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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
>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 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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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."
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
On political issues they're also pretty firmly middle-of-the-road beltway, which is its own little bubble.
I like this youtube channel a lot (Caspian Report): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwnKziETDbHJtx78nIkfYug
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.
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...".
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.
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.
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.
This trick probably works for other periodicals with a shady-as-hell internet filter bubble "feature."
Highly recommend it! And this is coming from someone who despises news, generally.
[0]: https://qz.com/emails/daily-brief/
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.
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.
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
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.
https://imgur.com/a/pl7qf3M
Also see https://rational.app — we are building it. Feedback welcome !!!
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.
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.
"That crazy guy who thinks there's a conspiracy to print off ads and put them in his mailbox called again today!"
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
I would say for starters that they live in a much more frightening world than you and I live in. And that is very unfortunate.
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.
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23940090
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It’s easy to see how such an idea can become mainstream when our society is losing a common agreed upon basic understanding.
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.
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. :)
It was only when in the hotel lobby having breakfast did we see the CNN/FOX alarmist news coverage blaring about a world spiraling out of control.
I thought, why is it always when we're on vacation that the world begins to teeter on the brink of destruction?
And then I remembered what cable news was like before we cut the cord.
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.
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...
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)
https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam...
Hundreds of studies of the effects of TV violence on children and teenagers have found that children may:
Extensive viewing of television violence by children causes greater aggressivenessI 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.
[0] https://www.slowernews.com | https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews
Also, 68k.news under Links+ or Lynx is heaven.
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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
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.
Typically it’s like $1-3 and takes a few minutes to read. Much better experience overall.
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.
That's because political news is advertising for the political class. You're meant to feel like there's a crisis so that you:
1. vote for them to do something about it and
2. not begrudge them their tax money.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMDPql6rweo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
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.
... probably one of the worst industry practices of all time.
Avoidance is good to the extent that you can engage in avoidance but not everything is avoidable. How do you actually build resistance to the stimuli?
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...
Immoral doesn’t even begin to describe this phenomenon.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/
Immunity, not addiction of course.
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.
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.
Those sites are not going to cover your local news which will have an impact on your life.
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* The Conversation - https://theconversation.com/us
* Ground News - https://ground.news
* sumi.news - https://sumi.news
* Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
If you find yourself reading too much this can help too
* LeechBlock - https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock
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."
https://www.slow-journalism.com/
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.
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.
I bet a number of outlets might be interested in publishing it, or you could DIY on Medium or Substack or something.
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You can find the backstory at https://legiblenews.com/about
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.
... and don't spend too much time on HN :-P
https://www.allsides.com
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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.
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 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.
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 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.
The only TV news worth watching that I've seen.
[1]: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
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.
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.
>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.
It is indeed a good idea to avoid TV news.
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.
Well that’s my 2¢ anyway ¯\＿(ツ)＿/¯
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.
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 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.
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.
Adding friction to your news consumption makes it feel higher quality, but is of course actually totally independent of that.
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.
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.
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TLDR: Dont watch news, read 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
> 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.
Let's not project. I was a news junkie for years, and the news itself was not stress inducing.
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.
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."
[1] https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...
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.
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.
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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”
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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”.
If your idea of political news is opinionated partisan coverage during elections, then you're doing it wrong.
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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.
Out of an hour of news, there was sports coverage in one quarter, local news in another with weather, national and then international news.
Each segment had, after commercials, 12 to 13 minutes max.
There wasn't time for all the speculation, and endless drone on about what if, and blah blah.
24 hours news half destroyed news first, then the internet finished it off.
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.
there's a reason why trust in media is decline
https://www.pewresearch.org/2022/01/05/trust-in-america-do-a...
And as was mentioned, it's no small irony that Buzzfeed's investigative journalism, while a limited part of their impact, is pretty good.
Ironically, BuzzfeedNews is pretty good.
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.
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?
Dead Comment
[0]: https://wisdomofcrowds.live/email/725986a1-fc00-4962-a1dc-c3...
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.
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.