15 ms·

I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. The biggest problem to me, seems to be the 24 hour news cycle for things like

I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. The biggest problem to me, seems to be the 24 hour news cycle for things like wars, elections and the like. I was visiting friends during a couple of major air accidents in the past couple of years (The MH370 and MH17 incidents in particular), and was astounded at the propensity for news stations on ALL channels to fill every minute of the day with news 'updates' on the events that eventually descended into getting quotes and theories from just about anyone they could get to talk in front of a camera. I was only exposed to that for a few hours at a time, but I found it absolutely exhausting to be bombarded like that. Not only that, I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources. No thanks. I would rather control my own news firehose, and be selective about the information that I want to learn more about.

cyberferret 10y ago
In an extension to what I wrote above, I used to follow my local newspaper on Facebook a couple of years ago, just in order to keep in touch with local events seeing as I don't have a TV. I noticed their feed back then starting to change from a simple and useful dissemination of their newspaper articles, into a conduit for posting tabloid style or inflammatory/unverified web links and popular memes. I questioned them a couple of times on this in the comments area, but was told on both occasions by the page admins that their Facebook page was a 'fun and social' outlet for their paper, and if I wanted 'real news', I should just buy a copy of their actual paper. Shortly after, I noticed that their print paper started to echo their Facebook feed, in terms of unresearched articles simple copied and pasted from other sources. I stopped following them on Facebook and stopped buying their paper shortly after. When clicks, eyeballs and stickiness trumps good journalism, then that pretty much closes the door for me.
- losteric 10y ago
  My theory is that profit destroys many news channels from the inside out. The channel start with the best intentions of conveying legitimate unbiased news to inquisitive educated audiences... but eventually the supply of news seekers gets depleted, while investors and advertisers demand more. The channel is "forced" to keep expanding so they start catering to people that don't seek out news... steadily devolving into click-bait infotainment articles. Low-brow content alienates the original news seekers, and they leave for cleaner sources of information... but by now the channel's legitimate reputation is lost. They must double down on the infotainment market to keep turning a profit. Eventually that gets saturated too, so the channel abandons their original (expensive) legitimate news reporting and continue chasing low-brow audiences, competing against all the other devolved spam-news sites. If their name held enough trust, they might chase profitable corporate/political puff-pieces ("fake news" aka lies). It feels like an awful game-theory scenario.
  - jospoortvliet 10y ago
    I'm sure this is what is happening. Income from readership of physical paper goes down, pressure mounts and even reputable news papers feel thsy have little choice... ask any journalist. It is brutal, earning a decent living is hard, earning it from actual quality reporting is impossible because the vast majority of customers can't separate anote article written in 10 minutes without any research or fact checking from the results of a 1 year research has undercover project... So yeah, no surprise they deliver more of the 10 minute pieces and quality goes down. If we don't pay we get what we pay for - nothing. Hot air..
blhack 10y ago
>Not only that, I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources. This is true every time there is a news story on about anything that somebody around me is an expert on. It's always "what the hell are they talking about!?" I've seen this directly, too. I've been on the local news quite a few times, and EVERY TIME what they end up broadcasting, and what I was explaining to them are different things. What's really really scary to me lately is all of this talk about "fake news", which originally referred to outright lies that were part of click-farms, but is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news. Frightening. Really truly actually frightening to me.
- meric 10y ago
  The media is shocked even after all newspapers and TV backed a single candidate, she lost. I speculate internally they blame alternative media, so now they run a campaign against 'fake news'. Of course it couldn't just have been the fact that most states and rural counties did not like Clinton much at all - the media's headquarters are all located in big cities so they were all blind. They are now blaming and accusing 'fake news' instead of taking a good look at themselves.
  - elsonrodriguez 10y ago
    The media wants to be shocked that covering Trump 24/7 yielded a victory for Trump.
    - seandougall 10y ago
      And by complete coincidence, they now have a lot more to get people riled up about (and more clicks to sell) for the next four years.
      - talmand 10y ago
        That goes along with my thought that sometimes the NRA would rather have a Democrat in office for much the same reasons.
sinatra 10y ago
In general, I agree with everything you said. However, > No thanks. I would rather control my own news firehose, and be selective about the information that I want to learn more about. My worry is: Isn't this what caused the fake news / misinformation silos? By being selective about our information sources, aren't we distancing ourselves from how a majority of the world lives and thinks? And as product developers (as majority HNers are), isn't it in our benefit to understand as much of the world as possible?
