence.
Since all the local TV stations and newspapers were bought out by conglomerates, they have been ruined. Local TV news is just random crimes and feel-good stories, and the newspapers are stories about restaurant openings and closures and sports.
Feels like meaningless dreck to fill the gaps between ads.
The Economist remains a good rag, and Wired is surprisingly good, albeit full of ads. But for true, long-form, thoughtful discussions I look to YouTube and podcasts these days.
Since all the local TV stations and newspapers were bought out by conglomerates, they have been ruined. Local TV news is just random crimes and feel-good stories
I'm older enough to remember local news before all the stations were bought up, and it was exactly the same. Nonstop horrible garbage.
Classic "kid stuck in the well" stories, a local news staple, go back to at least the 1940s.
I think Cuomo is maybe a bad example of why you shouldn't care. The Cuomo affair should hold a lot of interest because it was a true test of the health of public institutions.
Here is a powerful public official who was lauded by the media for his response to COVID, while simultaneously implementing terrible public health policies in old age homes that led to thousands of deaths, who then fudged his COVID reports to the CDC, and passed legislation that shielded executives that managed old age homes from liability for following those terrible public health policies. Other representatives tried to draw attention to these problems but couldn't get traction because Cuomo was a media darling in how he stood up to Trump.
Cuomo's public image was further bolstered by his brother at CNN, and with all this free publicity Andrew signed a multimillion dollar deal to write a book about his career.
But his incompetence and fraud wasn't enough to trigger a fall from grace, it took several sexual harassment complaints.
So as a health check on your democratic republic, I'd be a little worried given the multiple failures up and down the line: failure of the executive to implement sensible policies and report data accurately, failure of the press to check their claims, provide coverage free of conflicts of interest and otherwise keep them executive branches in line, failure of the justice department to prosecute blatant misconduct.
> "Why do you care what Andrew Cuomo is doing in New York city?"
In and of itself, I don't. Unfortunately, the local politicians toe the party line and ape the Big City / Big State politicians, the Cuomos and the Garcettis of the world.
Suppose you could paint it at some level as "know thy enemy" (pardon the abrasiveness of the wording) because those states are something of a test bed for what to expect from the local folks, but a year or so down the line whether that's "You must wear a mask and cannot let your child use that swing set," or "policies that demoralize the police and undermine anything resembling a reasonable standard of rule-of-law, or "we must tear down statues of elder statesmen ("divisive", old, racist White men) while erecting statues of individuals that praised and sought to emulate the Haitian revolution and its genocidal outcomes."
With that said, I can't stand that all of my local options routinely shove rage-bait National stories in your face. There is no true "local only" coverage.
Perhaps of these issues the only one that could be construed as a non-serious issue is the topic of statues. At the same time, I find it rather queer that when I take a stroll through the local park I am confronted with the statue of a man who wanted to kill everyone with my skin tone in a time where we are supposed to be seeking some sort of harmony.
No, you just have differing politics and beliefs. In my twelve years of browsing HN I've read many comments of that sort. Personally, I tend not to leave a comment unless I feel there is a substantive element to my reply.
It has nothing to do with differing opinions, its just ironic that you chastise the media for posting rage baiting articles and then make a post that is pretty much only rage baiting and opinion based.
You are describing a behavior that is directly in violation of the Hacker News guidelines
>Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
If your comment is so divisive that you think it would get your account deleted, it probably doesn't belong on HN.
>Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
>Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
edit: If nothing else, I'm impressed by the sheer audacity of creating a second throwaway to continue this argument after your first got flagged, and then accusing me of being the flamer.
I avoid cable television and ads. But once in a while I’ll see them on a screen in a bar and they really grab my attention.
I think not being exposed to ads, is actually slightly dangerous, since you don’t get used to ignoring them. When I watched television worth ads repeatedly I just automatically shut off my interest when ads were showing more efficiently.
So while I’d like to keep my kids from seeing ads, I’m worried that no ads at all would prevent them from developing the mental muscles to ignore ads.
Mainstream news is worthless if you want to be ahead of the curve at all. Covid is a great example, I was stockpiled by mid January because plenty of places were talking about issues with suppliers in China in December 2019. Mainstream news was downplaying it until the first week of March
15 minutes per day in the right places and you'll be weeks to months ahead of the general population on major trends that actually matter
What you say is true but the problem is if you're not already in the know it's almost impossible to understand where to find trustworthy sources. It's not just mainstream media, social media is a great platform for misinformation as well. Readers fleeing traditional outlets into sphere where you don't even know the name of the authors nor who they're affiliated with is going to only accelerate the problem.
I've become very aware of this over the past few months with the Covid debacle because I have in depth knowledge about China. I've seen misinformation spread directly from Chinese state sponsored outlets to Western media. People were mislead right from the start, which made many suspicious and led to them turning to Facebook, Reddit, Telegram & co. And of course there they got the full does, ranging from activists trying to inform people on the truth and to insane conspiracy theories, some of them very likely part of black propaganda disinformation campaigns.
Our media is broken, we have to address this! It's not just enough to turn our backs, this is where opinions are made and it matters a lot. A mislead populace is a dangerous populace. I also disagree with the article that we don't need news media in general and can get knowledge from other sources. Information is power. Some people may not be interested in the news and that's fine. But people who want to actively part-take in democratic processes need to be up to date regarding political and legal developments. The same goes for investors, traders and many other people. Free societies only function with a free flow of information, everyone turning their backs is the authoritarian's wet dream because it means they can do whatever they like without scrutiny.
Even the streaming stuff will include it subtly though. I was watching a show on Netflix with my wife the other day, Sweet Magnolia’s and it seemed about as controversial as a Hallmark channel show. But these days I notice whenever specific catch phrases or expressions are getting used across multiple news outlets and it puts me a little bit on guard if a suddenly notice a phrase being used excessively…as if the point is to normalize it in your language.
That show constantly used variations of the “Your truth” thing, which has always seemed in opposition to “the truth” or just “truth”. It’s one of the shadier expressions out there because it seems so harmless IMO.
>But these days I notice whenever specific catch phrases or expressions are getting used across multiple news outlets and it puts me a little bit on guard if a suddenly notice a phrase being used excessively…as if the point is to normalize it in your language.
This is very very visible on reddit, where a term, phrase or expression will become ubiquitous almost overnight. The most recent one I can think of was the acronym 'BIPOC' - and from the circumstances of its use it was clear that a lot of users didn't understand what it meant, and were just using it as a synonym for 'minorities'.
It leads me to conclude that there is much more centralisation of content than you would otherwise expect.
News channels, especially many local news channels that are owned by the same company, can and do explicitly coordinate their messaging. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
> And then they were watching a kids show at a hotel once and the ads came on and the effect it had on them was crazy. They suddenly desperately needed all the toys in the commercials and were repeating catch phrases from ads after only seeing them a couple of times. The contrast in their behavior was insane. And they HAD to keep watching it like I hadn't seen before. I spent a week off-grid with my parents a while back and it was great. We came home and my Mom put on the news suddenly everything was terrible and she was angry, but she had to keep watching.
The comparison between childrens' responses to toy ads and adults' responses to cable news is insightful. We all think we're too smart to be fooled, but we're all children at the core.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." (Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science)
Research shows, IIRC the details, that people who think they are smarter are easier to fool. But don't worry, you and I can comfort ourselves that it wouldn't apply to us. :)
I find reading more history (preferably: dead person-ago history) to be a healthy tonic.
When my more liberal friends were ringing in the end of days at Trump's election, my take was "Do you know how many terrible Presidents the United States has had? And how openly corrupt politics was for the first century of our country? And yet, we're still here." This too shall pass, indeed.
I'll be honest, that's kind of an odd take to me considering that the "first century of our country" was followed by a pretty bloody civil war. Yes the United States is still here, but I'm not sure I would be so casual about all the terrible stuff that has happened in our history as though it's no big deal if it happens again.
I'm not saying it was great or not important, only that it wasn't existentially concluding.
And the difference between "a bad person" becoming President and "half of the country withdrawing from Congress and formally seceding" is several orders of magnitude.
If your only criteria for concern is "existentially concluding" then I'd say you need to recalibrate your barometer. The biggest problem with this approach is that you'll likely only recognize such an event after it is already impossible to stop. We ended up getting very close to throwing out the past election results, wouldn't that be such an event? Or do you think it doesn't qualify because we managed to stopped it this time?
While I somewhat understand your reasoning behind not being concerned, the danger is that there is no guarentee the US will continue to exist forever, and history is full of failed democracies. If you're unwilling to have any concern over the stability of our democracy because it has got this far, then by the time you notice it has failed it will be too late to do anything to fix it.
And in the meantime, bad Presidents have and will continue to do terrible things to people, pretending like it's no big deal is not good. The fact that the US still exists is little consolation to those who were harmed by poor presidential decisions.
> We ended up getting very close to throwing out the past election results
We disagree on this. From what I've read, there was amateurish pontificating on throwing out election results, mostly by sub-Presidential aides or advisors.
And most critically, rejected by almost everyone in a position of authority to legally do so.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the most serious legal action taken to deny the results was the Arizona private recount?
The President of the United States claimed the election was fraudulent and directed the Vice President to throw out electoral votes and hand him the Presidency. Fake elector certificates were signed. The President called up state officials telling them to "find more votes", and refused to start the transfer of power. Election officials were threatened. The President's supporters attacked the Capital and (for a few hours) stopped the votes from being counted. That list doesn't even cover everything, how is that not a serious attempt? What exactly would they need to do for you to be concerned beyond them actually being successful in overturning the election?
Again, your barometer for concern is way too far off. The issue is that such attempts only needs to work one time for the game to be over. If you're always unconcerned about attempts being made because they failed then eventually one will be successful and you won't be able to do anything about it.
The President's own Vice President, Attorney General, Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, et al. refused to participate in any of the schemes. Republican governors refused to participate in any of the schemes. Republican secretaries of state refused to participate in any of the schemes. The DoJ is now investigating and charging everyone who broke into the Capitol (-ol, not -al), who were evicted the same day by the National Guard, Capitol police, and DC police.
To me, that's a bunch of clowns without a plan.
A serious attempt looks like someone sitting down, planning out an attempt likely to succeed, and then enacting that plan in a competent and responsive manner.
Trump lied on national news, shouted from a podium, and inspired a riot.
At the founding of our country, that would have been a Tuesday.
For me to be concerned, I would have needed to see any other person of executive power or branch of government participate in the plot. Or enough members of Congress to actually threaten the normal process.
And if it had been successful, then you know what everyone does? They march on the Capitol and demand the rule of law be adhered to. Coups require consent. Withhold that, and they crumble.
Fair! Imho, there's two classes of actual threats. (1) A sudden, well-prepared realignment of the status quo, enforced afterwards on an ongoing basis. (2) The slow realignment of expectations (aka boiling the frog slowly).
It seems like people often see (2), when in reality few groups are farsighted and patient enough to successfully carry that off. In reality what they're seeing is the normal sausage-making of a democracy groping towards a compromise over a point of disagreement, which has always happened.
As for (1), it's the scarier but less common class. Aka the January attacks on the Capitol, if they'd been better orchestrated and had a post-attack plan.
To me, weighing the severity of both is a question of "If this is successful, what will change?" As I told my conservative friends when they harp on an issue du jour: if one school district in New York state is mandating critical race theory education, what will that actually change about our country?
In a democracy, people are doing ignorant / crazy / inept things somewhere constantly. But there's an important distinction to be made between "somewhere" and "sufficiently large or important places."
I don't know why you think (2) relies on groups being farsighted and patient. The frog boiling that happens today is almost always a result of chaotic incentivization. Politics is very different today than maybe 20 years ago. No conspiracy needed for that. Yet these unintentional or perhaps even well-intentioned changes to the status quo can be worth observing and reasoning about.
A single district mandating critical race theory education won't by itself change a lot, but it's part of a broader shift in the zeitgeist's heresies. Does there need to be a shadowy cabal of progressives saying "yes, just as planned" for this to be true and noteworthy? The things you can't say today are different from the things you couldn't say 20 years ago. You don't need to breathlessly follow the news to know this, but you would be a fool to ignore it entirely. Regardless of whether you think these heresies are morally/politically good, every citizen needs to keep up to date on the latest heresies lest they run afoul of those heresies themselves.
Noting that slow shifts in the status quo are rare is rather unhelpful. Of course they're rare. But being familiar with the forest will help you find the right tree. The idea that the truth is a needle in the haystack is just as easily a prescription for consuming more news, not less.
That's not to say that you should. Perhaps your life is such that you've decided you don't need any of this or you don't need to find the true danger in every corner. Even dedicated experts find it hard to find true danger before it arrives knocking at the door. The value of finding true danger before it arrives is also debatable. Vast knowledge and the effort needed to acquire it is not an unalloyed good, it's a cost/benefit trade-off like everything else in life.
As to the slow shifts, I said they were the opposite of rare, and indeed constantly happening as consensus shifts and is rebrokered.
Which was a response to the comment I was replying to, regarding distinguishing actual danger from everything else.
Danger, to me, means subversion of democracy and/or individual freedoms. Which means either a minority wilfully shifting the zeitgeist out of proportion with their strength of support or taking away people's freedom to participate in democracy.
It does not include everyone deciding to gradually change their ideals.
If the country as a whole is becoming more racist (to create an example), in terms of population percentage, then that's a structural social issue that needs to be addressed as such. Awareness of current news isn't going to enable one to address or change that.
Yes I think so. Current news gives you a sense of what mainstream culture considers important this year, then you compare it with what you observed in previous years. It's common for there to be a common cultural trend or debate that is hammered non-stop in mainstream media, you won't have to breathlessly follow news (ie. you just don't have to quit the news entirely, casual check-ins are fine) because it'll be breathlessly reported. That's what you watch for and you watch the conversation change from year to year.
