I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Fix the News yet (https://fixthenews.com/). If you want a weekly boost of amazing news from around the world, sign up for this newsletter!
For example, did you know that in July 2025, 99.7% of new power capacity added in the US was from clean power (led by Texas)? The EU, US, and UK have committed to a $125 billion global fund to protect the Amazon? The US prison population is the lowest it's been since 1992? A new therapy has successfully cleared 100% of metastatic cancers in trial patients? 1 in 8 kids in Botswana were born with HIV in 2001, but that number has dropped to 1 in 100?
These headlines rarely make the mainstream, but they're the ones that bring me the most hope and joy. If you're looking for positive news, you will love Fix the News.
It think these "positive news" approaches are always falling prey to stated vs. revealed preference. People's revealed preference is that they want news about _actual_ events, which is why these positive news approaches always stay niche.
People stated reason for not liking news is the stress, attributing this to the negativity of the news. I think a larger issue is the frequency and transience of the updates, leading to oscillations in peoples understand of situations (similar to the car dealership example in the "Thinking in Systems" book).
Modern news networks are always pushing shallow views of new events (i.e. "BREAKING"). Unless someone explicitly follows up on a story, they were only exposed to the crisis and not the resolution of it. I'd love a network that was "yesterdays news" which waited to publish any news until a broader picture of the situation was understood.
You should read Postman's Technopoly. He critiques "context-free" news as leading to a confused viewership and argues that it's an unexpected consequence of modern news media: trying to give the viewer a fully-coherent understanding of current news simply wouldn't play as well as shallow, quick stories.
This creates a skewed information-action ratio, where people are inundated with information about problems they have no power to influence. Consequently, news is reduced to a form of trivia, and the act of being "informed" becomes a passive— and ultimately meaningless— ritual.
This! I also wish the news would be charged to follow up on their lead stories. It's interesting to read that the US wants to sell TikTok but as soon as it leaves the headlines you have to actively search for any updates - and you're lucky if there are any.
This kind of reporting (breaking, tickers) generates more stress than any understanding and never enables you to form a more complete picture.
Subscribe to a periodical. I got a bit too busy recently but for two years I subscribed to Private Eye (if you're not from the UK you might need to find an alternative) it's fortnightly and they don't put much on their website. They follow up on stories sometimes going back to the 80s or more.
Surprised? An email subscription box with almost zero information, no example publication or past issues for perusal, unknown subscription or payment model, multiple multi-page privacy policies... I'm surprised any of the target audience of people burned out by the shit that most media has become would assume it is legit and not going to burn you in some way.
That's pretty neat. It sounds like a better version of Mark's idea from Peep Show:
Nancy: Bad news, bad news, bad news. Jesus, Jeremy, one bus crash. What about all the buses that made it safely to their destinations, huh?
Jeremy: Yeah! Yeah, this is such bullshit.
Mark: Yes, I suppose the news should just be a dispassionate list of all the events that have occurred the world over during the day. That would be good. Except of course, it would take forever!
The problem with this kind of initiative is that people don't agree on what positive news means. Your selection is very ideologically slanted. People on the right could interpret these news stories as negative. For example:
1. 99.7% of power capacity coming from "clean power" can be interpreted by people on the right as the grid getting more expensive and less reliable in order to solve a climate problem they don't think is real.
2. Countries committing to a global fund to protect the Amazon can be interpreted as using money critically needed at home to bribe South Americans into doing what they should already be doing themselves. If the people who actually live next to it don't care enough to protect it themselves then why should random people in Iowa or Ireland be forced to?
3. The US prison population being low is only a positive if crime is low. If people don't feel safe, then it can be interpreted as a result of not locking enough people up, and positive news would be hearing that the prison population is going up. This claim may not feel positive if you just saw the video of the murder of the Ukrainian lady on US public transport by a known-dangerous dude who just randomly stabbed her from behind for no reason.
A news feed that is only positive news for a conservative would obviously look very different to such a feed designed for liberals.
It's easy even for children and many animals to understand the Golden Rule: treat others like you'd want to be treated. It generally takes an adult to fail to understand it.
I have cut out the vast majority of news and social media since the beginning of 2025.
My mental health is noticeably better, and I would readily attribute this to not being tuned in to the ongoings of the globe that I have zero control over. Instead, I have been more focused on my local life and community.
But I regularly feel guilty about not being keyed in to the flirtations with/forays into authoritarianism in my country.
Apple’s Screen Time has been pretty good by me. I set Safari to an hour and News/Stocks to 15 minutes per day, only allowed after noon, and blocked on the weekend. I still click Give Me Another 15 Minutes but it’s annoying enough that it reminds me why it’s there.
This is my strategy as well. There are some issues I care about enough to follow, mostly related to lgbtq+ topics and technical regulations affecting my industry. But for the larger political sphere and what I hesitantly refer to as "headlines that belong in tabloids" I actively do not care.
It'll take me about a day or two (per candidate) to get back up to speed when elections come around, so I can do my civic duty and vote. Beyond that I don't let it consume my life. I've got stuff to do, and not very much time left to do it.
I have a number of friends that are addicted to Outrage Pron (almost all media -mainstream or fringe- qualifies). They -literally- spend almost every waking hour, doomscrolling. One of them occasionally forwards videos to me, that are clearly edited for angst, but he takes as gospel. AI will make that kind of stuff much, much worse.
I had a friend tell me "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention!" He thought it was a clever, brand new saying (Spoiler: It's not —I first heard it, in the 1970s).