- cyberferret 10y ago
  You are correct. My viewpoint was mainly about being fed a constant stream of nonsense and/or distractions along with the general feed. For instance, I absolutely loathe 'celebrity news', but most main news sites here that I go to have at least one or two articles on rubbish like that as their lead, and I have to dig to find the stuff that is relevant to me. To use the example of air accidents above - I rarely find out anything useful that I want to know from popular news sources. Of course, I hear about the incidents on them, but when I want to dive deep, I go to specialist forums or sites where people in the know are talking about it. Similarly for mundane things like sport. If I want to find out more about, say, Formula 1 races, I will visit certain sites that I know have motor heads discussing things. That way I can learn about future car developments, driver contracts etc. Mainstream sports news seems to want to talk about dirt and gossip for just a handful of drivers.
  - graycat 10y ago
    > gossip for just a handful of drivers. They are using the technique of formula fiction, that is, what the ancient Greeks discovered as a sure-fire way to get and hold the attention of an audience. So, in that formula, there is a protagonist the audience comes to identify with, that is, care about. Then the protagonist has a problem. Through various highly in doubt and improbable victories, from skill, guts, determination, smarts, luck, whatever, the protagonist wins and at the end gets the girl. Can see a version of this formula fiction just as orchestral music with no words at all in the Richard Strauss Ein Heldenleben as at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2-dLoWorUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2-dLoWorUs So, to use some words, there is a man, the hero, aka, protagonist, nice guy, cruising along in life. Then he encounters his adversary, nasty, menacing, bad dude (flute, etc.). Then starting at about 10:00 in the performance above, he sees HER, the girl (solo violin -- IMHO one of the best solo violin parts in orchestral music)! She's a dream! But, soon, she's also darned hard to get and gives him a really tough time, a worse time than even Isolde gave Tristan in http://www.exoticitaly.com/images/Tristan-and-Isolde.jpg http://www.exoticitaly.com/images/Tristan-and-Isolde.jpg where he wouldn't take his eyes off of her and she flatly refused even to look at him. Near 14:00 she really chews him out! Soon she starts to be nice. About 15:00 they really start to smile at each other! Around 16:00 they are together. He keeps trying and eventually hear the music of the climax when he kisses her or whatever. Teenage boys, your life is so much easier now: Have that climax music queued up ready to go at a single button click at just the right time with her on the living room sofa. Trust me: Richard Strauss understood her much better than you do! Just about the time the hero is to settle down to a wonderful life of love, home, marriage, children, the adversary returns. The hero goes off to battle, maybe as in the Edmund Blair Leighton God Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Speed_(painting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Speed_(painting) There is a big battle with the bad dude. Tough battle. Comes and goes. Finally the hero wins the battle. Then there is victory music. Terrific victory music. As in art, the "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion", the victory music communicates well what a really big victory must feel like, bigger than getting 10 KLOC of code to run, a Series A, a big M&A offer, an IPO, anything in business. Really great victory music. If want to do a foil deck with a mash up of some media content for a presentation to investors, maybe in the last slide in the foil deck use the Ein Heldenleben victory music as background. No words, but it would be tough to miss the message! Of course, not even a big IPO could come up to the Richard Strauss music, but, well, there were no words for lawyers to use to sue for breach of promise! In the performance at the link above, the victory music is before 30:00 with the climax in the next minute or so. At the end, after the hero has hung up his sword and is fading away, the girl is really nice to him. If going to play with formula fiction, then might as well play with some of the best of it! Right, at one point the treble line suddenly goes up and the bass line, down. So, it feels, say, expansive, grand. Ah, Richard Strauss, expert in applied psychology of human emotions! Good thing that human emotions haven't changed much since he wrote his music! So, the race car drivers are made into protagonists people identify with. Similarly for what the tabloids do with celebrities. Similar to what a lot of TV news show producers try to do with their anchors. Put all of it into various buckets, e.g., manipulation, light entertainment. But it's not information.
jcoffland 10y ago
> I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. I hear a lot of people say this these days but it doesn't really count for much if you regularly watch Netflix or other ondemand Internet based TV instead.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Well, full disclosure, we DO watch the odd NetFlix shows etc., but I think the biggest difference is (a) no ads at all (b) no news blasted at us and (c) we can choose exactly what we watch, and when we watch it. We can happily go weeks without turning the thing on, and we do the occasional weekend binge of a TV series. The difference is that it is totally under our control, and we can select the content (and reject it) at will. The pure lifestyle changes around this (i.e. we as a family would far rather be caught up on other creative endeavours rather than watching TV) have been significant.
  - vog 10y ago