More importantly, news gives you a mainstream perspective beyond typically dry work conversation or your highly selective filter bubble of personal relationships. What's acceptable to say amongst friends is not necessarily the same as what's acceptable in the mainstream.
You don't want to be the CEO who lost his job in the span of a couple of days because he didn't realize that anti-abortion stances are no longer publicly acceptable in the creative mainstream [1]. Poor guy probably had friends and family who didn't have any problems with his views.
That example is something of a red herring. If you're a CEO, or someone in a high visibility corporate role, don't talk about political hot-button issues in a public forum.
You have the right to do so, but you also have the possibility of being nailed to the cross (apt metaphor, in this case) for doing so.
So taking the risk is stupid from a personal perspective.
CEOs do so all the time for mainstream acceptable issues like LGBT rights. While it's certainly a valid strategy to shut up about anything political, it can be beneficial or even expected for political commentary depending on the industry and company.
I think reading history gives us a much better understanding of the mindset of a person trying to overthrow an election.
We're lucky but naive to have grown up in a few generations wherein this sort of thing seems totally foreign, uncivilised.
But the 'transition of power' is by far the most destabilising and tricky point in history.
Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Macedonians, Persians, Romans, Chinese etc. etc..
And that's just antiquity.
Over and over again, it's the 'power struggle at the top' that drives most of the big events.
If everyone were to get into the headspace of those events, we'd understand how alluring and corrupting power is and we'd be much more cynical about power grabs.
Any student of history would see the attempts to overthrow the election plainly for what it was.
And FYI that is not a political statement. I don't care for domestic or foreign policy agendas, that's just what it is.
Yeah. Those people who spend a few million dollars on a 30-second-long ad during the Super Bowl? They aren't stupid. They aren't mistaken. It really is worth it to them.
But... if the commercials can do that to your kids, what about the programming? If ads have the effect that you have observed, does programming that is full of sex and violence have no effect?
The one mitigating factor I can see is the direction of the intended addiction. The ads are designed to make you want the product; the programming is designed to make you want more of the programming (not necessarily to want more sex or more violence). That might make it different from the ads. Still, based on the observed effect of the ads, I'm pretty incredulous of anyone claiming that the programming has no effect...
further, if the programming has no effect, then why are you watching it? Obviously it has some impact on you...
The relationship between TV viewing and violence/aggression is just as scientifically established as the link between smoking and lung cancer. And we've known about it since the 70s.
See the official position of the AACAP, for one source (there are many sources, this is just from a quick google)
Hundreds of studies of the effects of TV violence on children and teenagers have found that children may:
become "immune" or numb to the horror of violence
begin to accept violence as a way to solve problems
imitate the violence they observe on television; and
identify with certain characters, victims and/or victimizers
Extensive viewing of television violence by children causes greater aggressiveness
The manipulative trivia flood of our times was exactly the reason I started my pet project[0]. For years I searched for something that could "solve" this but never found it. Eventually, I built something..
I want to be somehow informed: I didn't quit all news, I quit trivia. When I can/feel like I browse HN. When I find something relevant I post it there and try to make sense of it. This may mean once a week - but no timeline. I don't really care if it succeeds. It's a way of using my procrastination positively and I hope it helps others tackling this issue.
I think about this a lot when I occasionally go to the movies. I remember going as a kid and maybe you'd have a slideshow of low-budget local ads for a dentist's office or whatever until the movie started and then have some previews. Now it's just a non-stop barrage of ads. They will colonize every last waking moment of your attention. I think about my 4 year old niece who's never been to a movie theater and who will be completely defenseless against this kind of thing. It makes me sick to my stomach.
Those old local ads seem great now right? Then again the theaters were probably much smaller and localized as well. Waiting for the movie to start with a bunch of silent, repeating and unobtrusive ads ended up often being a great time to socialize before the film.
We had a similar experience recently. We curate everything the kids watch so that they're not exposed to ads (as much as possible). Anyway, we had been watching the Olympics (can we please not let NBC have the Olympics anymore!?), and wow, every time the ads came on you could visibly see the kids demeanor change. They were hyper-focused. Then they started repeating the ads during the day then next day during play.
My son just gets annoyed when he can’t find the “Skip Ad” button on the TV. That he has no experience with cable or broadcast TV is probably going to shock him eventually.
That was really shocking for me the first time I went to China and watched their version on state sponsored television, around 2005. The contrast between the doom version of the news back home, to china's overly positive "15 people are missing in a coal mine but we are trying our darnedest to get them out" was really confronting. Made me realise that it has entertainment/manipulation as a goal, not providing information.
Really shows how the news basically sets the background music for everyday life around the entire country.
My Chinese friends have said that the evening news always comes in three parts: 1. Chinese leaders are busy; 2. Chinese people have good lives; 3. People outside China have not-so-good lives
There is a joke in China that a foreigner calls the hotel desk to tell him his TV is broken, it is stuck on the same channel. “No sir, it’s just the 7PM national news, which is required to be broadcast on every channel right now.”
Oh wow, I found the Imams preaching on TV in China the most surprising, and only now in your context realize they were probably trying to establish Party authority of the religion.
I didn't watch TV in China, but was struck by how all the subway ads were "public service", like "here's a picture of our traditional culture." It felt calm and reflective in comparison to those of Korea or Europe, but of course the goal of the ads was to build a sense of collective consciousness.
If you can read some Chinese, the red banner slogans they have hanging from foot bridges and on buildings everywhere have the best comedy value, like “let’s all work hard for a harmonious society.” Very old school.
There are very few things, I've found, that I need to be informed of by an authority. I read whatever the CDC's latest guidelines are, I read some papers that have been replicated and thoroughly vetted, and blog posts. The people that I know that stay tapped into news either nationally or globally are almost always "concerned" with something. It's their topic of the day and leaks into their speech, attitudes, and values. I've previously phrased it as, "Sometimes I feel like I'm speaking to an RSS feed more than a friend. Maybe there's more to our friendship than my opinion on the latest social issue and whether it aligns with yours?" As a consequence, I rarely talk about news or current events with anyone. While my views may not be heard or represented much I'm at least not arguing over hegemony.
In 2016 Google News was great because with a 5 minutes glance you coudl hved all the necessary news. However this strategy doesn't work anymore thanks to Google News trying to be smart by adapting news to your browsing history.
I haven't been able to find a good alternative to the old Google News.
I tried subscribing to one or many newspapers, but they all have too many useless articles inbetween valuable news such that filtering noise takes too much time.
So in the end I still read Google News but I'm getting a sens of negativity and frustration that wasn't there in 2016. And it takes more time to have all the necessary news. Since "Time spent on Google News" is probably an important metric for Google, the situation is not going to improve anytime soon.
I don't really understand where this comes from, if you're glancing at the news then the "Headlines" mobile app tab (or the "Top Stories" section in the website) is actually un-personalized. Google News explicitly pushes personalization in the separate and aptly named "For You" section.
What did you like about the "old Google News"? A good number of comments here seem to have a similar sentiment, so I'm genuinely curious. Was it simply the aggregation without personalization?
The manipulation part is what I find fascinating. And not just the way people use the term now about "fake news". But more about how the news cycle needs to keep you constantly engaged. If you follow the news, especially political news, it seems like the sky is falling constantly. I was always up in arms about something.
As the author notes, when I do pay attention to the news I feel better. Again, political news in particular. I still will watch sports news. I actually feel better when I watch that -- I love seeing sports highlights, and great comebacks -- even when I don't know a single player or team involved. The stakes are so low, but the enjoyment so high.
We really don't talk often enough in the open about how the mental health crisis might be _caused_ by something like manipulative news (and not just social media).
In the fourth grade my history teacher was idly passing back tests and sang the first half of a phone number melody in a commercial, some portion of the class felt obliged to complete the phone-number-melody and my teacher laughed and muttered, “and they say the kids aren’t being programmed by TV”
Recent Supply Chain News, Holy mother of god, the basic fabric of our society and they could not have been more wrong.
Commodity Prices and fluctuation, My god they really dont have a clue about commodity.
Tech, Foundry. Repeated mainstream news that follow like an echo chamber. We are now looking at Qualcomm X65 Modem switching to TSMC 6nm. ( In case you are wondering, NO it is not true. )
And Stocks. Using Bottom Up Analysis we figure out Google is paying $15B to Apple when the actual company annual report only state $13.5B in CAC ( Customer Acquisition Cost ) in total. ( Not all CAC goes to Apple, I mean Mozilla has a small trunk of it for example )
I am not sure if it is related, but because of how much BS coming from mainstream news, people are fed up and actually provide insight on Youtube Channel. How is something being done, why it is done this way. They are still high level overview, but they are directionally much closer to the truth than anything else. And it is the same with PodCast.
I now mostly just skim read news on my RSS-Feeds.
The worst thing about all of these is how people trust those number, figures, analysis. This makes online discussions on these topic 95% of times useless. Like I recently said to Dr. Ian Cutress where we agree, most media are only here for attentions and clicks, they are not here to inform their readers. The sad state of things.
Even Google News is too much for me now. Once in a while I'll scan the headlines. Or Apple News on my iPhone. But just the headlines alone are enough to turn me away. So much clickbait, so much outrage, so little substance.
People from the old internet will recognize Fark, and this book humorously details how news organizations essentially fabricate "news" from non-news items and entertain rather than focusing on just informing.
I love the Reuters app for my phone. I can listen to the roundup once in the morning while I'm getting ready or in 10 minutes on my way to the gym. It's all the basic headlines with a little blurb. Read to you with very little in the way of emotion, passion or hype. It plays in the background while I do other things and it's done. It doesn't drone on and on like the radio does until you realize you've heard this story 3 times already like on CP24 or whatever other news channel keeps blathering on while quietly promoting their hidden (or not so hidden) political agenda and gradually sapping at your will to live.
I've cut off my cable/satellite TV. I don't listen to any other news sources. I read BBC's headlines once a day.
Cutting off the "mainstream" media and advertising from my life has done more for my mental health than my gym membership, diet, meditation and fresh air combined. Not to say those things aren't important, but they didn't have nearly the impact that cutting off the constant drama, heightened emotion and propaganda have.
That just scratches the surface! The other crazy thing about news websites is how much invasive garbage they inject into their content: ads, everything is “BREAKING!”, subscribe for alerts, etc.
I basically wrote a manifesto about it at https://legiblenews.com/about and built a news website that strips away all the insanity and link to source material and Wikipedia articles.
It’s absolutely insane that it came to that, but it did.
I'm currently working on a weekly news digest that people can view on the web or get emailed to them so they can skim the news even less. If there's something you'd like to get out of the news that's not insane please open an issue at https://github.com/legiblenews/community/issues.
For anyone looking for them, I have some recommendations.
Written news (real time): https://www.reuters.com/
I mostly read the headline stories, and it's mostly just facts. Just like the founding fathers intended.
Written news (daily): https://join1440.com/
An old-fashioned email subscription! Just facts, it seems. This may be the endgame for some people.
Video news: https://www.newsy.com/
I watched them a bit back when they were new and I was pretty impressed. Just a bunch of short news segments on demand. When the whole "stop the steal" thing was going on I sensed a bit of a leftward bias (like me!), but it was never very thick.
Yikes! Lucy did a nice job talking around the ethics question at the end. She may be good at her job, but its pretty offensive that her job even exists.
> Scanning Google News or a couple of the more professional international news services like BBC / Al Jazeera / Reuters I still feel pretty well informed
I once spent several years diving deep into news, and one of the lessons I learned was that scanning headlines (or even summaries) is a very good prescription for being misinformed.
There's the obvious selection bias - you only see the headlines they put on top. But it's fairly common that the body of the article undercuts the headline. The headline will be stated definitively, whereas the nuances in the details will make you doubt the certainty of the headline. In a few cases, it would even negate the headline!
And this is from well regarded news sources (NY Times, WaPost, etc), not crappy click bait farms on the Internet.
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” - Mark Twain
I'm a firm believer that one should either dive deep or not read the news. The moderate path leads to the most misinformation.
The depressing reality is you can't, hence why avoidance is necessary. It's not possible to watch any media and not be effected by it in some way. What people tend not to get about propaganda is that it works even if you know it's propaganda.
quite simply, meditation. But sure there are many types of it, and while putting it like this it seems 'simple' it's also very difficult.
more specifically, it all stems from the practice of self-observing how you react to something "virtually", without getting carried away by it.
Doing this for any stimuli, good, bad, scary, exciting, is what it's all about, that way you can notice yourself getting carried away, and instead of going with it, you observe it pass by you.
But this is a practical discipline, you gotta keep doing it until you get good at it and so on...
That is a good method, another is actually studying the methods of advertising. The methods they have now are not much better than what they had 50 years ago. The only big differences are volume, intrusiveness, and rate. All of those have increased tremendously in the past few years. But learn about anchoring, A/B choice, timed choice, and so on. Helps quite a bit.
So being conscious that most forms of video media are trying to sell you something. Nothing is on that screen/audio unless someone put it there. Cynical but there are so many different ways to advertise. One cute one I can not unsee is product placement. Ghostbusters was my first time seeing it. The pop can in the fridge. Always at the right angle to see the label. The funniest one was in a movie called Cobra. He stops in the middle of a scene to drink a beer, in front of all the signage. It was literally a commercial right in the middle of the movie and 'fit' the scene.
One thing I have noticed after removing massive amounts of advertising in my life is that what does get through is much more effective. So you have to be very diligent in not being quick to buy anything. Buying something could be an idea or item. I also usually use a timeout method. Basically I set the 'thing' to the side and revisit it a few days later. It removes most of the urgency that most advertising tries to create.
I agree with most of your points but I strongly disagree here:
> The methods they have now are not much better than what they had 50 years ago.