I've found that I can get a lot done, when I pay attention to the things over which I have direct control.
> I'll take me about a day or two (per candidate) ...
I have so much trouble deciding on primary elections. There are often 5 primary candidates, and 10 seats to decide upon. And I've found no good tool to help evaluate their policy and record.
I want some sort of score board website that tracks their political and public behaviors towards various policies.
> But I regularly feel guilty about not being keyed in to the flirtations with/forays into authoritarianism in my country.
This really highlights that the threat of authoritarianism is really only a threat to certain people, which frankly is why authoritarianism happens.
Because if authoritarianism were an issue for you, you'd be reading the news. If POTUS were threatening to send troops into your streets to arrest people who look like you, that'd be something you'd want to be aware of yes? If he had a policy to detain people who look like you, and if he doesn't like your tattoos he'll send you to a foreign torture prison, you'd probably be very keen on paying attention to that kind of thing.
But since he's not threating you and yours specifically, you have the luxury of tuning out for your mental health while all that goes on. Until of course he comes for your ethnicity/religion/politics/profession. Although, I guess you won't know until that happens because you won't be reading the news.
Yeah, you know what I think I would have better mental health too if I could just tune out the daily missives from the abyss, but I need to stay on top of what words I'm not allowed to say at my job or else the government will target us for research defunding. Words like "equity" and anything that starts with the prefix "trans".
If you want to keep a light pulse on national news without the clickbait and doomscrolling, I recommend https://text.npr.org
It’s text-only, no photos or videos. Updates only once or twice a day. No comments section or any other distractions.
That’s been my main change to my news diet. Deleting the NYTimes app and replacing it with that site has made me much happier.
I still read a lot of local news (San Francisco things that affect my life) but I just realize that national political news is not something I need to track 24/7
I was previously a long time listener and donator to NPR (similarly for NYT), but their progressive bias for the last decade has seriously degraded the quality of their reporting. I remember when their articles and radio coverage was much more balanced.
For that, I think The Economist is much better. It has more direct reporting, with seemingly less editorializing. Try their news in brief to keep up.
I think the main reason I've pulled back from the consuming mainstream media is directly tied with the change in reporting style rather than the news fundamentally being more depressing or anxiety-inducing.
For example, I was listening to Left Right and Center until a few weeks ago when Sarah Isgur departed. The show really should have been called Left Left and Center, because if anything Sarah Isgur was more center leaning while Steve Inskeep is definitely quite progressive. Now the show feels even more lopsided. It's as if journalists are so entrenched with their point of view that they can't see the wider landscape. I truly wonder if social media has clouded journalists' perception as well, which might be contributing to this phenomenon.
I really do want balanced coverage. I want to know what each side of the political debate actually thinks, from their own mouth. It turns out that a lot of the people I was indoctrinated to vilify, were in fact people who believed differently than I did, but certainly weren't so toxic as to be simply pilloried for their beliefs. That approach is tiresome and I've lost hope that such reporting will return. That's why I've given up.
What I've observed is similar to what you describe, but in my view the cause is different. NPR's reporting is much the same as it has always been; what's happened is there has been a huge shift to the far right the last decade, and reporting on where the right used to be now looks like left leaning bias.
The same is not true of the left. What's labeled "progressive" really isn't; the left has moved right too. 15 years ago, the US was on the verge of passing universal healthcare. That's not even on the radar today.
Media orcs have not all kept up with these changes. Something that was "left right and center in 2015, would look as though it was mostly leftist today, because the ground has moved.
> I remember when their articles and radio coverage was much more balanced. For that, I think The Economist is much better. It has more direct reporting, with seemingly less editorializing.
The Economist definitely has bias. All reality has a bias. You may not like some topics, that's fair. But to call a report "good journalism", it should exclude fabrications and baseless accusations. The latter are tools of propaganda.
> For that, I think The Economist is much better. It has more direct reporting, with seemingly less editorializing.
I appreciate The Economist, but I find that they do editorialize, they're just up front about it. They use the word "should" regularly. They have a pretty clear and consistent viewpoint advocating for classical liberalism, but they're honest and unashamed about having a stance.
The last decade has brought us Trump, which has broken countless political (and other) norms -- that has made passive observation a lot more challenging.
I've listened to NPR for decades and the only thing I've noticed as far as "progressivism" is that the weekends include shows that speak to non-white audiences (Black and Latino).
I'm curious as to what you think was "too progressive".
I think in this age of information wars where my country's administration is unironically posting memes about their policy: it's almost as important to be informed of the "pulse" people have towards news as it is to understand the news itself. In a increasingly post-truth society, being informed of reality isn't enough.
I prefer GroundNews and in particular the blindspot. I gave up on NPR around 2022 because it was pushing extremely biased takes. I say this as someone whose news came primarily via NPR from ~1993-2022. I just can't stand them anymore. If there's a way to tie literally everything to some stupid social movement, that's all they can do nowadays. The best thing our local NPR station does is run BBC very early in the morning.
I’ve been using The Economist’s “The World in Brief”, which sounds like much the same thing. I’m six weeks in to the news diet, and am much less angry all the time.
I used to read the UK Financial Times ("the pink 'un") as a source of world news rather than fincancial news - it was always a lot more sober and objective.
Thanks. I'm not a USian but thats a nice summary to have. I might whip up a quick greasemonkey script to strip out the links so it's just a set of simple summaries.
