"Things you notice when you quit paying attention to your surroundings" What's really needed are sources of reliable information about events, particularly abo

"Things you notice when you quit paying attention to your surroundings" What's really needed are sources of reliable information about events, particularly about events that impact directly or indirectly on your own personal situation. Usually the written form of news is more information-dense. Understanding those events, however, does require a degree of background knowledge that 'news' will never provide; for that you need to at least read books in the subject. Television and radio news, it's always going to be more entertainment than information, due to its audio-visual format. However, crappy sources of information that distrort reality in order to serve the interests of a government's reelection campaign, a corporate business strategy, etc. - that's what most what is labelled 'news' today consists of. Hence the news consumer has to act as a filter, seeking the nuggets of information gold in a sewer of manufactured garbage. There are however ways to help with the filtering although authoritarian and heirarchical societies seem to prefer to generate a dumbed-down population incapable of discerning truth from falsehood, because such a population is easier to manipulate by a small group of ruling elites. Which is what you might call the cynical view of the current status quo.