The methods are much, much more refined and quite a bit better. You are being sold to and you may not realize it. Everything you interact with on social media (including reddit) has a good chance of being part of an advertising funnel. Even reviews and unboxings are usually advertisements.
One of the best new tactics is ragebait - when someone talks about how bad/evil something is. This is almost always a lead up to a covert sales pitch.
Marketing is everywhere and it has gotten much, much better in the last 50 years.
Fair point. However, if you read the literature of the time. You will see the exact same methods. The missing bit they could not do was mass targeting. It just was not feasible to do. They knew very well how to do it though. One on one sales where it was more feasible to do and more of what you see today. It is not refined per se, but more simpler to do. My father sold life insurance for years. One summer I was bored and took the advert classes on how to sell (mid 70s). It is all very familiar to what is done today.
Ragebait is not really new. You can see the exact same methods used in 'yellow journalism'. That is not a new term.
You can also read old magazines and see 'reviews'. When they are little more than thinly veiled adverts for that thing. Take the show 'computer chronicles'. Neat show, showed off tons of tech. But it was one giant advert for whatever they were showing off that week.
The only real big change is volume and cost of targeting has dropped to near 0. I could give that realtime A/B testing of campaigns is new.
>The methods are much, much more refined and quite a bit better. You are being sold to and you may not realize it. Everything you interact with on social media (including reddit) has a good chance of being part of an advertising funnel. Even reviews and unboxings are usually advertisements.
100% concur with this. Conventional advertising may have not changed much but conventional advertising is now a much smaller proportion of marketing than it ever was.
There’s a documentary, Consuming Kids, showing how psychologists work with child focus groups to iterate on maximizing the impact of TV commercials targeting young audiences.
Immoral doesn’t even begin to describe this phenomenon.
Interesting bit in "The Corporation" iirc about a phony research on how to make kids nag more efficiently which was presented as neutral research for parents about raising kids.
I agree, but to quote a film, maybe it is best to spend years building up an immunity to Iocaine Powder, because surely you will be exposed to it come day.
Why not let it filter through to you via a group of friends who are well informed? And will highlight whatever is interesting, funny, urgent or important. Kinda like HN front page.
Each person in my group has slightly different sources they subscribe to: YT channels, Twitter, Insta, Reddit, HN. And slightly different topics. And they share stuff in the chat group.
Why not skip the media by reading news directly from AP itself?
Their iOS app leaves a lot to be desired, but that’s a benefit for me. I open it up and can quickly get updates for what’s happening and not be at risk of a advertisement-driven company wanting to take me down a rabbit hole of clickbait.
As someone who just stepped back into pop culture after being in prison for years (so might as well been on the moon) my first shock was just how horrible it all is now. There is no news worth watching. Cable news is just a pile of filth excremented by a Labrador Retriever that solely eats baby diapers. I thought I will watch Bloomberg since if real money is involved it can't be too manipulative. Nope, wrong. The internet is just a fireheap. Let's check Reddit. Oh god close the browser window immediately. WTF? Slashdot? Um, what is this, someone wearing a Slashdot skin suit? How about the sites by supposedly rational academics on each side of the political persuasion to get some balance. WTF? Just hate and anger and toxicity on a crazy level otherizing any opinion not their own. People are once thought great intellectual insides making incredibly uncharitable frankly hate filled comments and self isolating in echo chambers. Google Discovery app... "here's some blog posts summarizing relationship posts made on Reddit". Huh? Why would anyone want to read this let alone have it further aggregated for them? Seriously, modern American discourse has less humanity, compassion, depth, and recognition of nuance THAN PRISON. Or maybe prison just made me less patient of bull crap and able to immediate horrible people by their mannerisms. Seriously this site is the only place I have found still sane and enlightening.
My favorite is Delayed Gratification : A print magazine that writes about events after the fact. Deep dives into a few topics and great infographics
"The world’s first Slow Journalism magazine.
A beautiful quarterly publication which revisits the events of the last three months to offer in-depth, independent journalism in an increasingly frantic world."
I do this manually - after a big event, I don't read the news articles about it since I know much will be wrong. If I still remember it 6 months later, I read the Wikipedia article about it. If I don't remember, well maybe it's not that important to me.
A fair perspective. It's also possible that your isolation from media has let you return to see what was wrong with that media all along. Possibly you were simply blind to how bad it was before, or just used to it.
I concur that it is worse than it was, but I would say 10-30% worse not "completely different."
It would be nice if there was a little less hate generally.
Man the first time I surfed the web it was crazy information overload. I had to nope out and walk away.
I think I just feel let down by people the number of people I looked up to being publically hateful. People that are too smart to think that it is ok. I just don't understand how they got there.
As someone who hasn't been in prison but has done a good job of not letting media outlets getting to me (since I just block a lot of them through my pihole), he's spot on. I've had people on a discord server whom I was friends with basically oust me simply because I had some marginally more conservative views than them. My experiences were invalid because they did not align with their worldviews. That is the media today with social media platforms amplified in that regard as well.
I'm not sure I follow how some former friends booting you out of a Discord server relates to the media. Are you giving that as an example of people so immersed in a left-wing media culture that they can't handle differing opinions? That's certainly something I've seen more and more of on both ends of the political spectrum. I do think there are more moderates on the left than the right, but in both cases the extremes do seem to be hostile to nuance.
Come to think of it have you considered writing an article about this? You have a very unique perspective since most people experienced it as it happed (proverbial frog in the boiling pot).
I bet a number of outlets might be interested in publishing it, or you could DIY on Medium or Substack or something.
Yeah no. Already have a heavy load and my life is already F'd enough, I can't be putting any more rocks into my load by amplifying attention on me in any way thanks. Plus a guy six months out still has a lot of mental issues, not back to being human yet :) A year living in a space smaller than an elevator with another person, a bunk bed, and desk with no out time because COVID doesn't help. On the plus side when you read the same magazine cover to cover 50 or so times you get a different take on it and feel expert enough to spout nonsense about it :)
I'm glad that HN has been able to provide you with some resources. It's really nice to see the more wholesome side of HN, and I'm actually going to have to bookmark some of these to check out later.
I appreciate your anecdote about reading the same magazine over and over. Really is true you can become a connoisseur about anything! I'm glad you have a good humor about it. https://xkcd.com/915/
Maybe sites like Twitter were, but it wasn't EVERYTHING like it is now. There just wasn't so much hateful speaking. There wasn't so much tribalization, otherization. Sure Reddit sucked but it wasn't hateful. Now it seems everything is full of unnecessary snide comments about whomever is perceived as the out group or other tribe with no self awareness of the ugliness of the comments. Educated conservative university professors I once admired, supposedly compassionate liberal entertainers I once enjoyed have all been infected by ugliness. Even music making websites with zero politics in the discussion just full of hate for no reason. Everything is just gross. It seems no one sees each other as human anymore. You know you are missing something when Liberals are hating a pot smoking, Bernie Sanders voter because he has pot smoking Art Bell type discussions with people and Conservatives are adopting him as one of their own. It's just pure tribal at that point. Seriously, WTF world is this?
I think it's strange and sad that I should find the society I've returned to more full of anger and hate and with less compassion than prison.
I actually distinctly remember that the internet started to deteriorate rapidly the year Trump got elected because he completely took over social media and the news cycle. He was the topic in all comment sections, even when you watched a video on completely unrelated topics, or read a technical subreddits. It was crazy. At the end of his election, Trump was banned from social media, and I feel like there is some fresh air now in the internet. There's still some lingering stench for sure, but I think you were actually "lucky" to miss the worst of it all.
Joe has not stood still since 2017 either, he profits off the outrage just a much as any other media company that makes money from viewers or listeners.
His podcasts used (going back a bit before 2017) to be chill conversations ranging from interesting to bonkers depending on the guest. He is consumed by politics now unfortunately, and it just gets tiresome.
Seems like OP would disagree with you strongly and had a rather intense reaction to the state of media in 2022. Do you have anything to offer a counter opinion?
Not the poster, but I concur that things weren't all that different in 2017. I would say that OP's reaction is caused by selectively remembering the state of the world. Living in the environment where mass media is ubiquitous, you don't quite realize just how bad things are or the negative effects it has on people. You only become aware of that after being removed from it for a period of time (e.g. being in prison) and then getting reintroduced to it.
As a counterpoint, most living in a given system rarely notice even significant changes when they happen gradually over months and years. Being removed from a place cuts you off from being a part of that, when you return all the changes will hit you at once full force. But someone who never left will just shrug their shoulders and go "haven't you heard?". It can't seem so strange to them because they've been conditioned into it, it's become normal.
I hear similar stories from people who move abroad and return, I wouldn't simply dismiss them.
Cable news has always been terrible during my periods of awareness. The pattern of always breaking news filled with outrage. The term outrage porn was coined in 2009. It's been obvious to me for a very long time that it's garbage and not worthy watching.
2017 is a small step backwards. Most mainstream forums are pretty shit at any point in time.
I built https://legiblenews.com for this very reason. Once per day at 6p PST it grabs the latest headlines from Wikipedia and displays them in a minimal format that does not induce anxiety. My fav part is that it judiciously links to Wikipedia articles so you can actually learn about the areas where things are happening.
What really happened, I think, is that journalism stopped paying, so more and more of what's there became tied to career ideologues. Increasingly "the news" is just a summary of what blue checkmark Twitter accounts said yesterday. And it's easy to lie when you're only speaking to your own followers.
As well, there's an unresolved demographic shift from an aged Boomer generation towards Millennials. Unresolved in the sense that assets haven't changed ownership, infrastructure hasn't been revised, and political leadership has done the bare minimum to keep up. So everyone now looks towards politics(or maybe tech) for a piece of the pie, unrest events have risen, and yet political disengagement is also high.
I got on the cryptocurrency train years back, as somewhat of an exit to the madness. It has treated me alright, though it's also a faith.
This is an interesting perspective. I feel like a frog in a pot of boiling water, the discourse in my life is just getting gradually worse and most of the media is happy to gaslight people into thinking...Well, anything that gets a click. I'd be interested to hear any more of your perspective.
Regardless of news media, I really want to wish you the best of, well, success more than luck. I do some prisoner-related activism (although it's for political prisoners), and that's enough to relate at least somewhat to the "I felt like I walked out into an alien civilization" sense that many people have.
Check https://synchro.net. You can access thru BBS's (telnet/SSH) or NNTP too, and you'll have night convos at FIDOnet and DOVEnet, both tech and non tech.
Specifically about covid - I think everyone knows that nothing is perfect. Arguing that other people think either vaccines or masks are perfect is a classic strawman argument. [1]
Vaccines are less-bad than a Covid infection, training your immune system without actually exposing it to the dangers of Covid-19 itself. Masks reduce viral loads - mostly through reducing shedding and partially through reducing intake.
Assuming lock-downs have impacted you personally, I'm sorry about that. We're all experiencing that pain together, personally I find most things about the lockdowns horrible. But still better than lots of people dying.
Masks, Vaccinations and lockdowns only benefit society with high compliance. So expect strong social pressure to comply or you invalidate everyone else's efforts.
I can't post on his comment as it's been flagged. Sorry to hijack your comment.
I can relate where you are coming from. Protecting your livelihood, providing for your family, that would get me so friggen worked up, and I can't even imagine the stress, I just can't even begin to. The worst part about prison is the failing your family aspect, so I can imagine how frusting, trapped feeling anything like that and it being outside of your control, through no fault of your own. And seeing that humanizes that this isn't just financial numbers, those financial numbers represent people that are deeply suffering from the lockdowns, those financial numbers represent a human cost. For me, I listened to my mother on the phone worry as she spent her last days in fear because she was dying of cancer and chemo killed her immune system and she was in a no mask state. So it's understandable I might be pretty protective of her and her fears. Or my daughter that has an immune condition and might never be able to live normally now that COVID is a thing. I as a son, a father, hold on to some little sliver wanting to protect my mother, praying my daughter doesn't have to become some bubble girl. Wanting people to wear masks might be irrational, but it isn't out of maliciousness or wanting to hurt, but out of a sense of powerlessness to protect those I love. It's even harder because I am a libertarian who doesn't think the mandates provide enough benefit for the costs nor should they be mandates on a logical level, but hearing the fear in my mom's voice, multiplied by so many people, I just don't know. Their fear has a consideration aspect too. This is the sort of humanizing of others experiences that I think we need and I just don't see anywhere else on the internet right now.
It's pretty rare that I'll downvote someone and also respond to them.
I agree with your general thrust, in general but I think you gave up too soon and have too harsh of a take or at least got too unlucky about the sources that you take in.
There are good news sources out there. Go listen to 3 or 4 of The Economist's podacasts or to Left Right and Center. There are real journalists out there. The landscape is worse, yes. But it isn't worse everywhere and where it is better it is truly better.
I strongly agree with this. I would, however, like to call out one TV program here in the U.S. that I think comes much closer to approximating the experience of “reading a 5,000-word article”: PBS NewsHour. It’s great, completely free and available to watch online, and you can even get most of what you need from their podcast alone (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/segments).
It consists of fairly in-depth, thoughtful coverage of both domestic and worldwide news topics, as well as a tiny bit of political analysis on Mondays and Fridays. It almost never devolves into the breathless, “the world is about to end”-type coverage found on basically all cable news programs. Judy Woodruff and her team are really great. I dearly miss Gwen Ifill and Jim Lehrer.
The Economist is also a great resource, as has been pointed out by other commenters here. They publish an audio edition of each week’s newspaper, too.
I feel like PBS is one of the few orgs that prioritizes quality above all else and really means it. Between newshour, NOVA, and the kids programming, they get a lot of playtime in my home.
That is also because PBS is one of the only channels that is held to any actual standards. All other channels (including all news channels) are classified purely as "entertainment" and therefore are not held to anything.
The NewsHour is fantastic. Occasionally they fall into the same traps that any news source can, but it's a great way to learn about what's going on with a minimal amount of sensationalism.