Ofc NPR may not be reliable, or even exist, soon due to Trump's retaliatory budget cuts. But meanwhile, nicw to have. Thanks again.
Part of the anxiety is the bias of the media and their attempts to get attention by sensationalizing the news, and often by lying.
Having the lies in text without photos does not fix the issue.
Edit: if you find yourself disagree, then it's because of your political position. I did not see it was NPR when posting this. replace NPR with Fox News and then read my comment again, see how you feel.
>if you find yourself disagree, then it's because of your political position
How does your political leanings affect how you react to clickbait? NPR makes clickbait, Fox makes clickbait. Images make it easier but text can still be effective.
I don't see the spin here. Yes, news across the spectrum is lying more and more. Or at least severly downplaying some heinous events. That shouldn't be a partisan stance.
I believe Hannah Arendt made the point that politicians lie not so much as to get away with the issue at hand but rather as a long term strategy to nullify any interest in politics overall in order to get away with absolute everything on their agenda. This might be the most recent iteration of this, aided by an often complicit media.
"Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest." -Mon Mothma
The explicit goal of dezinformatsiya (coined by Stalin) is not to get people to believe the lies (an occasional bonus) —— the goal is to get people to GIVE UP on finding the truth.
Once people give up on finding the truth, dictators and despots can get away with anything because people literally do not even have the knowledge prerequisite to any opposing action; the people become a mere mass of compliant NPCs in the despot's regime.
OFC, if the news is genuinely crippling in a way that renders you incapable of any action, then by all means take care of that first.
But especially in these times of serious real threats, anxiety in response to those real threats is the exact expected healthy response!
More broadly, as a society in the US and EU, the threats have outpaced the speed of anxiety growth, a delay which allowed them to gain power. Anxiety overall is only now growing to the point where a backlash is forming that may restore small-d democratic norms and overtake a rapidly growing authoritarian regime.
Remaining ignorant is personally easier in the short term, but definitely helps an authoritarian regime gain and cement its power, so is likely to be regretted in the long term. Many under Hitler's regime lived out their lives in shame they had not done more to stop him when they could have.
And I imagine avoiding political issues can show up also as avoiding issues or conflicts at work or in any group of people to which we belong.
I think so much of it is us feeling emotionally overwhelmed and running away. Anxiety can be really helpful if we engage with it, have the courage to address the fear. If we just always run, especially with social conflicts, the conflicts often don't go away, we just pretend they don't exist until they boil over.
This is not limited to authoritarian regimes only; Disinformation is just one aspect of Propaganda and is equally effective (in the negative sense) in the so-called "free" democratic countries too. Everything is Propaganda in today's World; just the form of it varies with the ideology i.e. Democracy/Dictatorship/Socialism/Communism.
The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action.
"Differences in political regimes matter little; differences in social levels are more important; and most important is national self-awareness. Propaganda is a good deal less the political weapon of a regime (it is that also) than the effect of a technological society that embraces the entire man and tends to be a completely integrated society. Propaganda stops man from feeling that things in society are oppressive and persuades him to submit with good grace."
Propaganda employs encirclement on the individual by trying to surround man by all possible routes, in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or his needs through his conscious and his unconscious, and by assailing him in both his private and his public life.
Propaganda must be total in that utilizes all forms of media to draw the individual into the net of propaganda. Propaganda is designed to be continuous within the individual's life by filling the citizen's entire day. It is based on slow constant impregnation that functions over a long period of time exceeding the individual's capacities for attention or adaptation and thus his capabilities of resistance.
Propaganda should no longer be viewed in terms of an orthodoxy but rather modern propaganda should be seen as an orthopraxy because it aims for participation not adherence. Participation can be active or passive: active if propaganda has been able to mobilize the individual for action; passive if the individual does not act directly but psychologically supports that action.
Propaganda is concerned with timeliness since an individual is only moved to action if he is pushed towards a timely one by propaganda. Once it becomes history it inevitably becomes neutral and indifferent to the individual who is sensitive primarily to current news. "Operational words" are used to penetrate an individual's indifference. However they lose their value as immediacy passes as old facts are replaced by new ones. The "current events man" is carried along the current of news and caught in the events of today, losing interest in the events of yesterday. The indifferent are apolitical and without opinion, therefore they are outside of propaganda's grasp. Incidentally, there are also the undecided, people whose opinions are vague, who form the majority of citizens within the collective. These citizens are the most susceptible to control of public opinion that is dictated by propaganda. Lastly, this part discusses propaganda and truth or the ability of propaganda to relay something as true based not on the accuracy of facts but of reality. Propaganda veils the truth with falsehoods even though lying is generally to be avoided.
Political vs. Sociological Propaganda:
Political Propaganda involves techniques of influence employed by a government, a party, an administration, or a pressure group with the intention of changing the behavior of the public. The themes and objectives of this type of propaganda are of a political nature. The goals are determined by the government, party, administration, or pressure group. The methods of political propaganda are calculated in a precise manner and its main criterion is to disseminate an ideology for the very purpose of making various political acts acceptable to the people. There are two forms of political propaganda, tactical and strategic. Tactical political propaganda seeks to obtain immediate results within a given framework. Strategic political propaganda is not concerned with speed but rather it establishes the general line, the array of arguments, and the staging of campaigns.