    In Germany we have the term "Zeitsouveränität" which means time sovereignty. That term originally appeared to describe workplace conditions and biography. However, nowadays it is mostly used to describe media consumption. You decide when to listen to news or watch a certain show, the same way you decide when you read the next chapter of a novel.
    - DonaldFoss 10y ago
      Very nice. I saw the word "Zeitsouveränität" and knew the literal meaning but didn't realize it's modern usage. In reality, time sovereignty is the only worthwhile thing wealth gets us, because time is our most valuable resource, a non-renewable one at that.
      - vog 10y ago
        One particularily popular example are German podcasts of radio stations, which are advertised by "... zum zeitsouveränen Nachhöhren", which roughly translates to: ... for time souvereign listening.
glaberficken 10y ago
At my place (me, my wife, 6yo and 1yo daughters) we have done the same (got rid of our TV about 5 years ago). We watch the occasional TV show via on demand streaming (guilty pleasure="The Voice", food for thought="several long form journalistic features, tv documentaries etc") The improvement to our quality of life at home as been significant. In the little free time our daily chores still leave us, we simply play with our daughters (lego, board games, silly play) or read a book with them. The only concern I have is with the kids growing up. Is the lack of exposure to daily news going to make them less aware of the "world out there"? After all we could make the choice to live without TV/News after growing up with it. All that news noise is part of our accumulated view of the world. How will this affect someone growing up?
- newspaper-shill 10y ago
  My advice to you would be to get a subscription to a quality newspaper, even if it's only on a weekly basis. Newspapers have come to terms with their position, as last in the news race, so they tend to make up for it with articles pondering the why's of news, rather than the what's. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for, and they will absolutely read a newspaper while eating breakfast, if you leave one out for them.
  - glaberficken 10y ago
    Yeah I thought about subscribing to a weekly newspaper. The problem is that over here (Portugal) all the weekly news papers are of a particular political "lean". To get a balanced view I would need to subscribe to at least 2 of them. But I guess as the kids grow older they will inevitably come into contact with the mother of all noise machines... the internet. Then the problem will be to teach them how to filter...
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Good move. How I counter this news awareness in our house is to actually have discussions with my kids about news that I know they are interested in. For instance, my younger son is super interested in space and space exploration. Whenever I see a news article or announcement on the web (or even right here on HN), I read up a little about it and then seek him out with a "Hey, did you hear about ...". This often leads to a great discussion, and ends up with us sitting in front of the computer to visit the NASA or ESA websites to get more information, photos or videos direct from the source, without much editorial slant on it. It's all about piquing their interests, without overloading them with a lot of garbage. They've got enough on their plates with school and social activities etc., so curating their news for them like this is I think useful, plus also leads to some good father/son bonding time where we talk about big ideas like adults.
ldev 10y ago
>I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. You enjoy watching movies, sitcoms, documentaries, etc, on a 27" computer monitor? Just buy a TV and external hard drive, it's so much better watching stuff on 55" TV on a couch...
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. That was an upgraded size, and it is at my feet when my feet are on the table. Also, my couch is a floor. It isn't as glorious to stretch out on as one might think.
VLM 10y ago
I'm not disagreeing with any of your post but one bombardment which I can't stand now that someone "helpfully" pointed it out to me, is when I was a kid and still watched news, "breaking news" complete with animation and breathless commentary and interruption to regular programming, this meant that a pope had died, or Reagan was shot, or a new Russian leader, another war or coup started, or at minimum a major airliner crash, Challenger explosion, that level of significance. In the 2010s, "breaking news" apparently means early news cycle filler as opposed to late cycle filler that's already been reported 47 times in the last 24 hours, so after the attention grabbing fanfare, the breaking news is the national christmas tree lighting ceremony in DC, or surprisingly it snowed in the winter in the midwest yesterday, or congress is boringly making sausage as usual, while I'm sitting there waiting, come on, whats the breaking news part, did the ISS re-enter, has a political leader died, has a new war begun? And then they go to yet another old person pharmaceutical commercial, because those are the only people who still watch news channels, and I'm all question marks. Where's my important news?
torrent-of-ions 10y ago
> I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources. This is what I hear from real experts every single time their subject is dealt with by the news. I've experienced it first hand myself with certain technology-related news where I've been heavily involved in the real thing. So when they report on economics, health or anything else I'm not an expert in, I assume that the real experts are shaking their heads just like I shook mine.
randomsearch 10y ago
I don't watch TV either (don't have a subscription or connection). But your criticism of television does not support the idea of disengaging from news altogether.