I disagree with the post article that "staying up to date" is some fundamentally bullshit concept. It can help you prioritize what you care about influencing in the world, even if that influence is relatively small.
"Staying up to date" could mean hourly updates or weekly (or monthly) newspapers.
How often are those priorities changing? Surely nobody needs hourly pings from a news app on their phone to inform what they care about influencing in the world.
I was a huge NPR fan forever, could hum all their audio intros etc. Donor to local affiliate.
I think there has been a major change there in the last x years?
They seem to do the same story over and over now. And the lens has shifted pretty far left.
I've laughed at a few things when it's just ridiculous. Sadly I did stop listening.
Anyone have any listening data from media markets like NY or Boston or SF (ie, leftwing) to see if this new format / approach is resonating with folks? I've been actually wondering what the 5 year story would look like now just given how into NPR I was and now how I don't listen.
I'm left but I like a touch of perspective or at least to be able to hear the other side of an issue.
I hardly watch TV, but happened across News Hour at someone's home. I was shocked; it was a like an alternate reality. It makes CNN and Fox look ridiculous - everyone should watch News Hour just to reset their perspectives.
I would have also recommended the Economist until I experienced a Gell-Mann amnesiac effect [1] with regards to an article they wrote about South Africa, a country where I lived much of my life in, in which they so horrifically butchered the coverage I simply canceled my subscription for fear of how inaccurate everything else might have been.
What did they get wrong about it? I am particularly interested in South Africa; when I was young my favorite novel was set there (Spud by John Van De Ruit) and it's grown into a very interesting "split narrative" among Americans, who believe things about it depending on their political beliefs.
As a counterpoint, I've found The Economist is quite good on my own domestic politics when it does cover it - albeit rarely.
To me this quote underlines the importance of reading news from varied sources rather than not reading it at all. I mean clearly 99.99% of news I ignore, but if I think it's important I'll read about it from multiple papers because the one I primarily read - the FT will have its own viewpoint.
Having seen what the Canadian media writes about US politics I’m not surprised.
I’ve come to the conclusion if you really want to under the nuances of a current affair, you simply won’t get it from the news. You’ll get the super simplified, “tie it in a nice bow”, “here are the bad guys and here are the good guys view”.
They simply don’t have the time or resources for more than that.
may be worth pointing out that you seem to be using that backwards - the Gell-Mann amnesia effect is about immediately forgetting that you read something so horribly misrepresented - you knowingly scoff and then trust the next thing you read. a reaction of "this is shit, what else in here might be shit, get it away from me" is the direct opposite.
Gosh, News Hour with Jim Lehrer was a STAPLE in my house growing up. Both parents would be back from work, cup of chai in hand, and you would hear the intro go and even I used to tune in as a teenager to get the news.
Spoiler: He did not actually quit the news, just watching news on TV as opposed to reading articles.
>I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole. There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic.
My suggestion: Go to a news stand instead and grab a copy of The Economist. One who does that will learn much about the world. About countries one rarely hear about in other media outlets. About advances in science and technology.
In my opinion, time spent reading The Economist is not wasted.
I agree, it's a great magazine. But don't forget that even the Economist is only providing a shallow overview of any given topic (despite the apparent depth); has a specific partisan viewpoint / world philosophy; and is frequently wrong.
Most people know that at an intellectual level, of course. But it's all too easy to read something like an Economist article and come away thinking "oh, I learned a lot / have a decent understanding of this issue". A lot of that comes down to the editorial style and self-assured tone of the writing. It helps to remember that even something like the Economist is largely written by people in their mid-20s with no particular expertise, and edited by people who may be older and wiser but also cover many different topics.
> My suggestion: Go to a news stand instead and grab a copy of The Economist. One who does that will learn much about the world. About countries one rarely hear about in other media outlets. About advances in science and technology.
To play Devil's advocate, why is it useful to spend time learning about these types of things -- world politics, economics, even current scientific developments? Is it mainly because it's interesting (so that it's primarily entertainment)? Or is it to better yourself in some way? I think a lot of people implicitly think that this type of knowledge falls into the "bettering yourself" category, but I wonder if it's mostly for entertainment. Of course, if you are actively involved in international politics, then things look different, but I'm mainly talking about the "everyperson".
I bring this up because I go through phases where I get really into world "happenings" as described above, but then after a while I feel as though I have gained little or nothing, except emotional responses and opinions about these things, which causes no noticeable positive effect in my day-to-day life (and in fact, often affects my mental state negatively, given the amount of fear-mongering in media). Instead, I have the suspicion that all of that time would have been better spent focusing on things local: myself, friendships, family, hobbies.
I pointed out that the Economist isn't that great in another comment, but turning around and leaping to its defense:
It tends to give an overview of geopolitical events that do have some meaning. For instance, your entire idea of the Philippines may be that it's a US ally, has a lot of beaches and happy people. The Economist (or something similar) may then clue you in that no, actually, the country is on the edge of falling to dictatorship and in bed with China. That info is slanted, and may not be useful for you taking any substantive action; but on the other hand, it gives you a starting point if, say, you ever had a Filipino coworker. It also tells you something about the broader world, such as the fact that a lot of democracies are starting to look fragile enough that you might want to consider learning enough to decide whether that could actually be a local problem. (This isn't a screed, just an example; the Philippines may be fine and your local democracy may be strong!)
If you already knew a decent amount about the situation -- well, maybe just skip that particular article, or give it a quick skim and move on. Maybe look at the Economist as a sampler, rather than something to read cover to cover. It also has stuff like the Technology Quarterly, which actually covers a much broader range of tech concepts than, say, HN.
My reason for reading in-depth articles and books is to increase my learnings on all these topics.
Partly for entertainment. But mostly because our world is hyperconnected. A looming war in Eastern Europe, combined with supply-chain shortages, apparently has a giant effect on stock prices. So, in order to understand why my pension is at risk, what I can do to secure it, or whether I should wait with buying a new car or house, , I need to know about 1) Russian Geopolitics, 2) Natural-Gas usage, 3) Supply-chains of, mostly, computer-chips, 4) inflation and then, 5, how all this ties together.
We live in a hyperconnected world where every butterfly has profound effects on my daily life. For me, that means I try to avoid reading about every butterfly or wing-flapping (i.e. the daily news) but I try to learn as much as possible about underlying mechanisms and issues.
Understand things like, "what is in shampoo", to take an example from the article? I like to understand things too, but there there's plenty of things to learn, and I think one can benefit from being choosy.
I was in the original wave of "cord cutters," it's been 20+ years. I have also spent many of those years abroad. My exposure to TV news is around 1-2 hours per year, in various countries.
When I visit my family back at home there is normal American news on the TV. I can only last a few seconds before I have to leave the room because the news is presented as if the audience consists of people with a 5th grade education. It is beyond insulting. I never felt this until I left TV's influence for a few years. This phenomenon is extremely exaggerated in the USA.
My suggestion is don't even bother with the economist. It's news in more pretentious and intelligent packaging. It's honestly better than some other sources for sure, but that isn't the point.
The point isn't to find good sources of news. I think the point is that most news, no matter how good it is, is largely pointless.
I'll pick up the economist if something in it interests me. Otherwise I largely ignore all news.
And it definitely is biased. It sadly very much "informs" you towards having the opinion it wants to promote which is what I think we are discussing getting away from.
If I may ask, what other publications do you recommend that you deem more objective? Do they also cover large swathes of the whole world, like The Economist does?
I'd advise against the news stand. Classic intelligence fieldwork ploy: if you make someone work a little for a bit of information, they're more likely to assign it a higher value.
Adding friction to your news consumption makes it feel higher quality, but is of course actually totally independent of that.
I’m waiting for someone to jump in and shit on The Economist. However, I don’t think a person that doesn’t have any sort of social standing to uphold will have anything bad to say.
I'll bite. The Economist is a right-wing publication. The quality of the writing is usually pretty good so it's not a bad choice if you're in to that sort of thing, but it is propaganda.
I guess that depends on how you define right-wing.
But sure, the publication is in favour of capitalism. Is that really so controversial though? I thought it was pretty obvious that The Economist is neither Social Democrat, nor socialist or communist. On the other hand, a Social Democrat could probably agree with much that’s written there.
That seems like a quite opinionated podcast indeed. From the blurb it sounds like the old proverb “som fan läser bibeln” (don’t know if you have it in English but it means “like the Devil reads the Bible”).
The book discussed could be interesting though. I might pick up a copy!
It’s right wing on many economic issues (free trade, globalization, etc) but don’t expect them to fall in with typical USA Republican Party lines on social issues (gay marriage, abortion, guns, etc)
It feels like some of the more agile publishers reacted to this sentiment some years ago, in that they started publishing 5,000 word articles about EVERYTHING and subsequently even long reads are self-indulgent garbage.
I personally would extend this article in today's world to be more like "scan the headlines every 2-3 days and go read books instead". That way you know "what" is largely happening, e.g. geopolitics, floods, murder trial, but you don't waste time consuming a few thousand words of garbage from somebody who knows no more than you do.
A friend of mine started doing this way before me and a take of his was that any sufficiently big news will make its way through to you via social circles anyway, use people who don't value their time as your filter.
I don't think it's specifically against TV so much as against junk news. There's lots of junk news in article form. TV is just a really bad offender as far as junk news goes.
Yeah, TV News is the real issue, it only gives a completely surface level understanding of anything, such that you will be forming political opinions based on emotional impact and nothing else.
And that, btw, is the reason to stay informed: to come to accurate conclusions that inform your political opinions. Because at some point, decisions need to be made about things, and your vote is part of that process. Not just your own vote, either, but the votes of anyone else you can communicate with.
Of course, for many, the emotional impact is all that happens, which forms the basis of all propaganda and advertising.
My strong rule regarding news is that I will not get any news from a narrated source. if I want the news I'll read it & preferably pay for it like NYT etc. my reasoning is that evolutionary we are not well designed to reject reality, and anything that is absorbed via audio-visual senses is considered reality (at least initially) by our monkey brains. if we believe a lie we just end up creating a smaller 'universe' in our heads where that lie is true and do a sort of 'chroot' to it. this makes rejecting outright-lies/spin/BS very taxing. I have noticed that I can be much more critical of info presented if I am reading it because I have control on the process & that provides necessary space to insert my reasoning and context into it.
For starters, being informed makes for more interesting conversations with others. It means that you get to reflect on what you stand for, and grow as an individual with an opinion.
News is also the gateway for deeper information. If you stick to just the news, that's one thing, but if you then go deeper into the topic (what is the relationship between Ukraine and Russia?) then you get invaluable context. Without following current events, how would you know what is an important topic to follow?
Finally (but not lastly), news makes you informed when it comes time to vote at the municipal, state, and federal level. If you don't follow the developments in your community, your vote is at best useless, at worst it's harming the democratic process.
Edit: I should be clear on what I mean by news. In the traditional sense, it's reporting on facts, checking sources, and providing two sides to every story. Opinions and partisan "news" are not that.
But you're not truly informed, at best you know the opinions of others. Or more typically, you're informed as to what media outlet publishes to get eyeballs for advertising revenue.
Your conversations with others are only more interesting because you're engaging with people who are themselves very interested in discussing the opinions of others.
My friends are not like this. And the ones that are, I try to avoid endlessly musing about some complex foreign policy which no one has enough accurate information to have an opinion about.
It's all good, but it's a hobby when it doesn't affect your community.
I agree with much of what you wrote. Finding curious and open minded people is super important and I would encourage you to spend the time to find people who actively participate in their society. Unless, of course, you'd rather not.
> But you're not truly informed, at best you know the opinions of others. Or more typically, you're informed as to what media outlet publishes to get eyeballs for advertising revenue.
I do disagree that you're not truly informed. If you're coming at News from this point of view, you're essentially lumping all publications, from the Economist to OANN to RT to Huffpo to War Room together. This is a naive approach and leads to the rise of partisan publications and channels that distort reality.
I'm a bit of a pessimist here. Finding open minded people has been very difficult. I've got a set, they are my oldest and best friends, spread across the continent now.
What is your reading list and hours per week spent?
If you are regularly reading several publications like the economist and keeping tabs on diverse set of news outlets, then you might be able to see the forest. But that takes significant time, and I don't know anyone who does that or has the time to in between working and taking care of themselves/family - which is why I view it as more of a niche hobby nowadays.
I agree that it's difficult. I am very selective with friends and it takes months if not years to find a new friend. However, when one is found, they are a friend for life.
> What is your reading list and hours per week spent?
It's a combination of local (municipal, state) and national/international news. Local is easy and tends to be very factual. If you're in the US, there are a lot of smaller publication that report on local events related to your city or state.
For international news, something like r/worldnews is a good start.
National news is the trickiest one because it tends to be the most partisan and requires reading from multiple sources. I also ignore it the most for that reason (US national politics are a shitshow: no one cares about the house and senate, and over indexes on the president, which should have very limited power compared to congress).
Do you have advice on finding more resources for local news? It seems my local sources are just as biased as the national ones, and most pieces read like puff pieces to prop up political careers, hit pieces (my local news transportation writer loves to bash cal hsr), or downright advertisements just like the junk from the national outlets. A lot of local stuff that does sometimes directly impact me doesn't even seem to get written about unless there is some financial or electoral incentive to print. I feel like you almost have to work at city hall to get an understanding of the politicking between the city departments and city/county government interactions with what little drips its way out, heavily diluted into a handful of paragraphs, into local news outlets. What little does get out even from seemingly benign departments like sanitation could make for a long winded docuseries easily, so there is plenty there but no one wants to step up and shine a light on it these days at least. Maybe the environment for journalists is too litigious? I've never seen an LA times journalist accuse a blatantly corrupt politician of anything remotely improper before the FBI perp walks them out of city hall, for example (perhaps they do but these pieces don't seem very common), whereas I would expect to see these articles connecting obvious dots well before FBI indictments if the fourth estate were doing its job.