Sociological propaganda is a phenomenon where a society seeks to integrate the maximum number of individuals into itself by unifying its members' behavior according to a pattern, spreading its style of life abroad, and thus imposing itself on other groups. Essentially sociological propaganda aims to increase conformity with the environment that is of a collective nature by developing compliance with or defense of the established order through long term penetration and progressive adaptation by using all social currents. The propaganda element is the way of life with which the individual is permeated and then the individual begins to express it in film, writing, or art without realizing it. This involuntary behavior creates an expansion of society through advertising, the movies, education, and magazines. "The entire group, consciously or not, expresses itself in this fashion; and to indicate, secondly that its influence aims much more at an entire style of life." This type of propaganda is not deliberate but springs up spontaneously or unwittingly within a culture or nation. This propaganda reinforces the individual's way of life and represents this way of life as best. Sociological propaganda creates an indisputable criterion for the individual to make judgments of good and evil according to the order of the individual's way of life. Sociological propaganda does not result in action, however, it can prepare the ground for direct propaganda. From then on, the individual in the clutches of such sociological propaganda believes that those who live this way are on the side of the angels, and those who don't are bad.
"For propaganda to be effective the propagandee must have a certain store of ideas and a number of conditioned reflexes that can only be acquired through peace of mind springing from relative security. The establishment of a mode of common life—all this leads to the creation of a type of normal man conveniently leads all men toward that norm via a multitude of paths. Propaganda's intent is to integrate people into the normal pattern prevailing in society bring about conformance to way of life. To sum up: The creation of normalcy in our society can take one of two shapes. It can be the result of scientific, psycho-sociological analysis based on statistics—that is the American type of normalcy. It can be ideological and doctrinaire—that is the Communist type. But the results are identical: such normalcy necessarily gives rise to propaganda that can reduce the individual to the pattern most useful to society.
Information is indistinguishable from propaganda in that information is an essential element of propaganda because for propaganda to succeed it must have reference to political or economic reality. Propaganda grafts itself onto an already existing reality through "informed opinion".
Citizens are aware that political decisions affect everybody and governments cannot govern without the support, presence, pressure, or knowledge of the people. Yet the people are incapable of making long term policy so opinion must be created to follow the government because the government cannot be led by opinion. All of this describes the "Mass-Government" relationship characterized by people demanding what has already been decided, in order to appear as though the government is actually caring about what the people need.
An ideology provides society certain beliefs and no social group can exist without the foundation of these beliefs. Propaganda is the means by which an ideology can expand without force. An ideology is either fortified within a group or expanded beyond the borders of a group through propaganda. However, propaganda is less and less concerned with spreading the ideology nowadays as it is with becoming autonomous. The ideology is no longer the decisive factor of propaganda that must be obeyed by the propagandist. The propagandist cannot be constrained by the ideology of his State but must operate in service of the state and be able to manipulate the ideology as if it were an object. The ideology merely provides the content for the propagandist to build off since he is limited to what already is present within the group, nation, or society. The fundamental ideologies are nationalism, socialism, communism, and democracy.
Propaganda and Democracy:
Since democracy depends on public opinion, it is clear that propaganda must be involved. The relationship between democracy and propaganda evidently presents a conflict between the principles of democracy and the processes of propaganda. The individual is viewed as the cornerstone of a democracy which is a form of government that is made "for the people and by the people". However, as discussed in early chapters Ellul described the masses are incapable of making long-term foreign policy and the government needs to make these decisions in a timely manner. This is where propaganda comes into play and projects an artificial reality to the masses to satisfy their need to participate in government while the decisions are really made behind the scenes. This was also describe earlier as the "mass-government" relationship. Democratic regimes develop propaganda in line with its myths and prejudices. Propaganda stresses the superiority of a democratic society while intensifying the prejudices between democratic and oppressive.
I’ve reduced my news intake to broadly just AP News, with color commentary/opinion/perspectives coming from The Guardian and Al Jazeera as needed. For local news, it’s my NPR station (WBUR) and Universal Hub in RSS format.
The good news is I spend significantly less time doomscrolling (down, on average I’d say, over 90%). My anxiety levels are largely gone, and when they do spool up I’m equipped with the tools to interrupt or stop them.
The downside to this has been an increased reliance on my news intake by others who have abandoned it wholesale or only consume opinion pieces like the “nightly news”. It’s a markedly different kind of anxiety, because now I also have to be ready to teach these other people about things they really should be building habits for themselves - but if I bail out, they just rely on ChatGPT instead to explain complex topics while remaining bereft of nuance and historical contexts.
The current landscape sucks, because everyone is chasing bullshit KPIs (engagement metrics, attention economy, advertising revenue, etc) instead of just delivering high-quality journalism at rates the common man can’t afford to pass up (i.e., affordable). I do not blame people from noping out, but I remain angry that everyone basically abandoned RSS feeds and digestible news in lieu of clickbait, algorithms, and walled gardens.
> I remain angry that everyone basically abandoned RSS feeds and digestible news in lieu of clickbait, algorithms, and walled gardens.
Well one of them had billions to advertise and make dark patterns to keep people on. And people still don't realize those tricks in at play.
This is sadly why proper regulation is needed. We didn't cut down o Yellow Journalism in press last century by simply informing the populace better. In many ways, the honest people need enough power to punish the dishonest people. Shame that 2025 is not the year of honesty.
I'm much more interested in actively filtering it than cutting it. Think yahoo pipes except DIY and more sophisticated. That'll take time to build though.