cyberferret 10y ago

In an extension to what I wrote above, I used to follow my local newspaper on Facebook a couple of years ago, just in order to keep in touch with local events seeing as I don't have a TV. I noticed their feed back then starting to change from a simple and useful dissemination of their newspaper articles, into a conduit for posting tabloid style or inflammatory/unverified web links and popular memes. I questioned them a couple of times on this in the comments area, but was told on both occasions by the page admins that their Facebook page was a 'fun and social' outlet for their paper, and if I wanted 'real news', I should just buy a copy of their actual paper. Shortly after, I noticed that their print paper started to echo their Facebook feed, in terms of unresearched articles simple copied and pasted from other sources. I stopped following them on Facebook and stopped buying their paper shortly after. When clicks, eyeballs and stickiness trumps good journalism, then that pretty much closes the door for me.

losteric 10y ago
My theory is that profit destroys many news channels from the inside out. The channel start with the best intentions of conveying legitimate unbiased news to inquisitive educated audiences... but eventually the supply of news seekers gets depleted, while investors and advertisers demand more. The channel is "forced" to keep expanding so they start catering to people that don't seek out news... steadily devolving into click-bait infotainment articles. Low-brow content alienates the original news seekers, and they leave for cleaner sources of information... but by now the channel's legitimate reputation is lost. They must double down on the infotainment market to keep turning a profit. Eventually that gets saturated too, so the channel abandons their original (expensive) legitimate news reporting and continue chasing low-brow audiences, competing against all the other devolved spam-news sites. If their name held enough trust, they might chase profitable corporate/political puff-pieces ("fake news" aka lies). It feels like an awful game-theory scenario.
- jospoortvliet 10y ago
  I'm sure this is what is happening. Income from readership of physical paper goes down, pressure mounts and even reputable news papers feel thsy have little choice... ask any journalist. It is brutal, earning a decent living is hard, earning it from actual quality reporting is impossible because the vast majority of customers can't separate anote article written in 10 minutes without any research or fact checking from the results of a 1 year research has undercover project... So yeah, no surprise they deliver more of the 10 minute pieces and quality goes down. If we don't pay we get what we pay for - nothing. Hot air..

blhack 10y ago

>Not only that, I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources. This is true every time there is a news story on about anything that somebody around me is an expert on. It's always "what the hell are they talking about!?" I've seen this directly, too. I've been on the local news quite a few times, and EVERY TIME what they end up broadcasting, and what I was explaining to them are different things. What's really really scary to me lately is all of this talk about "fake news", which originally referred to outright lies that were part of click-farms, but is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news. Frightening. Really truly actually frightening to me.

meric 10y ago
The media is shocked even after all newspapers and TV backed a single candidate, she lost. I speculate internally they blame alternative media, so now they run a campaign against 'fake news'. Of course it couldn't just have been the fact that most states and rural counties did not like Clinton much at all - the media's headquarters are all located in big cities so they were all blind. They are now blaming and accusing 'fake news' instead of taking a good look at themselves.
- elsonrodriguez 10y ago
  The media wants to be shocked that covering Trump 24/7 yielded a victory for Trump.
  - seandougall 10y ago
    And by complete coincidence, they now have a lot more to get people riled up about (and more clicks to sell) for the next four years.
    - talmand 10y ago
      That goes along with my thought that sometimes the NRA would rather have a Democrat in office for much the same reasons.

sinatra 10y ago

In general, I agree with everything you said. However, > No thanks. I would rather control my own news firehose, and be selective about the information that I want to learn more about. My worry is: Isn't this what caused the fake news / misinformation silos? By being selective about our information sources, aren't we distancing ourselves from how a majority of the world lives and thinks? And as product developers (as majority HNers are), isn't it in our benefit to understand as much of the world as possible?