This is an interesting point. In Seattle we're lucky enough to have The Stranger. They are crass and funded by escort and pot ads, but they are very much in your face about their editorial bias and they cover only the city of Seattle.
Their coverage on local political candidates is considered the gold standard in the area. If you want to run, you will show up for the Stranger's inquisition, and god help you if you start spewing platitudes. Their elections board has no interest in being polite to you, even if they like you.
My wife is heavily involved in local politics, so we know what's going on via that gossip network. The truth is that the forces in place change very slowly. The homeless problem in Seattle? Same systemic problems it's been for a long time. Who's driving the zoning decisions in Bellevue? Same couple of developers who have a chokehold on downtown. Puget Sound Energy's ongoing poor engineering and amazing propoganda? Completely rational actors with a fixed playbook. I could write a briefing on these topics that would still be good in six months or a year.
For topics that require action on your part? By the time the news is covering it, the decisions have been made. Crazy racists running for Bellevue school board? You hear about them in the news when someone has already FOIA'd their emails and found a news outlet to publish them. Action happens via local groups, either your political party or cells of Indivisible or PTSA's or specialized action groups like CENSE. If you want to know what's going on, you need to subscribe to the newsletters of these groups.
I agree that it's not easy. While most major publications in your area have opinion columns and a leaning, I would still read them for the facts they share.
For more local news, I have found a decent strategy. This may sound weird, but I've joined local Facebook communities in my area to track the sources of the articles their members share. If you ignore the pro-/anti- rhetoric in the comment sections, you may find that some of the publications are actually legitimate sources of information about the latest happenings in the community. It doesn't have to be a scandal all the time (it often isn't). Instead, I read about new Covid regulations, about the struggles and successes of local business, about new legislation being tabled by the state government, about elections and their candidates, etc.
Most news is surprisingly human and humble. Opinions and partisan publications have made news out to be this incendiary thing whereas, in reality, it's just a bunch of people trying to live their lives and make decisions in a world of little certainty.
Finding news sources that meet your “traditional” definition is extremely difficult. Even the most dry, informative outlets are often complicated by the need to grab eyeballs.
> News is also the gateway for deeper information.
When the news you watch makes you feel informed on a topic but is actually misleading or omits major nuance, it hinders motivation to seek deeper information.
> For starters, being informed makes for more interesting conversations with others.
Depends on the crowd. In my experience, that's true with only 10% of the people I know. Most of them are more interested in having an opinion than understanding what is going.
When I expand the circle to the population in general, it probably drops to about 2% of the population.
> If you stick to just the news, that's one thing, but if you then go deeper into the topic (what is the relationship between Ukraine and Russia?) then you get invaluable context.
As a former news junkie, I agree - with the caveat that to get to what I call the minimum threshold of deep understanding will take many, many hours.[1] You have to seek out many different interpretations, sources, etc. It's a very active thing. If you spend merely an hour a day on the news, you won't get there (or perhaps you'll only get "there" for a topic or two).
At that point, you start doing a cost-benefit analysis, as I had to. And then you realize that in the universe of things you could be doing, there are plenty of things that give you a better cost/benefit ratio.
> In the traditional sense, it's reporting on facts, checking sources, and providing two sides to every story
Strong disagree. For many (most?) issues, if you can itemize only two sides to the story, you have a very narrow picture of what is going on.
[1] No, definitely just reading the Economist will not do. The quest for reducing news sources to just 1-2 quality sources is a flawed one, and you'll always have a skewed view of the world that way.
If "interesting" is talking about the latest outrage that everyone will forget in a week, sure. If on the other hand you find "interesting" to be debate on the philosophical principles of private ownership or the moral relativism of a state's relationship to vulnerable populations, ya ain't gettin that from the news.
> It means that you get to reflect on what you stand for, and grow as an individual with an opinion.
You can do that without the news. And having an opinion is like having an asshole: everyone has one, and you should probably keep it to yourself.
> Without following current events, how would you know what is an important topic to follow?
There is no objective importance other than what will directly affect your life. The news is mostly national and international information, which rarely ever directly impacts you (unless it is "impacting" your amygdala). Local and state actions are much more likely to impact you, but I doubt you follow local or state news, if it's even covered at all by journalists as more than "here's all the local crime to scare you and keep you tuning in".
> news makes you informed when it comes time to vote
The news rarely (if ever) lays out out all the positions, track records, or experience of candidates in local and state elections. But they do parrot talking points and promote the candidates with the most money and influence.
A lot of this is addressed in Amusing Ourselves to Death (which I can highly recommend), but to address some specific points
> it's reporting on facts, checking sources
Right, but which facts? Local restaurant inspections is probably useful since it has the potential to impact my daily life. Reporting on some kid who fell down a well in some country on the other side of the planet probably isn't, since the situation will not affect me in any tangible way. Not to downplay the event, of course. To those involved it's very important, but telling me does nothing except make me feel bad.
> and providing two sides to every story. Opinions and partisan "news" are not that.
The thing is, though, not every news story or societal issue has two sides. Some have more, some have fewer. Trying to find someone to provide an opposing viewpoint on an issue that reasonably shouldn't have one means that every time the news does that in the name of giving equal time it has to go further into the fringe to find some wingnut who will provide it, legitimizing and amplifying their viewpoint instead of dismissing it. Repeat that a few times over a couple of decades and you start to see the televised discourse we 'enjoy' today.
Watching/reading/consuming modern news is too stress-inducing (as it is designed to be) just to have something to chat about or become more well-informed about issues that in large part have no bearing on me.
I pay attention to issues that are important to me at scopes that matter - state and municipal. Everything else is noise.
The news itself is often pretty boring but the tone being used is meant to be stressful and keep you reading with baited breath. Looking at stale news like a web archive from cnn from months ago is always funny. Almost hysterical titles and sentences for things that just end up not mattering or being significant at all, but its all written up as if Japan has bombed Pearl Harbor and war were declared.
>Edit: I should be clear on what I mean by news. In the traditional sense, it's reporting on facts, checking sources, and providing two sides to every story. Opinions and partisan "news" are not that.
Yeah, good luck with that. Even what appears to be purely factual reporting is subject to bias in the form of what gets factually reported and what is simply ignored. Several good examples of this were documented in "Manufacturing Consent."
Opinion and national bias often creep in to so-called factual reporting by 'expert analysis.' You really have to go to primary sources and evaluate them for yourself. Putin giving a speech is easier to evaluate than a talking head from the Brookings Institute who somehow ended up as their 'Russia Expert' because he studied abroad there 15 years ago for a semester.
You may be right that you could read the speech yourself to form an opinion, but you wouldn't know there was a speech to begin with without someone reporting it.
When was the last time you saw, on an American news outlet, a foreign spokesman or leader giving a direct statement? Other than showing them walk across the stage to shake the American president's hand or, in Saddam's case him waving a shotgun in the air on very old b-footage, I can't recall an instance of that. You only get 'expert analysis'. That's by design. It's actually possible to get a wider exposure to foreign primary sources on TikTok than CNN. This was especially true at the beginning of COVID, when the consensus in Washington was deeply confused on what the messaging should be, and now on Russia where I can see clips of Putin laying out his case with subtitles.
Strong disagree with the idea that watching or reading mainstream news is informative. I don't think it's unfair at all to label mainstream news (US) as propaganda. Have you ever compared the home pages of major mainstream media companies? It's as if they are reporting on a completely different country.
It begs the question of whether it is better to be uninformed or misinformed. Consuming mainstream media in the US will misinform you. Not consuming any media will leave you uninformed. If I had to pick I'd rather have an electorate of uninformed than an electorate of misinformed.
> It begs the question of whether it is better to be uninformed or misinformed. Consuming mainstream media in the US will misinform you. Not consuming any media will leave you uninformed. If I had to pick I'd rather have an electorate of uninformed than an electorate of misinformed.
Channeling from Thomas Jefferson[1] (emphasis mine):
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
His proposed solution is:
"Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy."
How would you have found out about the Texas power outages last year or the rising Opioid epidemic if it were not for news (unless you lived in Texas or knew someone addicted to Oxy)? Or any other event from your city all the way to your federal government?
You can dismiss all news as being misinformation, but even the shadiest outlets report some semblance of facts. It's the cause of the news that's often up for debate.
People outside of Texas may be considering moving to (or immediately traveling to) Texas.
Or they may the citizens of a democratic polity being called upon to evaluate competing energy policy alternatives where the facts of the Texas case have potential bearing.
The most powerful manipulation the so-called news uses is not what it reports, but what it refuses to. I'm not going to give examples because I see no upside in violating other HN readers' widely held taboos, but they're pretty obvious with a little consideration.
How would you have learned about COINTELPRO if you didn’t read the news? Right, you probably didn’t hear about it in the news back then since it didn’t serve the right interests (unlike e.g. Watergate).
I have a different question. What does it matter if I am uninformed on those two topics? What does it matter if I am uninformed on most topics? There are (almost) never any single issue items on the federal ballot. On local or state ballots there are single issue items maybe once every two to four years. I can inform myself on those topics or I can cast an uninformed vote. Again, I would consider an uninformed vote to be a better outcome than a misinformed vote.
> What does it matter if I am uninformed on those two topics?
You have to consider how you spend your time. Not reading on the happenings in your city, state, and country is a choice that you make every time you do something different. Is what you sacrifice by being up to date on the latest happenings more important? Then do that. You would be in the majority.
> What does it matter if I am uninformed on most topics?
Profoundly disagree. An uninformed voter may vote poorly. A misinformed voter will unequivocally vote poorly. I'll take my chances with the uninformed to not create a dystopian mess.
> In the traditional sense, it's reporting on facts, checking sources, and providing two sides to every story. Opinions and partisan "news" are not that.
Unfortunately, the mad scramble for eyeballs for advertising dollars coupled a particularly virulent set of political objectives has completely decimated news, morphing it into nothing but a massive reality distortion field designed to keep you completely uninformed, pissed off, powerless, and addicted.
you only have so much mental energy. i think it’s important to adopt a JIT attitude and be able to learn and filter things when you need them, not as a matter of day to day activities.
being informed most definitely does not make for more interesting conversations. everyone is biased + critical thinking is severely lacking. nowadays i feel like any conversation quickly devolves into a us-vs-them and “politics”
> Finally (but not lastly), news makes you informed when it comes time to vote at the municipal, state, and federal level. If you don't follow the developments in your community, your vote is at best useless, at worst it's harming the democratic process.
Election time is when candidates (or some of them) pump out propaganda against their opponents. Negative ads about what some candidate said 15 years ago. Who wins in that race? Often the one who has the most marketing money.
Not just ads though; the propaganda could be part of The News as well if there is a coalition in the media that thinks of the candidate as a threat.
(And it was either CNN or MSNBC (the news as the article in question defines it) that said that they covered Trump so much (free press in his case because he fed off the notoriety) because he was good for ratings.)
I’ve seen perfectly reasonable candidates lose in part because their more corporate-friendly opponents were better funded by private interests.
I’ve begun to think that an intentionally random vote might be better for the venerable “democratic process”.
It may be a good idea for you to follow up on your elected officials outside of the election period in that case. See what bills are being proposed, and signed. Who they choose to put in their cabinet, what leaders they meet with and public statements they make.
If your idea of political news is opinionated partisan coverage during elections, then you're doing it wrong.
> If your idea of political news is opinionated partisan coverage during elections, then you're doing it wrong.
But that’s the news. That’s what “following the news” means. The American media covers each federal election for, what, two years? Who except people who follow politics as a hobby will remember whatever “the news” was before that? (Sure, in more local elections things are bound to be better than that.)
And you already have to be savvy in order to distinguish the partisan coverage from things that are more substantial—you don’t know what you don’t know.
Whatever you are talking about is not on the topic of The News.
At someone point in the last two years I stopped watching the news, because it was just an endless stream of useless information about COVID. I’m not sure I felt better, but it certainly saves some time.
Point 3 is spot on, most of the commentators have no idea about what going to happen. At best their guesses a marginally better than my own. Once you realise this, watching debates between journalist and political commentators becomes pointless. I simply don’t see the point in some expert trying guess when Russia will attack Ukraine for instance. Tell me when they attack. Just report whats happening, not what might happen, because your going to get it wrong.
I don't think the news has changed all that much, there still used to be a heavy focus on the same types of negative topics. What has obviously changed is the large amount of commentary that has sprung up around traditional newsreading.
But you can't fill 24 hours of "news cycle" without lots of nonsensical filler! Sometimes, the world just doesn't agree with that requirement, so they have to make material.
The sad truth is, you totally could fill 24h of news. The sun is always up somewhere. Even in a single country there’s no way nothing interesting isn’t happening somewhere somewhat.
But it’s hard, you need way more sources and accept to broadcast without footage, you can’t filter and spin the messages as much, you don’t have a “voice” and become more of a firehose, it’s less entertaining overall, and you can’t have that on tv.
Buzzfeed is hardly the pioneer. Cable TV news has been doing it since the 1980s with constant "shocker!" bait segments and constant bullshitting between talking heads who make any banal thing they feel like sound like a impending disaster.
And as was mentioned, it's no small irony that Buzzfeed's investigative journalism, while a limited part of their impact, is pretty good.
It's not an opinion, it's an objective fact. They don't have a strong track record.
Remember when BuzzFeedNews was peddling such fake news garbage that Robert Mueller's team had to call them out on their bullshit [0]? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
In light of the current situation in Europe I've thought of a rule of thumb I give people about media they consume.
If someone is painted as an enemy, and the information you're given makes their actions or motivations seem irrational, you're likely not being given all relevant information.
In the same vein as this article, I've also quit Twitter a year ago and it's been great. Pretty much the same effects also.