In the near term I've found that asking an LLM with search/deep research to summarize news helps. Obviously zero shielding from bias, but at least its concise & all in one place
There is also kagi and newsminimalist for out of the box semi-filtered:
I'd rather just drink from the hose directly, personally. I've been doing an "anti-pomodoro" timer, myself. Set 30 or 60 minutes, and just scroll around as I usually do. aggregators (including here on the rare occasion a post isn't flagged), various news feeds, etc. when the timer ends, I get out of the hypnosis and move on to whatever the day needs.
I think being anxious in these times is important. But the anxiety has middling returns. I want to do more, but I know spending hours worrying over stuff I can't control is futile.
The vast majority of news consumption is for feeling amusement, outrage, tribal-solidarity, etc. It almost never leads to a change in action by the consumer.
Non-entertainment news: articles that change future actions, e.g. trade publications related to one's career/job.
Need information to vote? Wait 4 weeks before the election and then go to one of the many websites that track candidates' quotes to determine as best one can what their positions are on the issues you care about. For example: https://www.ontheissues.org/
Entertainment is fine and dandy! But don't make the mistake of thinking it's productive or better/nobler than alternatives just because "journalism."
>Wait 4 weeks before the election and then go to one of the many websites that track candidates' quotes
So just hear carefully curated words and not see the actions they did? Yeah, that's pretty much how my country got into this situation.
There's plenty of fluff, but lets not pretend that there isn't actual reporting out there for stuff that does or will affect your daily life. 1000x so with local policy where it is so excruciatingly difficult to find any real information on. Just
1) be honest about when you want either the dryest, direct report, or you want a show to go with it. I'm definitely in the middle myself, slightly skewed towards dry.
2) Understand the balance of relevance, impact, importance, and fun to your life. We can be honest and admit there some important news out there that simply isn't a fight you want to participate nor follow closely.
Likewise, we're on a tech forum right now and I'm sure while many of us would read about a distributed GPU runtime that we also all know it's not necessarily the most important thing in life right now (unless that is indeed your career right now).
Awareness can do a lot to drive behavior by itself. We just first need to be honest about it.
I switched mostly to using an RSS reader to see the headlines, and then read what is interesting. Plus I follow several writers that I trust (eg. Heather Cox Richardson).
Commafeed looks nice. Can it also auto download a full article and strip any kind of formatting and ads? That's kinda what I'm looking for. And then have an LLM filter on top of that to filter out all the stuff I don't care about.
Readit News
For example, did you know that in July 2025, 99.7% of new power capacity added in the US was from clean power (led by Texas)? The EU, US, and UK have committed to a $125 billion global fund to protect the Amazon? The US prison population is the lowest it's been since 1992? A new therapy has successfully cleared 100% of metastatic cancers in trial patients? 1 in 8 kids in Botswana were born with HIV in 2001, but that number has dropped to 1 in 100?
These headlines rarely make the mainstream, but they're the ones that bring me the most hope and joy. If you're looking for positive news, you will love Fix the News.
People stated reason for not liking news is the stress, attributing this to the negativity of the news. I think a larger issue is the frequency and transience of the updates, leading to oscillations in peoples understand of situations (similar to the car dealership example in the "Thinking in Systems" book).
Modern news networks are always pushing shallow views of new events (i.e. "BREAKING"). Unless someone explicitly follows up on a story, they were only exposed to the crisis and not the resolution of it. I'd love a network that was "yesterdays news" which waited to publish any news until a broader picture of the situation was understood.
This creates a skewed information-action ratio, where people are inundated with information about problems they have no power to influence. Consequently, news is reduced to a form of trivia, and the act of being "informed" becomes a passive— and ultimately meaningless— ritual.
This kind of reporting (breaking, tickers) generates more stress than any understanding and never enables you to form a more complete picture.
Nancy: Bad news, bad news, bad news. Jesus, Jeremy, one bus crash. What about all the buses that made it safely to their destinations, huh?
Jeremy: Yeah! Yeah, this is such bullshit.
Mark: Yes, I suppose the news should just be a dispassionate list of all the events that have occurred the world over during the day. That would be good. Except of course, it would take forever!
1. 99.7% of power capacity coming from "clean power" can be interpreted by people on the right as the grid getting more expensive and less reliable in order to solve a climate problem they don't think is real.
2. Countries committing to a global fund to protect the Amazon can be interpreted as using money critically needed at home to bribe South Americans into doing what they should already be doing themselves. If the people who actually live next to it don't care enough to protect it themselves then why should random people in Iowa or Ireland be forced to?
3. The US prison population being low is only a positive if crime is low. If people don't feel safe, then it can be interpreted as a result of not locking enough people up, and positive news would be hearing that the prison population is going up. This claim may not feel positive if you just saw the video of the murder of the Ukrainian lady on US public transport by a known-dangerous dude who just randomly stabbed her from behind for no reason.
A news feed that is only positive news for a conservative would obviously look very different to such a feed designed for liberals.
It's easy even for children and many animals to understand the Golden Rule: treat others like you'd want to be treated. It generally takes an adult to fail to understand it.
A newsletter is problematic if it doesn't cater equally to people who believe that climate change is a hoax? Seriously?
I'm surprised you just don't get it. People are sick of "amazing news".
My mental health is noticeably better, and I would readily attribute this to not being tuned in to the ongoings of the globe that I have zero control over. Instead, I have been more focused on my local life and community.
But I regularly feel guilty about not being keyed in to the flirtations with/forays into authoritarianism in my country.