cyberferret 10y ago
You are correct. My viewpoint was mainly about being fed a constant stream of nonsense and/or distractions along with the general feed. For instance, I absolutely loathe 'celebrity news', but most main news sites here that I go to have at least one or two articles on rubbish like that as their lead, and I have to dig to find the stuff that is relevant to me. To use the example of air accidents above - I rarely find out anything useful that I want to know from popular news sources. Of course, I hear about the incidents on them, but when I want to dive deep, I go to specialist forums or sites where people in the know are talking about it. Similarly for mundane things like sport. If I want to find out more about, say, Formula 1 races, I will visit certain sites that I know have motor heads discussing things. That way I can learn about future car developments, driver contracts etc. Mainstream sports news seems to want to talk about dirt and gossip for just a handful of drivers.
- graycat 10y ago
  > gossip for just a handful of drivers. They are using the technique of formula fiction, that is, what the ancient Greeks discovered as a sure-fire way to get and hold the attention of an audience. So, in that formula, there is a protagonist the audience comes to identify with, that is, care about. Then the protagonist has a problem. Through various highly in doubt and improbable victories, from skill, guts, determination, smarts, luck, whatever, the protagonist wins and at the end gets the girl. Can see a version of this formula fiction just as orchestral music with no words at all in the Richard Strauss Ein Heldenleben as at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2-dLoWorUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2-dLoWorUs So, to use some words, there is a man, the hero, aka, protagonist, nice guy, cruising along in life. Then he encounters his adversary, nasty, menacing, bad dude (flute, etc.). Then starting at about 10:00 in the performance above, he sees HER, the girl (solo violin -- IMHO one of the best solo violin parts in orchestral music)! She's a dream! But, soon, she's also darned hard to get and gives him a really tough time, a worse time than even Isolde gave Tristan in http://www.exoticitaly.com/images/Tristan-and-Isolde.jpg http://www.exoticitaly.com/images/Tristan-and-Isolde.jpg where he wouldn't take his eyes off of her and she flatly refused even to look at him. Near 14:00 she really chews him out! Soon she starts to be nice. About 15:00 they really start to smile at each other! Around 16:00 they are together. He keeps trying and eventually hear the music of the climax when he kisses her or whatever. Teenage boys, your life is so much easier now: Have that climax music queued up ready to go at a single button click at just the right time with her on the living room sofa. Trust me: Richard Strauss understood her much better than you do! Just about the time the hero is to settle down to a wonderful life of love, home, marriage, children, the adversary returns. The hero goes off to battle, maybe as in the Edmund Blair Leighton God Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Speed_(painting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Speed_(painting) There is a big battle with the bad dude. Tough battle. Comes and goes. Finally the hero wins the battle. Then there is victory music. Terrific victory music. As in art, the "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion", the victory music communicates well what a really big victory must feel like, bigger than getting 10 KLOC of code to run, a Series A, a big M&A offer, an IPO, anything in business. Really great victory music. If want to do a foil deck with a mash up of some media content for a presentation to investors, maybe in the last slide in the foil deck use the Ein Heldenleben victory music as background. No words, but it would be tough to miss the message! Of course, not even a big IPO could come up to the Richard Strauss music, but, well, there were no words for lawyers to use to sue for breach of promise! In the performance at the link above, the victory music is before 30:00 with the climax in the next minute or so. At the end, after the hero has hung up his sword and is fading away, the girl is really nice to him. If going to play with formula fiction, then might as well play with some of the best of it! Right, at one point the treble line suddenly goes up and the bass line, down. So, it feels, say, expansive, grand. Ah, Richard Strauss, expert in applied psychology of human emotions! Good thing that human emotions haven't changed much since he wrote his music! So, the race car drivers are made into protagonists people identify with. Similarly for what the tabloids do with celebrities. Similar to what a lot of TV news show producers try to do with their anchors. Put all of it into various buckets, e.g., manipulation, light entertainment. But it's not information.

jcoffland 10y ago

> I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. I hear a lot of people say this these days but it doesn't really count for much if you regularly watch Netflix or other ondemand Internet based TV instead.

cyberferret 10y ago
Well, full disclosure, we DO watch the odd NetFlix shows etc., but I think the biggest difference is (a) no ads at all (b) no news blasted at us and (c) we can choose exactly what we watch, and when we watch it. We can happily go weeks without turning the thing on, and we do the occasional weekend binge of a TV series. The difference is that it is totally under our control, and we can select the content (and reject it) at will. The pure lifestyle changes around this (i.e. we as a family would far rather be caught up on other creative endeavours rather than watching TV) have been significant.
- vog 10y ago
  In Germany we have the term "Zeitsouveränität" which means time sovereignty. That term originally appeared to describe workplace conditions and biography. However, nowadays it is mostly used to describe media consumption. You decide when to listen to news or watch a certain show, the same way you decide when you read the next chapter of a novel.
  - DonaldFoss 10y ago
    Very nice. I saw the word "Zeitsouveränität" and knew the literal meaning but didn't realize it's modern usage. In reality, time sovereignty is the only worthwhile thing wealth gets us, because time is our most valuable resource, a non-renewable one at that.
    - vog 10y ago
      One particularily popular example are German podcasts of radio stations, which are advertised by "... zum zeitsouveränen Nachhöhren", which roughly translates to: ... for time souvereign listening.