A few years ago, seemingly out of nowhere, were a bunch of articles about how Oman was the center of terrorism in the middle east.
I had had family stationed there years before so the name popped out at me, as they'd described it previously as "open and accepting of westerners" (relatively speaking, I guess).
Anyway, this "center of terrorism" thing was front page news across the board for a solid week, maybe two, then poof, it went away. Nobody even remembers it now.
I don't really know what to make of it. What would I, Normy McYaBasic, do with the above information in any case?
It's a fun little metagame to imagine the motives of headlines put in front of you. In this case, maybe the motivating factor that lead to the journalist's boss dropping this assignment on their lap could have been anything from a slighted Saudi prince to someone shorting Oman Air that week.
Except that the "current situation in Europe" actually is being motivated primarily by irrationality. (That's what extreme nationalism amounts to.) And I don't know what kind of ideological contortions you'd need to undergo to conclude that the man who has brought about this situation is not your enemy.
If you had the all the info, how would you be certain that you are not biased?
I had the unluckiness to be born in a country torched by war. I am still finding out the info about the war, that you won't be able to read anywhere. I am aware that it is not easy for someone that grew up and lives in totally different world to learn and understand all the complexities... But at least take everything with a grain of salt.
That's just an argument that news is biased and flawed. It's hardly a justification for quitting the news. Evidently, you haven't quit the news because you know about the current situation in Europe, you're just skeptical that the news is giving the whole picture.
The situation in Russia is the action of a single person. Rationality is not a universal state of people. People can have mental problems and while actions can seem to be rational in their own head, every other person realizes their irrationality.
Also for the record, given the lies being created, it’s quite obviously rational what they’re doing, but it doesn’t make the lies not lies.
One item he only tangentially refers to: Most developing stories are not worth reading.
At one point in my news addiction, I decided to stop following it on a daily basis but instead "catch up" on all the previous month's news once a month.
So when the new month began, I scrolled and caught up on all the news feeds in my RSS reader. And you'd then see this pattern: Breaking news story. Lots of follow up stories that day and the next few days. If you compare the information content at the tail end of these stories vs the early stories, you'll realize how much junk is in the early stories: Wrong information and filler information. By the end of the saga, it's mostly accurate - there's not much information churn.
So when I would read day to day, I'd read all those articles, and have my knowledge slowly get updated/amended as each day passes. Why go through that much trouble? Just wait towards the end. You'll get more information from reading 2-3 articles at the tail end than the 20-30 you may read throughout.
> A common symptom of quitting the news is an improvement in mood.
Anecdotal data point here, but I experienced more than just an improvement in mood. I had a completely unexpected blossoming of immense amounts of creativity.
About three weeks into my total news cut off, I started to feel sober in a way that is similar to discovering sobriety during December holiday weeks with family after non stop drinking for months in College.
Unlike the author in the linked article, I did a complete cut off from all "news-like" sources: TV news, Youtube channels, social media, reddit, podcasts that talk about current events, blogs and newsletters that discuss news - all of it.
When conversations started to become awkward (about 6 months after being completely cut off and I could no longer infer/derive the common assumptions underlying a conversation in a group), I subscribed to The Economist, directed their Espresso newsletter to Feedbin and started reading that about every other day. I found that a handful of bullet points about what's going on in the world per week is sufficient for me to keep up with any conversation I find myself in.
If there are any other news abstainers here, I'd love to hear your life hacks and tricks that you use to navigate the world.
I adopted this approach and read some long-form sources once in awhile. My only vice is reddit, but I want to make the effort to avoid engaging with the news content often. Actually I hadn't used RSS until maybe 2 years ago and it's such a revelation.
No tips to offer. I find it impossible to avoid hearing about most news between wife and family.
There are things that happen in the news that may affect your day to day life.
Apart from the obvious things such as covid, there are a lot of things going on all the time that may influence your voting decisions (not just in the run up, but the entire time someone is in office), purchasing decisions, where you go on vacation, who you want to work for, how you get to work today etc.
I guess if that is fine for you, then please feel free to carry on and go book your vacation to the Ukraine, drive a Volkswagen, work for facebook, use too much water during a drought season, have your garden furniture blow through your windows when that storm rolls in, have a BBQ during a high-risk fire season, don't use condoms, and then just flat out are late to work today because you didn't know about the strike/accident/whatever on your usual route. Good luck.
By all means, quit twitter or facebook or whatever but at least read the headlines from major journalistic outlets. Something might happen that deeply matters to you and you won't know about it otherwise.
Those are true points, but I'll make some counterpoints.
1. I've found the news to be the worst way to get information about covid. My state health department website and other sites like it have given me much better details.
2. Yeah, I need to know if there are things that might block my route when driving. Google Maps does a better job of that than any local news that I've seen.
3. Plenty of people drive Volkswagens and are perfectly happy with them. They didn't let the news tell them how awful they were for this practice. For that matter, they didn't let the news tell them how awful Musk is or how wonderful some other execs in the industry are either. And you know what? They are just fine for that.
Most of your other points don't seem to have much to do with the news being talked about. I don't think the article was telling you not to check the weather.
> feel free to carry on and go book your vacation to the Ukraine, drive a Volkswagen, work for facebook...
These could all be researched at the time of purchase though. There's nothing in the daily news about VW or Ukraine that can't be learned more efficiently by doing some research just before purchasing a vehicle or vacation.
There's nothing wrong with keeping tabs on the latest headlines, I personally do so and am fine with it, but there's nothing essential about it either. A person who never reads the news will still find out about something like Covid from a hundred other sources in short order.
The post lists several other things along with those examples that I think DO make it essential:
> use too much water during a drought season, have your garden furniture blow through your windows when that storm rolls in, have a BBQ during a high-risk fire season
If you’re going to check if there’s a drought every time you use water - congratulations, you’re reading the news!
I am very skeptical of the effectiveness of combating something like a drought by hoping most adults read about it on the news and individually decide to take appropriate actions. These sorts of cases need to be handled at the government and utility level.
I live in a drought stricken region and everybody here is well aware of it, regardless of their news habits, because they learn about it from many other sources.
As one example, the water district regularly sends out fliers telling people there is a drought, making suggestions on how to conserve water, adding restrictions on water use, and more. These messages are far more ubiqutous and effective than current news articles.
To completely quit news is not a good idea, unless you want to live under a rock, metaphorically speaking.
Fact of the matter is, day-to-day events affect each one of us who live in a modern society. You don't want to be the guy who has no mask and 0 preparation for a pandemic when it hits. You don't want to be the guy who keeps buying/using a product when there's news circulating that it could be unsafe.
The author mentioned reading a 5000-word report, which is great if you're into that sort of things. But the mass majority of people have jobs to work, kids to take of, important things to do. They don't have time to spend hours every day reading deep into all the issues going on in the world.
Most people just want to stay up to date with the latest events, so they can plan their lives better.
Of course you can get addicted to news and let it negatively affect you. But the alternative of having no idea what's going on in the world until it's on your doorstep is not a good idea either.
A balance is good. Stuff like limiting yourself to spending 15 minutes in the morning during breakfast quickly going over important news, and making a commitment to not waste more time reading news for the rest of the day.
This is how the media and media addicted people convince you that you absolutely need to keep tuning into the madness. You can hear 99% of the news that will actually affect your life simply through interacting with friends and doing activities.
At the risk of sounding a bit hyperbolic, it's also important for citizens living under a representative form of government to monitor the government for encroachment on liberties. The news is how this happens.
this is a false dichotomy.
I'm the textbook "i do not watch the news person" and when things like Covid happen you cannot just ignore them.
Not only that, but there are many things where paradoxically I'm better informed than people "watching the news". You see, there is being informed and there is actually spending your mental resources on problems you don't have or you have 0 say in them.
to debunk some of the things you brought up:
- you don't decide to go to Ukraine and you book your vacation without at any point learning about this (you will learn about this from the booking agency, you will learn about this at the airport, you will learn about this from people around you). The odds of you landing in Ukraine are 0 unless you really want to go there.
- if you drive a a VW you may not be in a position to stop driving it. Choosing your car based on a scandal screams privilege. You may choose to pick your next car based on it, but again: you will learn about this no matter way. Other car manufacturers will tell you, people around you will tell you about how crappy VW is when you bring it up (are you going to buy it solo without talking with anyone?).
- work for Facebook: it's cool to hate Facebook and I have personally stopped using it eons ago. But not suspecting that some of the things that they are doing aren't exactly heavenly and ending up working there? again, the odds are zero
- use to much water? how can you be in a drought season and not see the drought. Also: everyone likes capitalism until the fish from the lake is depleted. If you can afford to use the water and pay for it, why not? The pricing should be tiered in such a way that there is a strong incentive against you using the water - we should not expect people to just do the right thing. this rarely work s without economic incentives.
- BBQ in during fire season? I think there are legal and economic things in place that should prevent this.
- using condoms? really? really? you're gonna put the equal sign between the news and basic sex ed. really?
> The odds of you landing in Ukraine are 0 unless you really want to go there.
Oh yeah, you'll definitely find out eventually, but timing matters. This whole debacle started a fair amount of time before Putin gave the order to invade and most travelers book holidays further in advance. In that time, you could have cancelled and rescheduled your commitments around this news, but instead you'll spend most of that time clueless.
> how can you be in a drought season and not see the drought
Uh, are you saying that if I live in a nice little house or apartment unit in a Californian city, I can just see the drought by looking outside? Perhaps if you live near farmland, but the effects of drought have never been noticeable to me in the urban jungle. Even if they are, how the govt responds to drought is not obvious. It's not always just a tiered pricing change. California, as just one example, will apply restrictions on when and how you use sprinklers.
> BBQ in during fire season? I think there are legal and economic things in place that should prevent this
...like what? By the time there are legal consequences, isn't it too late?
I agree with your central thesis that you shouldn't spend time worrying about problems that you don't have, but making that distinction isn't straightforward and your stated counterpoints are muddled themselves.
so, at one point I planned a trip to New York and a hurricane made an appearance in the area. Had to cancel everything (you could not fly in there) and we actually got automatic refunds on anything. If this can happen with New York and a hurricane it can definitely happen with Ukraine and a war.
What does spending all that time clueless mean? I'm sorry but I just don't buy it.
>Uh, are you saying that if I live in a nice little house or apartment unit in a Californian city
My point was that if there is a drought and we need to save water this will be highly visible. The water company will tell you, the bill you pay should be higher, etc
> By the time there are legal consequences, isn't it too late?
nope. breaking the law always involves a reward and a risk. The risk/punishment is not properly calibrated for the consequences but there is no reason why it shouldn't be.
Spending all that time clueless means that you're wasting time you could have spent reacting to the situation. It's not just about refunds, if you blocked out four weeks for a doomed vacation, then knowing that the vacation is doomed in advance will give you time to prepare an alternate itinerary for those four weeks rather than finding out perhaps a few days beforehand.
> The water company will tell you, the bill you pay should be higher, etc
My water usage varies across months, I am hardly unique in saying that I don't keep a close tab on the water price breakdown. Many people auto-pay their electronic bills and don't check in very often until something goes very wrong (like the water gets shut off). These are the kinds of important items that show up very prominently in local headlines though.
> breaking the law always involves a reward and a risk.
That's not what I'm saying. By the time you realize that you're actually breaking the law, you're already being punished. Suppose there's a law that punishes BBQs during fire season. If I'm not aware of this BBQ law in advance (eg. via the news), by the time I'm fined or arrested for unknowingly hosting a big BBQ, it's too late for me to figure out that it's illegal.
As others have said, there are other ways to obtain this information but news feeds will highlight noteworthy issues. Do you repeatedly poll the health dept website for the latest guidance? That's one way to keep up to date on Covid restrictions, but generally it's even more inconvenient to poll everything that matters.
it's a tradeoff between time wasted to react to the situation and time wasted to keep yourself informed. Based on my own experience the time you need to adapt to the situation is a fraction from the time you spend watching the news.
I didn't write that article, but I certainly could have - I've noticed exactly the same things, and clearly have had some identical conversations with people about the value of "being informed."
The way I describe it is that all you can ever hope for with "following the news" is eventual consistency with some representative subset of world events. I don't know what's happening as it happens, and I don't know everything that's happened, so I'm (by the requirements of reality) both behind and only updated on some events.
I'm just happy being far longer on the "eventual" window and having a somewhat lower amount of representative content.
What I've also learned is that almost everything actually important will filter to me some way or another. It's absolutely impossible to live under a rock if you interact with other people, because they'll ask you about XYZ event. And, often, enjoy updating you if you've not heard about it!
I also agree with the "Read three books" observation - I'd rather someone recommend three books on an interesting topic to me than link me to some hour long video. The books take longer, but I'm likely to have at least some familiarity with the topic, from a few different points, with the books. YouTube will make people think they've got some understanding, when it's largely missing.
I quit the news roughly 20 years ago and never looked back. The way I explain it to people is that the news is simply a form of entertainment that I don't really enjoy.
I'm sure it's been pointed out before, but the news is also a horrible way to actually understand the world around you. What gets discussed is the most novel/stimulating things that happened--if you attempt to fit a model of the world to these data points, you end up completely wrong. If I am interested in a topic (immigration trends in a country, covid statistics, what's happening with electric car subsidies, etc.) I just seek out the necessary information myself.
You know what I really want? A version of 'the news' that is done quarterly and is just sampling of what's happening in the lives of 100 random people. Who are they, some basic statistics about then, and what's affecting their lives written up in few paragraphs for each person. Just an unbiased sample of the 'real world' from people outside my bubble.
Ha, you totally got me :) In my defense, my comments were meant apply to mainstream world/national news. If you have a specific interest that you want to keep up on, that's a somewhat different set of tradeoffs. But, even then, I prefer places like HN where an upvote/sorting is aligned with a someone thinking the content is useful rather than just making ad money for clicks.