It'll take me about a day or two (per candidate) to get back up to speed when elections come around, so I can do my civic duty and vote. Beyond that I don't let it consume my life. I've got stuff to do, and not very much time left to do it.
I have a number of friends that are addicted to Outrage Pron (almost all media -mainstream or fringe- qualifies). They -literally- spend almost every waking hour, doomscrolling. One of them occasionally forwards videos to me, that are clearly edited for angst, but he takes as gospel. AI will make that kind of stuff much, much worse.
I had a friend tell me "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention!" He thought it was a clever, brand new saying (Spoiler: It's not —I first heard it, in the 1970s).
I've found that I can get a lot done, when I pay attention to the things over which I have direct control.
I have so much trouble deciding on primary elections. There are often 5 primary candidates, and 10 seats to decide upon. And I've found no good tool to help evaluate their policy and record.
I want some sort of score board website that tracks their political and public behaviors towards various policies.
This really highlights that the threat of authoritarianism is really only a threat to certain people, which frankly is why authoritarianism happens.
Because if authoritarianism were an issue for you, you'd be reading the news. If POTUS were threatening to send troops into your streets to arrest people who look like you, that'd be something you'd want to be aware of yes? If he had a policy to detain people who look like you, and if he doesn't like your tattoos he'll send you to a foreign torture prison, you'd probably be very keen on paying attention to that kind of thing.
But since he's not threating you and yours specifically, you have the luxury of tuning out for your mental health while all that goes on. Until of course he comes for your ethnicity/religion/politics/profession. Although, I guess you won't know until that happens because you won't be reading the news.
Yeah, you know what I think I would have better mental health too if I could just tune out the daily missives from the abyss, but I need to stay on top of what words I'm not allowed to say at my job or else the government will target us for research defunding. Words like "equity" and anything that starts with the prefix "trans".
If you want to do something, get involved in local politics and groups, stay off social media where Facebook like activism does nothing.
It’s text-only, no photos or videos. Updates only once or twice a day. No comments section or any other distractions.
That’s been my main change to my news diet. Deleting the NYTimes app and replacing it with that site has made me much happier.
I still read a lot of local news (San Francisco things that affect my life) but I just realize that national political news is not something I need to track 24/7
For that, I think The Economist is much better. It has more direct reporting, with seemingly less editorializing. Try their news in brief to keep up.
I think the main reason I've pulled back from the consuming mainstream media is directly tied with the change in reporting style rather than the news fundamentally being more depressing or anxiety-inducing.
For example, I was listening to Left Right and Center until a few weeks ago when Sarah Isgur departed. The show really should have been called Left Left and Center, because if anything Sarah Isgur was more center leaning while Steve Inskeep is definitely quite progressive. Now the show feels even more lopsided. It's as if journalists are so entrenched with their point of view that they can't see the wider landscape. I truly wonder if social media has clouded journalists' perception as well, which might be contributing to this phenomenon.
I really do want balanced coverage. I want to know what each side of the political debate actually thinks, from their own mouth. It turns out that a lot of the people I was indoctrinated to vilify, were in fact people who believed differently than I did, but certainly weren't so toxic as to be simply pilloried for their beliefs. That approach is tiresome and I've lost hope that such reporting will return. That's why I've given up.
The same is not true of the left. What's labeled "progressive" really isn't; the left has moved right too. 15 years ago, the US was on the verge of passing universal healthcare. That's not even on the radar today.
Media orcs have not all kept up with these changes. Something that was "left right and center in 2015, would look as though it was mostly leftist today, because the ground has moved.
The Economist definitely has bias. All reality has a bias. You may not like some topics, that's fair. But to call a report "good journalism", it should exclude fabrications and baseless accusations. The latter are tools of propaganda.
I appreciate The Economist, but I find that they do editorialize, they're just up front about it. They use the word "should" regularly. They have a pretty clear and consistent viewpoint advocating for classical liberalism, but they're honest and unashamed about having a stance.
I've listened to NPR for decades and the only thing I've noticed as far as "progressivism" is that the weekends include shows that speak to non-white audiences (Black and Latino).
I'm curious as to what you think was "too progressive".
I think in this age of information wars where my country's administration is unironically posting memes about their policy: it's almost as important to be informed of the "pulse" people have towards news as it is to understand the news itself. In a increasingly post-truth society, being informed of reality isn't enough.
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/
Maybe the real source of anxiety is people have justified anger but no where to direct the anger to affect change?
Maybe it is better to keep reading the news and organize people to make it so we do not have any bad news to report.
https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
Ofc NPR may not be reliable, or even exist, soon due to Trump's retaliatory budget cuts. But meanwhile, nicw to have. Thanks again.
Part of the anxiety is the bias of the media and their attempts to get attention by sensationalizing the news, and often by lying.
Having the lies in text without photos does not fix the issue.
Edit: if you find yourself disagree, then it's because of your political position. I did not see it was NPR when posting this. replace NPR with Fox News and then read my comment again, see how you feel.
How does your political leanings affect how you react to clickbait? NPR makes clickbait, Fox makes clickbait. Images make it easier but text can still be effective.
I don't see the spin here. Yes, news across the spectrum is lying more and more. Or at least severly downplaying some heinous events. That shouldn't be a partisan stance.
If everything is a lie then nothing can be true. It destroys the requirement to tell the truth, because everyone is lying.
The explicit goal of dezinformatsiya (coined by Stalin) is not to get people to believe the lies (an occasional bonus) —— the goal is to get people to GIVE UP on finding the truth.