glaberficken 10y ago

At my place (me, my wife, 6yo and 1yo daughters) we have done the same (got rid of our TV about 5 years ago). We watch the occasional TV show via on demand streaming (guilty pleasure="The Voice", food for thought="several long form journalistic features, tv documentaries etc") The improvement to our quality of life at home as been significant. In the little free time our daily chores still leave us, we simply play with our daughters (lego, board games, silly play) or read a book with them. The only concern I have is with the kids growing up. Is the lack of exposure to daily news going to make them less aware of the "world out there"? After all we could make the choice to live without TV/News after growing up with it. All that news noise is part of our accumulated view of the world. How will this affect someone growing up?

newspaper-shill 10y ago
My advice to you would be to get a subscription to a quality newspaper, even if it's only on a weekly basis. Newspapers have come to terms with their position, as last in the news race, so they tend to make up for it with articles pondering the why's of news, rather than the what's. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for, and they will absolutely read a newspaper while eating breakfast, if you leave one out for them.
- glaberficken 10y ago
  Yeah I thought about subscribing to a weekly newspaper. The problem is that over here (Portugal) all the weekly news papers are of a particular political "lean". To get a balanced view I would need to subscribe to at least 2 of them. But I guess as the kids grow older they will inevitably come into contact with the mother of all noise machines... the internet. Then the problem will be to teach them how to filter...
cyberferret 10y ago
Good move. How I counter this news awareness in our house is to actually have discussions with my kids about news that I know they are interested in. For instance, my younger son is super interested in space and space exploration. Whenever I see a news article or announcement on the web (or even right here on HN), I read up a little about it and then seek him out with a "Hey, did you hear about ...". This often leads to a great discussion, and ends up with us sitting in front of the computer to visit the NASA or ESA websites to get more information, photos or videos direct from the source, without much editorial slant on it. It's all about piquing their interests, without overloading them with a lot of garbage. They've got enough on their plates with school and social activities etc., so curating their news for them like this is I think useful, plus also leads to some good father/son bonding time where we talk about big ideas like adults.

ldev 10y ago

>I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. You enjoy watching movies, sitcoms, documentaries, etc, on a 27" computer monitor? Just buy a TV and external hard drive, it's so much better watching stuff on 55" TV on a couch...

Broken_Hippo 10y ago
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. That was an upgraded size, and it is at my feet when my feet are on the table. Also, my couch is a floor. It isn't as glorious to stretch out on as one might think.

VLM 10y ago

I'm not disagreeing with any of your post but one bombardment which I can't stand now that someone "helpfully" pointed it out to me, is when I was a kid and still watched news, "breaking news" complete with animation and breathless commentary and interruption to regular programming, this meant that a pope had died, or Reagan was shot, or a new Russian leader, another war or coup started, or at minimum a major airliner crash, Challenger explosion, that level of significance. In the 2010s, "breaking news" apparently means early news cycle filler as opposed to late cycle filler that's already been reported 47 times in the last 24 hours, so after the attention grabbing fanfare, the breaking news is the national christmas tree lighting ceremony in DC, or surprisingly it snowed in the winter in the midwest yesterday, or congress is boringly making sausage as usual, while I'm sitting there waiting, come on, whats the breaking news part, did the ISS re-enter, has a political leader died, has a new war begun? And then they go to yet another old person pharmaceutical commercial, because those are the only people who still watch news channels, and I'm all question marks. Where's my important news?

torrent-of-ions 10y ago

> I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources. This is what I hear from real experts every single time their subject is dealt with by the news. I've experienced it first hand myself with certain technology-related news where I've been heavily involved in the real thing. So when they report on economics, health or anything else I'm not an expert in, I assume that the real experts are shaking their heads just like I shook mine.

randomsearch 10y ago

I don't watch TV either (don't have a subscription or connection). But your criticism of television does not support the idea of disengaging from news altogether.