Jan 10, 2021 was the day I unsubscribed and/or deleted every news source I had. I just couldn't take it anymore. That week capped off a decade of alarmist content that seemed to start at the end of the housing crash, but continued to get angrier and nastier every year. I lost family members to the brainwash that is the "news" and it has been heartbreaking. It's honestly worse than losing someone due to death, because they're right there, in front of you, just a different, angrier, person that uses words and expressions that make no sense, and it replaces all those good childhood memories you used to hold of them.
Honestly, I have never felt better being disconnected from it all. It really frees up the brain to ponder on things I can actually control in my life.
I have zero trust in media anymore. Watching un-edited videos of certain famous events, then reading what well-respected, reputable news outlets wrote about it... it was basically at tabloid level how misrepresented it was.
Best I can do - if particularly interested in a current event and there's no video footage - is sample wide range of news sources and see if there's any common strand of truth between the lies.
I've uninstalled Facebook and stopped reading / watching the news. I read HN and a few local subreddits via RSS. I do feel much better mentally.
I would, however, like a way to be informed of breaking news. I tried a few apps but their idea of "breaking" news often involved celebrity gossip. I really only want to know if its MAJOR: war breaks out, aliens land and make contact, fusion is finally perfected and we're all no longer required to labor 40 hours a week.
My current solution is basically: if something major happens my wife tells me about it.
Wikipedia current events page is your friend. It has a executive summary of about the last week or two and then a daily breakdown if you want more detail
I sort of took your route but I do get an axios "news in 5 minutes" type of email every morning. I also get a similar one for local news which I do feel a need to stay on top of
I had this exact issue. Over time your irl social network (like your wife) cotton on that you're not in the loop and they'll contact you to tell you about things they think you're interested in. So not only is there better curation going on but you're also strengthening your bond with real people around you.
My favorite way to demonstrate the news's general irrelevance is to go to archive.org and look up the front page of your favorite news source from, say, 10 years ago. In hindsight, paying attention to nearly anything on the news a decade ago gave you no useful information to date. Why would today's news be any different?
Because "news" by definition is only really useful or interesting at the time it occurs?
The Miriam-Webster definition of "News" is literally "A report of recent events". A report of events a decade prior is not "News" anymore and of course likely to be irrelevant. To visit a decade old front page of any paper expecting it to be directly applicable somehow to your life today is bizarre logic to me.
It's not a test of whether it was "news" at the time - it's a test of its relevance to you.
If you look back at the news from a particular day and see now that reading it didn't convey information you've used since, then that is a good indication that the news you're reading now probably won't convey anything you find useful going forward.
This is demonstrably nonsense. People make investment decisions for one, based on events in the news. The news every day is not required to be relevant specifically to you alone, that's an absurd notion, but it will from time to time be relevant to you, as it will be for anyone who exists in a given polity.
It is a signal to noise issue. If you are a day trader, daily financial news may be relevant.
99.9% of news isn't relevant or actionable for most people.
If I can't answer the question "how will this inform a decision I have to make?" the news is purely entertainment. If entertainment doesn't make your life better, don't consume it.
There is no value in having an "informed opinion" about topics that don't change your life.
> 99.9% of news isn't relevant or actionable for most people.
This is what news is supposed to be though! To expect otherwise is the problem. Just because something isn't immediately actionable or entertaining that day in some measurable outcome is a poor test of "value" too, and would eliminate many other things people consider of "value".
Continuing my previous single example, financial news can affect anyone who owns a home or has retirement savings, whether they want to admit it or not, the scope is vastly beyond financial professionals and day traders. If I know interest rates are likely due to rise in March (I do! Thanks news!), I can take steps to lock a low rate now for any debts I have, like a mortgage...
>This is what news is supposed to be though! To expect otherwise is the problem. Just because something isn't immediately actionable or entertaining that day in some measurable outcome is a poor test of "value" too, and would eliminate many other things people consider of "value".
Where do you think the value of news comes from, if not helping people take better actions to navigate their lives?
>Continuing my previous single example, financial news can affect anyone who owns a home or has retirement savings, Whether they want to admit it or not, the scope is vastly beyond financial professionals and day traders.
My point is that information doesn't matter even if it will or could affect you, unless you will take some action based on it. If someone realistically thinks they might sell their family home or cash out their retirement, then by all means, pay close attention to financial news. If not, they would be better off ignoring it entirely.
The list of things that can affect me and many others and appear in the news is pretty much limitless; new legislation, interest rate changes, changes to my school district, tax rate adjustments, rebanding of my property, changes to what animals are allowed on a leash in local parks, road or business closures, the list goes on and on. We do not exist in a vacuum of one and decisions of others will from time to time affect even the most introverted of individuals.
All of these things can be actionable, and all of them require paying attention to a news source of some kind to take that action in time. That is the value! And yes, it means very often I have to flick through a paper that doesn't entertain or inform me at all, but that has always been the reality of the news.
There are even really positive things that enter my life too, it's not all misery; news of exhibitions or bands coming to town that I love for one. There are huge interests and hobbies I have only discovered because I read about them in a news article - there can be a "discovery cost" for many people to reading no news at all too. "Value" is a tricky concept and benefits are often indirect.
>The list of things that can affect me and many others and appear in the news is pretty much limitless; new legislation, interest rate changes, changes to my school district, tax rate adjustments, rebanding of my property, changes to what animals are allowed on a leash in local parks, road or business closures, the list goes on and on. We do not exist in a vacuum of one and decisions of others will from time to time affect even the most introverted of individuals
100% agree. As I said, many things can have an impact on you, but that doesn't mean they are worth paying attention to proactively unless you are even slightly likely to do something about them.
>All of these things can be actionable, and all of them require paying attention to a news source of some kind to take that action in time.
Again, 100% agree, assuming you might actually take action. I think most people are not honest with themselves about what might actually lead to action.
My point is not that news cant be actionable, but that for most people it rarely is. People would be better served if they curate their news consumption based on what may actually be relevant and likely to lead to action, and gasp perhaps spend some more time actually taking actions.
If you feel you already do that, then great. Based on my experience, the vast majority of people don't. They spend dozens of hours following local elections for states they will never visit, building "informed opinions" about protests while never attending one themselves. They track stocks they don't own and will never buy and read crime exposes for locations they will never visit.
I thought it was odd when YouTube started implementing a "Covid-19 News" feed to the home page that couldn't be disabled. I get why they would implement such a feed as a default, but not letting people turn it off and let people watch cat videos or whatnot in peace seems like a bad idea.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who finds this “feature” annoying. Most of the videos are the same polarizing guidelines we’ve heard over the past two years, only now they’re regurgitated through a seemingly endless list of new channels I have to keep marking as not interesting.
I’ve already gotten vaccinated thrice and still contracted covid. When can I stop being harassed about what I’m already doing??
Apple TV or Newsstand (I forget which) added I think an unremovable covid and/or black lives matter channel. I didn't mind them surfacing them, but it was annoying you couldn't edit them.
Life hack: if you do want to keep up on global current events but can't stand the breathless media circus, get your news from Wikipedia.[1]
If you actually want to make a difference consider putting more into getting engaged locally, whatever that means for you. National and global scale issues are really easy to fall into a despair/paralysis cycle with.
I mean... I'm looking at the current events page and there's a conspicuous lack of exhausting USA focused culture war BS. It's dry and to be honest a bit boring. If you look at the Ongoing Events pane on the right, there's a list of present issues that don't necessarily get reported on because they don't have the flash to drive ad revenue.
Exactly Wikipedia’s flaw: it only holds a mirror to the sources, and even then, a distorted one at that to the whims of an anonymous editor who very well could have an inflammatory agenda and in cohort with other similar actors.
I got some utility out of the Wikipedia current events page, but I don't assume that it'll be universally useful. I have to ask you though -- putting aside the general issues with writer bias on Wikipedia, what issues do you have with the presentation of info in the Current Events portal?
I used to listen to NPR while doing chores like washing dishes, laundry, driving, etc. As of late, I’ve come to be increasingly dissatisfied with NPR functioning as the unofficial spokesperson for the Democratic Party (chiefly broadcasting stories compressible into 0 bits…). I’ve nearly completely replaced that habit with listening to Lex Friedman. Lex does long form interviews with a wide variety of guests. He is both respectful and curious. The medium is just flat out better on both sides - you can start/stop a podcast when the dishes are done, or to look up related info or to discuss something. You can skip the episodes that don’t interest you. And, perhaps best of all, it isn’t a constant stream of doom, gloom and outrage porn
2. I've read print newspapers (local, international) every day for a decade
3. I've read online news (local, intl) every day for more than a decade
4. I've never was active (neither reading the feed nor posting something) on any social network except Tumblr for visual inspiration
5. Today I read just one single online hyperlocal news portal, beside tech news (Hacker News + newsletters)
The takeaways:
a. Less anxiety.
News are, well, inaccurate since Pulitzer / yellow journalism. Their major function is to keep you on a constant stress level. Which is good on tech news, hyperlocal news -- where you can act, but not good on national and international level -- where you are just a simple spectator.
b. Less biased. I know that I know nothing, so I'm listening everybody and trying to make sense what's happening around.
I think you also discover that a lot of things you assumed you believed in yourself were actually just other peoples' opinions, which you signed off on to because of the mere-exposure effect. Without hearing them chanted over and over, they stop being as self-evident as you thought they were.
Huge problem with US news sources (and most others too). Almost all of them have an overarching editorial “narrative” that colors their every decision.
This is a great article, I can surely relate and confirm the main points, from my experience. I ‘quit’ news a few years ago, and it greatly improved my mood. Obsessively trying to stay ‘informed’ can be quite stressful, and I believe gives you a warped sense of what the world is really like.
I’m not completely in the dark. I still scan headlines a few minutes of the day, but I have switched completely to RSS feeds. I use the NetNewsWire app on my iPhone, and I have feeds from all the major news networks.
This way I’m in complete control of my intake, and I get a completely text based experience (my settings default to ‘reader’ mode once I click through to the article website). I get to just read, and not be bothered with all the other ads & nonsense on news sites.
It’s really nice to consume news on my own terms, and not what the Google news algorithm wants me to see. Or not consume it at all and be happy :) Taking a step away from obsessively reading articles everyday can go along way from disconnecting from the ‘propaganda machine’, and thinking for yourself, instead of getting sucked into whatever ‘narrative of the day’ is.
- stop reading any form of "push news" (so, no Google News, Apple News etc)
- whenever you feel the urge to read something, save to read-later service (I use Instapaper)
- print subscription to Economist
You realize you never needed to "keep up to the minute", and it's okay to find out about things a day or two later
Nearly all of it is, for most people, when it comes to national and international news. It's little more than low-value entertainment. Which is fine, but people get all kinds of crazy ideas about "needing" to follow the news closely to be a good citizen or whatever. Nah. Much better if folks would spend that time reading books on political science, economics, policy, and history, rather than the news. Spend a couple minutes catching up every few months, and you won't have missed much of consequence.
Oh the quality may be crap, but there's a much higher likelihood of learning something you can act on, even if it's just "oh, that band I like is going to be in town".
Five years ago or so I decided to study some history and I've been reading roughly 5-8 history books a year (mostly history since the industrialisation) and it has completely changed the way I read and contextualize news. I feel that I'm in a much better position to filter out the noise and to grasp the significance of some news that really contribute to major trends. This is on top of generally completely transforming my view of the world, can highly recommend anybody who wants a better understanding of our world to get into history.
I still don't understand how we made it through the 00s with trust in television news media still fully intact, at least here in the US.
the nation was basically united in wanting to invade Iraq/Afghanistan all because the talking heads on TV manufactured that consent. it wasn't a "party lines" or "oh that was just FOX News" kind of thing—the news stations were a united front in getting us to believe in something absolutely ridiculous, and we accepted it at face value because we were scared and confused following 9/11. we now know it was all bullshit that resulted in the further unnecessary loss of life, American and otherwise, yet millions of Americans still "trust" these "news" programs implicitly—it's The News, why would you question it?
now these same news stations with overly-polished talking heads—including "former" intelligence agency regulars—and pharmaceutical advertising money (most Americans never bat an eye at the pharma ads on TV and how creepy and weird they are, or are even aware that they're illegal in most of the rest of the world) claim to be the Arbiters of Truth and The Best, Perhaps Only Way To Stay Informed, and we eat it right up. my dad thinks he's consuming a "balanced news diet" by watching the nightly news from every station. it's insanity. turn it off and don't look back. they call it programming for a reason.
It's been about 8 years since I've completely stopped watching tv news or reading newspapers but this post made me realize that I still browse reddit and r/worldnews sometimes.
This is just to say that quitting everything might be close to impossible considering that in some cases we even get news reports via unsolicited SMS messages but we can still reduce input and have a more focused, calmer state of mind.
A useful middle ground is to only read periodicals. These publications give journalists time to distill news into accurate, complete information with some analysis. The articles are information-dense and an efficient method to stay aware of current events without a significant investment of personal time.
I currently prefer The Atlantic and The Economist for this purpose, but there are many choices.
Yah, much of the news isn't even news, its either punditry, gossip, or fear mongering because something sounds scary (school shootings vs car accidents, hours of pandemic talk without anything new, etc).
So, yes cutting all that BS our is going to make you feel better because in two weeks no one is going to care that $celebrity had $life_event.
All for profit media is biased trash to live and enjoy your life far away from.
There's no objectivity especially with political news (barf) and world event news (things that try to control your life).
Ive posted this same sentiment many times here on hacker news about the garbage media .. always gets voted down. But im passionate about living and enjoying life far from it .. think for myself and for me my relationships with people are most important not some dumb for profit news cycle that's manipulated bias trash. Such will never come between me and someone i care about! They can believe that garbage they fill their head with but i only very briefly give my opinion on it and move the topic to something positive/fulfilling!
