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From my early 20s and for well over a decade, the sunday NYT, FT weekend, weekend globe and mail, a full (expensive FT subscription), an Economist subscription

From my early 20s and for well over a decade, the sunday NYT, FT weekend, weekend globe and mail, a full (expensive FT subscription), an Economist subscription were personal rituals. There was a coffee shop I would leave the weekend FT at and people would miss me if I didn't show up and leave it for them. News was a very big part of my life. I even wrote as a freelancer for some papers and magazines. I could probably name a few dozen journalists off the top of my head with an opinion about their writing. Today, I can't be bothered to even look at a mainstream news website, and pretty much discount anything written in a mainstream publication as too compromised to be a valuable use of time. The reason is that the essential ingredient in a story is a conflict or tension, and while the facts may be tenuously accurate, the tension and conflict the story is about is entirely synthesized from ideololgy. It's not the stress or anxiety the article states, it's the rote, turgid stupidity of cant and affected concern. When you can't tell the difference between writing in Vice and the NYT, it's not because either of them got better. I don't read the news because if I need something I can find original sources or hear an expert talk about it on a podcast for a couple of hours, and journalists today are just minor partisan operators who are less believable than soviet olympians or tour de france winners. Anxiety, pah.

alpaca128 3y ago
I agree except for the anxiety part. Just because it wasn't the problem for you that doesn't mean it's not widespread. I avoid news nowadays because most of it is just a depressing reminder of everything that doesn't get any better over time.
concinds 3y ago
Well put. I think the cause of the decline is this: The narrative used to be set by newspapers. Now, the narrative is set by a subset of Twitter/Fediverse users: the "respectable" users that journalists follow and are followed back by. These people determine the "respectable-views" Overton window, which is very narrow. Step outside of it, and the "respectable-people" mob will say that you're "amplifying bad-faith talking points"; do it too much and you'll be seen as tainted and ostracized. So the pressure to uphold this "respectable-views ideology" is huge. I think does contribute to real anxiety in some people, because this intense "us-versus-them" is very obvious in everything they write. And just like it would be toxic in a personal relationship, it turns the national narrative "toxic", so people who don't derive entertainment from it tune it out, because, like every other kind of toxicity, it makes them feel like shit.
- motohagiography 3y ago
  I think calling it anxiety elevates the issue as though the people writing were somehow peers. For me it's not anxiety, it's just disgust. In presenting themselves as underdogs, they diminish themselves as a means to self-license to behave in ways that are not to the standards and conventions of normal men and women. It's a kind of intellectual and political perfidy, where these writers affect some grand social injury as a means to appeal to our tolerance and kindness, and then use the attention to inject their ridiculous beliefs. It's abuse, hence disgusting.

alpaca128 3y ago

I agree except for the anxiety part. Just because it wasn't the problem for you that doesn't mean it's not widespread. I avoid news nowadays because most of it is just a depressing reminder of everything that doesn't get any better over time.

concinds 3y ago

Well put. I think the cause of the decline is this: The narrative used to be set by newspapers. Now, the narrative is set by a subset of Twitter/Fediverse users: the "respectable" users that journalists follow and are followed back by. These people determine the "respectable-views" Overton window, which is very narrow. Step outside of it, and the "respectable-people" mob will say that you're "amplifying bad-faith talking points"; do it too much and you'll be seen as tainted and ostracized. So the pressure to uphold this "respectable-views ideology" is huge. I think does contribute to real anxiety in some people, because this intense "us-versus-them" is very obvious in everything they write. And just like it would be toxic in a personal relationship, it turns the national narrative "toxic", so people who don't derive entertainment from it tune it out, because, like every other kind of toxicity, it makes them feel like shit.

motohagiography 3y ago
I think calling it anxiety elevates the issue as though the people writing were somehow peers. For me it's not anxiety, it's just disgust. In presenting themselves as underdogs, they diminish themselves as a means to self-license to behave in ways that are not to the standards and conventions of normal men and women. It's a kind of intellectual and political perfidy, where these writers affect some grand social injury as a means to appeal to our tolerance and kindness, and then use the attention to inject their ridiculous beliefs. It's abuse, hence disgusting.