Once people give up on finding the truth, dictators and despots can get away with anything because people literally do not even have the knowledge prerequisite to any opposing action; the people become a mere mass of compliant NPCs in the despot's regime.
OFC, if the news is genuinely crippling in a way that renders you incapable of any action, then by all means take care of that first.
But especially in these times of serious real threats, anxiety in response to those real threats is the exact expected healthy response!
More broadly, as a society in the US and EU, the threats have outpaced the speed of anxiety growth, a delay which allowed them to gain power. Anxiety overall is only now growing to the point where a backlash is forming that may restore small-d democratic norms and overtake a rapidly growing authoritarian regime.
Remaining ignorant is personally easier in the short term, but definitely helps an authoritarian regime gain and cement its power, so is likely to be regretted in the long term. Many under Hitler's regime lived out their lives in shame they had not done more to stop him when they could have.
I think so much of it is us feeling emotionally overwhelmed and running away. Anxiety can be really helpful if we engage with it, have the courage to address the fear. If we just always run, especially with social conflicts, the conflicts often don't go away, we just pretend they don't exist until they boil over.
See Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda:_The_Formation_of_M...
Excerpts:
The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action.
"Differences in political regimes matter little; differences in social levels are more important; and most important is national self-awareness. Propaganda is a good deal less the political weapon of a regime (it is that also) than the effect of a technological society that embraces the entire man and tends to be a completely integrated society. Propaganda stops man from feeling that things in society are oppressive and persuades him to submit with good grace."
Propaganda employs encirclement on the individual by trying to surround man by all possible routes, in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or his needs through his conscious and his unconscious, and by assailing him in both his private and his public life.
Propaganda must be total in that utilizes all forms of media to draw the individual into the net of propaganda. Propaganda is designed to be continuous within the individual's life by filling the citizen's entire day. It is based on slow constant impregnation that functions over a long period of time exceeding the individual's capacities for attention or adaptation and thus his capabilities of resistance.
Propaganda should no longer be viewed in terms of an orthodoxy but rather modern propaganda should be seen as an orthopraxy because it aims for participation not adherence. Participation can be active or passive: active if propaganda has been able to mobilize the individual for action; passive if the individual does not act directly but psychologically supports that action.
Propaganda is concerned with timeliness since an individual is only moved to action if he is pushed towards a timely one by propaganda. Once it becomes history it inevitably becomes neutral and indifferent to the individual who is sensitive primarily to current news. "Operational words" are used to penetrate an individual's indifference. However they lose their value as immediacy passes as old facts are replaced by new ones. The "current events man" is carried along the current of news and caught in the events of today, losing interest in the events of yesterday. The indifferent are apolitical and without opinion, therefore they are outside of propaganda's grasp. Incidentally, there are also the undecided, people whose opinions are vague, who form the majority of citizens within the collective. These citizens are the most susceptible to control of public opinion that is dictated by propaganda. Lastly, this part discusses propaganda and truth or the ability of propaganda to relay something as true based not on the accuracy of facts but of reality. Propaganda veils the truth with falsehoods even though lying is generally to be avoided.
Political vs. Sociological Propaganda:
Political Propaganda involves techniques of influence employed by a government, a party, an administration, or a pressure group with the intention of changing the behavior of the public. The themes and objectives of this type of propaganda are of a political nature. The goals are determined by the government, party, administration, or pressure group. The methods of political propaganda are calculated in a precise manner and its main criterion is to disseminate an ideology for the very purpose of making various political acts acceptable to the people. There are two forms of political propaganda, tactical and strategic. Tactical political propaganda seeks to obtain immediate results within a given framework. Strategic political propaganda is not concerned with speed but rather it establishes the general line, the array of arguments, and the staging of campaigns.
Sociological propaganda is a phenomenon where a society seeks to integrate the maximum number of individuals into itself by unifying its members' behavior according to a pattern, spreading its style of life abroad, and thus imposing itself on other groups. Essentially sociological propaganda aims to increase conformity with the environment that is of a collective nature by developing compliance with or defense of the established order through long term penetration and progressive adaptation by using all social currents. The propaganda element is the way of life with which the individual is permeated and then the individual begins to express it in film, writing, or art without realizing it. This involuntary behavior creates an expansion of society through advertising, the movies, education, and magazines. "The entire group, consciously or not, expresses itself in this fashion; and to indicate, secondly that its influence aims much more at an entire style of life." This type of propaganda is not deliberate but springs up spontaneously or unwittingly within a culture or nation. This propaganda reinforces the individual's way of life and represents this way of life as best. Sociological propaganda creates an indisputable criterion for the individual to make judgments of good and evil according to the order of the individual's way of life. Sociological propaganda does not result in action, however, it can prepare the ground for direct propaganda. From then on, the individual in the clutches of such sociological propaganda believes that those who live this way are on the side of the angels, and those who don't are bad.
"For propaganda to be effective the propagandee must have a certain store of ideas and a number of conditioned reflexes that can only be acquired through peace of mind springing from relative security. The establishment of a mode of common life—all this leads to the creation of a type of normal man conveniently leads all men toward that norm via a multitude of paths. Propaganda's intent is to integrate people into the normal pattern prevailing in society bring about conformance to way of life. To sum up: The creation of normalcy in our society can take one of two shapes. It can be the result of scientific, psycho-sociological analysis based on statistics—that is the American type of normalcy. It can be ideological and doctrinaire—that is the Communist type. But the results are identical: such normalcy necessarily gives rise to propaganda that can reduce the individual to the pattern most useful to society.