I am avid reader of tech, entertainment and some local news cause that's fluff vs brainwashing/try to control how I enjoy the time Im here on earth.
I actually stopped purposely reading/watching the news some time around 2016 - and it's been a very positive experience for me.
I had enough negativity in my life as it was, and it just felt like every media outlet overwhelmingly pursued negative stories - war, famine, corruption, FUD etc. I dwelt on such stories, fretting about what might happen. And it frustrated me greatly that I could do nothing about any of these events - technically I live in a democracy, but it counts for little if both main parties are 2 sides of the same coin, and the others have zero chance.
So, I took the drastic step of stopping watching and reading news. I still inadvertently come across some small snippit from time to time, and events that directly impact me, like covid, are apparent without 24-hour death toll coverage.
It's been great - I feel "unburdened", and definitely happier.
> To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole. There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic
I guess in that respect I've long quit the news. I'm honestly surprised some people still watch TV news, I've cut the cord a long time ago personally.
I tend to go to axios, New York times, Atlantic, Reason, etc., and not on a daily basis, since long form news doesn't get published as often. Been doing that for a while.
Axios is my favorite for keeping up with daily news, no opinion pieces, just reporting on events and a quick summary of why it could matter in a digestible form.
So true. Now more than ever. Watching people around me talk about what's happening in Ukrain, obviously feeling miserable about everything while doing so is really just sad.
Just by glancing at a news article the agenda of spreading fear for clicks/views becomes so obvious.
645 comments so far and no one has pointed out what struck me as obvious red flags:
1) This blog post is from 2016 and yet it is the hot story and discussion today on HN. The main argument is that following news is pointless and we are better off not doing so.
2) It has been upvoted and commented on 600+ times today, right as Russia is invading the sovereign nation of Ukraine. This is objectively news worth following. Russia has lost the debate across most of the mainstream english speaking internet regarding this invasion.
3) Russia is the main party that benefits at this time from convincing people to ignore the news.
Situations that are vast in scale and yet out of our control naturally cause unease – it would be weird if they didn’t. It can seem as if our multitude of aspirations, intrigues, and interests are once again subject to random, fluctuating factors. It’s particularly stressful in the wake of Covid inc and many of us feel like we’ve already fried our adaptability mechanisms.
However, re Russia and Co, if you’re not living in the directly affected areas – and I hope you are not – or required to deploy there, remember this: Before this century, no population in history was ever instantaneously aware, in real-time, of hostilities happening around the world. If staying informed by the moment is important to you or you think it will help you muster an appropriate policy recommendation for your local government representative, go for it.
But if not, consider that you’re spiking your adrenals by basically live-streaming blow-by-blow intelligence on s**t happening, keeping your body + psyche in fight/flight/freeze mode. Be aware and of course, if you’re a student of history, yes the developments are fascinating but claim/retain your agency in all this. You control yourself, your outlook, and your immediate environment. Asserting your creativity, enterprising nature, and sensuality in such an atmosphere is not denying that it’s disturbing – it’s good for your morale and those around you.
I agree with most points and I myself read and watch very little news, except for the most important ones. But I want also to highlight the still relevance of news and more importantly the conversations surround it.
For me as an on-the-side investor, relevant news can mean gain or loss. Conflicts like the Ukraine-Russian one can affect the price of oil and gas significantly, not just in the short term. We’ve also seen how much global logistics was affected by the event of Evergreen blocking the Sue canal. There are countless examples like that.
The second important aspect of news for me is the sentiment and conversation surround it. I want to understand what other people are thinking, what do they feel and how they are trying to explain and substantiate their thinking/believe. It’s not always intellectually enriching but sometimes it can be even enlightening, especially when it proved I was wrong or mistaken. Completely unaware of current news would not allow me to converse with people like that.
Nevertheless, I also see that most media today are trying to polarize people more than ever with the results that people are increasingly driven by belief and ideology instead of facts and logics. I afraid the classic news and reporting is an endangered species and reading news today will likely endanger your (not just mental) health.
I used to listen to the whole of Today on BBC Radio 4, every day. Plus Any Questions and watch Question Time, News Night etc on the TV.
I quit, and now other than a 5 minute scan of the BBC News Website occasionally, I am news free. I know the important stuff, such as the ending of Covid restrictions in the UK and the invasion of provinces in Ukraine, but I don't dive deeply into the articles, or do any wider reading.
The reason for my switching off from the news, is that there is bugger all I can do about it, other than voting once every five years, or becoming an activist.
I don't have the time or energy to campaign as an activist on issues I care about. I have a family to look after and a job to maintain. My priorities are selfish.
Voting for me, is a waste of time (although I always do vote). I live in a Tory county, and my vote counts for nothing without proportional representation (which I voted for, but did not happen).
What's the point of digesting news. I learn stuff that mostly has little impact on my life, and when it does have an impact, there's nothing I can do about it.
My quality of life is certainly better since I cut back on digesting the news, in any form, other than this site.
The thing about trying to follow the news, rather than following news coverage, is that correcting for bias requires:
1. Reading/viewing multiple source, from different countries.
2. Reading against the text, using claims from one biased source to contrarily interpret another source, but also holding those claims in suspicion, allowing for the second source to potentially disprove or at least recast what the first source wanted you to know.
3. Watching for things like subtext, timing of stories, _absence_ of coverage, distribution of sources etc.
4. Often, reading languages other than the one you're most fluent in - at least to some extent.
5. Getting used to the most significant and controversial stories being a mess of not just conflicting coverage, but personal and collective accusations which are often at least half-true even if they are a distraction, having to live with how some authors combine conspiracy-theorism or zealotry on some points with decent journalistic work on others...
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Bottom line: It's frustrating, it's time consuming, it draws you away from your social surrounding who either know nothing about things or are repeating shallow slogans they heard in some mainstream news show.
"To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole. There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic."
This is important.
I haven't watched cable news in years (maybe a decade now?) but still check in with long form journalism for in-depth exploration of a topic.
I think this right here is a source of all of the evil mentioned in the article:
I'm not always above creating narratives and cherry-picking information that feeds those narratives because, end of the day, Im human just like everybody else. But being aware of this and learning how to better catch yourself as you're doing it does make a massive difference. It also damned near forces you to try and look for information closer to the source.
(Try reading news sources in another language from another country and watch what happens. Ideally you wouldnt use Google Translate)
Am I paranoid or do certain topics get upvoted with suspicious frequency lately?
Now that shit is popping off in Europe there is an uptick in NSA/CIA/America bad posts with anti-free press sprinkled on top. Every post about events unfolding in Europe were flagged and didn't even reach the front page here until the last few days.
In the Jeff Geerling post Dang revealed that there are groups of inauthentic actors on this site.
> Am I paranoid or do certain topics get upvoted with suspicious frequency lately?
Given the ease of targeting sites for manipulation, HN is probably prominent enough to be worth some psyops effort, though nothing on the scale of the major social media platforms. So, it wouldn't be unexpected though I haven't noticed it, particularly.
> Now that shit is popping off in Europe there is an uptick in NSA/CIA/America bad posts with anti-free press sprinkled on top. Every post about events unfolding in Europe were flagged and didn't even reach the front page here until the last few days.
There's a fairly normal thing here that well-covered potential political events, even fairly extreme ones that don't offer particularly novel discussion opportunities, tend to get down voted along with routine political events. But at a certain level of significance of actual rather than potential events, there's often a phase transition where the down voting is less aggressive (sometimes, there may also be, usually limited, mod intervention to allow some discussion.) So, I’m not convinced that that is particularly suspicious in this case, though the particular content bias may (or may not) reflect some influence of “inauthentic actors”.
I agree with what the article says about news but I think the same idea is applicable to a wider category of 'flash consumption'. One common example I can think of are the Twitter threads with clickbaity titles claiming to give you knowledge about something in 7-10 140 character chunks. They induce a certain FOMO as you scroll by but leave you with no lasting memory about the subject.
This worked really well for me: instead of checking “the news”, I look at the front page of Wikipedia. That has some of the biggest (world) news stories, but it also has a bunch of other stuff. Often when I am checking the news it’s really just because I want to read about something interesting, and Wikipedia provides that without trying so hard to get me to click on stuff.
I've been subscribed to Stratfor[0] for a couple of years now and have generally been pretty pleased. No fuss, no shouting headlines, just reporting of what's happening and a clearly-separated section for analysis and implications.
Maybe yall should give it a go.
I used to read Stratfor, but in the 10 years following the Iraq War, I noticed some glaring blind spots and also a political agenda. I'm not sure I would trust them alone, but if you use them very skeptically for their background history summaries, they might have value.
You can easily get lost in the weeds with something as detailed as Stratfor's reports though; sometimes you need to step back 10,000 ft to recalibrate.
What gets passed off as news and journalism too often isn't either. Just because something happened (e.g., it rained) doesn't make it news. News has to have relevance and importance.
With that proper definition as a filter, a fairly high percentage of US mainstream media news is in fact fake news. This higher revenue fluff is used intentionally to marginalize things that qualify as legit news. Yet somehow these members of The Fourth Estate are shameless enough to cry about "threats to democracy."
The problem is, we don't hear the news admit their definition of news is technically nonsense. Not one of them is willing to police the others. It's hypersonic bullshit that repetition has normalized.
As for journalism...this is a solid filter. It's a handy bullshit detector.
It's one of the things I've learned after reading "4 Hour Work Week" by Tim Ferris. If you want to focus, you need to quit caring about what's happening in the world. It's a great conversation starter by the way. You can always just ask people what's going on and they can share any major events with you, now you're a great listener, because you genuinely don't know what's going on in the world. And should you care? No.
When I stopped watching TV/reading any news at all I noticed one thing: I'm less distracted.
Once you realize that media outlets make tremendous amounts of money by selling you their narrative and like any business they're just trying to be as profitable as possible, everything changes.
Nowadays I might read an article or two from people I subscribe to on substack or something more independent, but still I don't feel like it's something that I need at all.
I think the value-added of journalism to society has changed drastically since the Internet. If I'm interested in a topic or issue I can find writing by people who actually practice it, and I can find the primary sources if at all possible.
In particular, I question the need for giant journalistic institutions like the New York Times or Fox News or any other. If anything happens anywhere I tune to the local news first, because I'd rather read that then the NYT copy/pasta from that, along with some quote from some friend-of-a-former-professor expert.
That said, the news fills a valuable function even if you don't read it. When Alzheimer's gets cured, I will likely learn about it from a headline.
I am torn on this issue, partially because I don't want to let my past deeply unhealthy relationship with reading about current events affect how I view it vis a vie society.
I think this is missing the point of news and this sums it up very nicely:
"Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world."
That's why it's called "news", it's living, recent information that is in the making, being talked about and discussed. Everything else is great but it's something different and likely is encapsulated by an echo chamber.
Nothing against reading up books about politics for instance but it's at best complementary to news. At worst - not being a political scientist - you might select the "wrong" book and find yourself wasting time how people describe obscure views.
But yes, in general I agree of course. Watching/reading too much news can be draining. But really, our current democracy is built on the fact that people consume news from at least one mainstream news outlet. How else do you know who to vote for?
I very much avoid the news. Unfortunately twitter somehow forces it into my timeline but in a limited way.
What I really hate about news is how you jump on a topic without context. The perfect example of that is the Iraq war of course, Ukraine now is such an issue. 99.9% of people barley know where the Ukraine or the Crimea was. You can't just jump into a topic without context think its a great way to get information.
And that is even before you consider that a lot of the time a simple party line is adopted and endlessly repeated. Not even because of some conspiracy simply because its easier to report on what everybody is reporting.
If you for example understood the Syria conflict only based on typical news, and I include even 'reputable' news papers your overall understanding would still be problematic. Much better to spend your time reading a history book on Syria and AQ in Iraq.
I realized the news doesn't matter to me at all when I left Bing.com up over a week by accident.
I came back and looked at the week old news stories they featured. I'd forgotten about all of them and they'd all had zero impact on my life in any way.
Which, outside of the weather forecast, is true for any given week since forever.
Then I watched a Ricky Gervais interview where he compares tweets to graffiti. Einstein and a total idiot would tweet in the same font.
Now when I see a tweet I strongly disagree with, I get zero emotional involvement. It’s wonderful, but now Twitter seems almost pointless. Perhaps that is wonderful as well.
I call it the "Fox Detox" for fun, but is not limited to Fox, although they are the biggest Point of view purveyor. I have challenged friends and family members to try eschewing all point of view media for 30 days and to instead do other things, oh you know, going for a walk, visiting friends, reading a book, watching a good movie, you know normal life. The regular 5 o'clock local news and perhaps a few mainstream ones online, AP, Reuters or whatever, people know when they are consuming Pov channels, the confirmation makes them feel good, like drugs, is not good for your mind. When people try it, they report similar things like "I feel better" or "I am less stressed". Too much of anything is bad for you, including "News" and especially PoV news.
I spent years without a TV at all and haven't watched any sort of broadcast or cable regularly since like 2004. As a result, I have a few distinct memories of "news events" that persist like visits to a carnival of madmen.
The disappearance of MH 370 was on literally non-stop on CNN in particular, and we'd walk out of the hotel lob
We went quite a few years without ever seeing cable. My kids would stream shows and consume other media on-demand, but any advertising was minimal and fairly non-intrusive. And then they were watching a kids show at a hotel once and the ads came on and the effect it had on them was crazy. They suddenly desperately needed all the toys in the commercials and were repeating catch phrases from ads after only seeing them a couple of times. The contrast in their behavior was insane. And they HAD to keep watching it like I hadn't seen before. I spent a week off-grid with my parents a while back and it was great. We came home and my Mom put on the news suddenly everything was terrible and she was angry, but she had to keep watching.
Just awful for mental health if you can't separate yourself from it.