Information is indistinguishable from propaganda in that information is an essential element of propaganda because for propaganda to succeed it must have reference to political or economic reality. Propaganda grafts itself onto an already existing reality through "informed opinion".
Citizens are aware that political decisions affect everybody and governments cannot govern without the support, presence, pressure, or knowledge of the people. Yet the people are incapable of making long term policy so opinion must be created to follow the government because the government cannot be led by opinion. All of this describes the "Mass-Government" relationship characterized by people demanding what has already been decided, in order to appear as though the government is actually caring about what the people need.
An ideology provides society certain beliefs and no social group can exist without the foundation of these beliefs. Propaganda is the means by which an ideology can expand without force. An ideology is either fortified within a group or expanded beyond the borders of a group through propaganda. However, propaganda is less and less concerned with spreading the ideology nowadays as it is with becoming autonomous. The ideology is no longer the decisive factor of propaganda that must be obeyed by the propagandist. The propagandist cannot be constrained by the ideology of his State but must operate in service of the state and be able to manipulate the ideology as if it were an object. The ideology merely provides the content for the propagandist to build off since he is limited to what already is present within the group, nation, or society. The fundamental ideologies are nationalism, socialism, communism, and democracy.
Propaganda and Democracy:
Since democracy depends on public opinion, it is clear that propaganda must be involved. The relationship between democracy and propaganda evidently presents a conflict between the principles of democracy and the processes of propaganda. The individual is viewed as the cornerstone of a democracy which is a form of government that is made "for the people and by the people". However, as discussed in early chapters Ellul described the masses are incapable of making long-term foreign policy and the government needs to make these decisions in a timely manner. This is where propaganda comes into play and projects an artificial reality to the masses to satisfy their need to participate in government while the decisions are really made behind the scenes. This was also describe earlier as the "mass-government" relationship. Democratic regimes develop propaganda in line with its myths and prejudices. Propaganda stresses the superiority of a democratic society while intensifying the prejudices between democratic and oppressive.
The good news is I spend significantly less time doomscrolling (down, on average I’d say, over 90%). My anxiety levels are largely gone, and when they do spool up I’m equipped with the tools to interrupt or stop them.
The downside to this has been an increased reliance on my news intake by others who have abandoned it wholesale or only consume opinion pieces like the “nightly news”. It’s a markedly different kind of anxiety, because now I also have to be ready to teach these other people about things they really should be building habits for themselves - but if I bail out, they just rely on ChatGPT instead to explain complex topics while remaining bereft of nuance and historical contexts.
The current landscape sucks, because everyone is chasing bullshit KPIs (engagement metrics, attention economy, advertising revenue, etc) instead of just delivering high-quality journalism at rates the common man can’t afford to pass up (i.e., affordable). I do not blame people from noping out, but I remain angry that everyone basically abandoned RSS feeds and digestible news in lieu of clickbait, algorithms, and walled gardens.
Well one of them had billions to advertise and make dark patterns to keep people on. And people still don't realize those tricks in at play.
This is sadly why proper regulation is needed. We didn't cut down o Yellow Journalism in press last century by simply informing the populace better. In many ways, the honest people need enough power to punish the dishonest people. Shame that 2025 is not the year of honesty.
In the near term I've found that asking an LLM with search/deep research to summarize news helps. Obviously zero shielding from bias, but at least its concise & all in one place
There is also kagi and newsminimalist for out of the box semi-filtered:
https://www.newsminimalist.com/
https://kite.kagi.com/
I think being anxious in these times is important. But the anxiety has middling returns. I want to do more, but I know spending hours worrying over stuff I can't control is futile.
Thanks to atom/rss, it's a evening job at most.
I made a self-censor app that simply scrubs feeds from certain controversial content.
The vast majority of news consumption is for feeling amusement, outrage, tribal-solidarity, etc. It almost never leads to a change in action by the consumer.
Non-entertainment news: articles that change future actions, e.g. trade publications related to one's career/job.
Need information to vote? Wait 4 weeks before the election and then go to one of the many websites that track candidates' quotes to determine as best one can what their positions are on the issues you care about. For example: https://www.ontheissues.org/
Entertainment is fine and dandy! But don't make the mistake of thinking it's productive or better/nobler than alternatives just because "journalism."
So just hear carefully curated words and not see the actions they did? Yeah, that's pretty much how my country got into this situation.
There's plenty of fluff, but lets not pretend that there isn't actual reporting out there for stuff that does or will affect your daily life. 1000x so with local policy where it is so excruciatingly difficult to find any real information on. Just
1) be honest about when you want either the dryest, direct report, or you want a show to go with it. I'm definitely in the middle myself, slightly skewed towards dry.
2) Understand the balance of relevance, impact, importance, and fun to your life. We can be honest and admit there some important news out there that simply isn't a fight you want to participate nor follow closely.
Likewise, we're on a tech forum right now and I'm sure while many of us would read about a distributed GPU runtime that we also all know it's not necessarily the most important thing in life right now (unless that is indeed your career right now).
Awareness can do a lot to drive behavior by itself. We just first need to be honest about it.
Fair enough. Take a look at candidate actions as well.
I don't want to get my news from social media.
Curate your news sources, people.
I use a self hosted commafeed. Super easy to setup and I also follow blogs along with my news sources.