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The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
- Phiwise_ 2y ago"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's." -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Bed of Procrustes"
- llm_trw 2y agoI rather enjoy doing that. It reduced my anxiety greatly when I realized just how little anyone making news understands what is going on. Doing it for the week, month, year and decade was even more educational.
- dosinga 2y agoI love reading books about the future written 10 years ago
- marginalia_nu 2y agoI had this moment during the prelude to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. First the experts were confindent that the troop movements in Russia were just posturing and saber rattling, there's no way they'll do anything. Next, once they'd entered Ukraine, it would be over in a few weeks. The Russians would win. When the Russians were getting their asses kicked and it looked really bad, the Ukrainians would win by the end of the summer. Next it would be over by the winter. Next the russians would run out of materiel soon. Next the russians would run out of men soon. They confidently made every prediction except the multi-year trench war that actually ensued.
- _rrnv 2y agoVirtually no true expert whose predictions are accurate shares their opinion with the public, because they know what their words are really worth. Virtually all news experts are clueless placeholders put there to support the daily narrative.
- jimbokun 2y agoBut that's punditry, not news. News would be accurately reporting on where the Russian troops were and what they were doing at that moment. News isn't supposed to include prediction. That's why Opinion sections were traditionally kept separate from the rest of the paper.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoTechnically yeah, but it's also what the news looks like today. By volume, it's mostly speculation, gossip, and politically flavored analysis.
- Phiwise_ 2y agoNews would have refused to put sugar on its porridge, too.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ListeningPie 2y agoThis style of title seems purposively written to preach to the choir.
- ricardobayes 2y agoI like the system in UK and Germany where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news. I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoIn the Netherlands as well, and the main news source (on public broadcasters) is a cooperation between all the broadcasters, which in theory means it's an independent and neutral organization that provides the news. In theory. There's news on commercial channels as well but it's more aimed at entertainment, often has some lighter subjects and informal newsreaders, and of course ad breaks.
- lodovic 2y agoAnother issue is that they have a lot of nonsense on the public TV and radio, such as game shows or light comedy. These broadcasts could very well be done by commercial stations, but as these would need to compete against a state-funded entity, it creates an unfair playing field. The public channels have the advantage of guaranteed funding, which allows them to produce content without the same financial pressures faced by commercial broadcasters.
- dailykoder 2y agoI am a german citizen and I always wondered why people hate SO MUCH on that system. Yes, there might be some corrupt people that give themselves too much pocket money, but overall the system works really good. I didn't stop reading news, but I mostly stopped reading news that are not funded by the "Rundfunkbeitrag", because the funded news organizations are encouraged to be rather neutral and they don't use that much weird rhetoric. All the other private news companies are just trying to clickbait with stupid headlines.
- sunaookami 2y agoRundfunkbeitrag is waaaay too much and they are not interested in lowering it. Compare that to the similar system in Japan which is way cheaper and they actually lowered the cost in recent years. Germany has too many public radio and tv stations where a lot of content is nearly the same. The ARD is also not as independent as they claim, just look at how many politicans are in the Rundfunkrat. OP said it's not a tax but it is the same. You have to pay it even if you don't use it and you go to jail if you don't want to pay. Doesn't matter how they are describing it, it's a pseudo-tax. >the funded news organizations are encouraged to be rather neutral and they don't use that much weird rhetoric Tagesschau is all but neutral and the tone of ZDF Heute is very aggressive. At least they are consistently bad and private newspapers are even worse so you know what you get. The state of news in Germany is sad but what do you expect when journalists side with politicians and favor more censorship?
- gniv 2y agoI don't read news but I read too much twitter. I curated my following base carefully so now almost everything on the timeline is interesting/insightful/funny. Problem is it's still junk food and of little long term value. I really need to step away for a while.
- harshitaneja 2y agoI curated twitter in a similar style with following in my niche interest categories of academics and others with a really good signal-to-noise ratio but post musk purchase most of the accounts I followed either got off the platform, tweet much less frequent and with paid subscribers getting priority the replies feature much less relevant tweets than before. I so desire a space similar to my little corner of twitter but not able to find one anywhere after having tried with X, Mastadon(multiple servers) Bluesky, Threads. Does it still work for you?
- donatj 2y agoWhen I figured out that you can disable individuals retweets but keep their actual direct tweets, that saved my feed. I know a fair number of people who post fascinating things, but also retweet a lot of news and politics I don't want.
- boingo 2y agoAll it takes to ditch the news is being on the inside of a breaking story, and realizing how much information being spewed out is just plain incorrect... then the next few articles you read, you realize it's not just your article they warped for clicks, but all of them. When newspapers were the primary news consumption, it was a bit better - journalists had a few hours to collect facts before publishing. Now there's zero time so they will publish anything. Empty calories.
- graemep 2y agoMy experience of being quoted by respected news organisations (Reuters and the BBC) is that quotes will be random and out of context, or just made up (I did get an apology from the BBC for the latter and they removed it from their website). It does not even need to be a particular story. Experts in almost every field complain about how bad coverage of their field is, and you can extrapolate to coverage being bad in general. What Michael Crichton dubbed Gell_Mann amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn... I would also add knowing a country that gets covered in the news but which is not important enough to be prominent (Sri Lanka in my case) also soon shows you the media are sloppy and make huge mistakes and write with little understanding.
- vitaliyf 2y agoDefinitely - basically, that's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_a...
- bluetomcat 2y agoI would call it a paradox of interconnectedness. We can write, photograph or broadcast about an immediate event and have that instantly shared with a huge audience online. The stories that bubble up and make it to the top attract a disproportionate amount of our attention and blur our perception of the surrounding reality.
- aitium12 2y ago[dead]
- steveBK123 2y agoThe blending of comedy/entertainment with news, going back to the GWB era with the Daily Show is a good example of this problem. People consuming junk food thinking they are getting their vegetables. Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
- mandmandam 2y agoMultiple studies over those years showed that The Daily Show watchers were significantly better informed on issues than cable news viewers. Cable news is the junk food, and TDS showed it to be so bad that even a parody news show could do a better job of informing people, a point made very often by the host. Using it as an example of junk news is missing the point by a rather wide margin. > Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication. It's all coming from the same six companies, as per the article. It all has a lot of the same messaging - trust the police, the good guys always win, torture is bad but if you have a good reason it's ok, Islam is super scary yo, capitalism is cool actually, being too smart isn't cool, and leave the status quo the fuck alone or get Avengered. ... Turn your brain off at your peril. Junk food can kill. If you really feel the need to watch absolute garbage and ignore the news, you probably need to work less and/or sleep more.
- kaashif 2y ago> Multiple studies over those years showed that The Daily Show watchers were significantly better informed on issues than cable news viewers. This comment only makes sense if you're trying to imply the Daily Show increases how informed people are. It seems plausible that causation runs the other way: more informed people are more likely to watch the Daily Show, because then they get all the jokes.
- steveBK123 2y agoPrecisely. The Daily Show was a predecessor to Twitter political culture and remains the offline version of it. Blue Flavored Fox News with more laughs. It's the same political culture of preaching to the already converted and mostly shouting about how bad the other side is. No attempts at persuasion.
- rustybolt 2y agoBite-sized articles have their value. I don't know how many mobile tabs I have open, Chrome stops displaying the number when you reach 100. Most of the tabs contain a deep dive into a particular topic and it's not feasible to actually read every one of them. However, every unread tab I close feels like a personal failure to keep up. I can see the value of news articles and short videos like those from Fireship: It might be educational and/or entertaining, but if not, it hasn't been a serious time investment, so it doesn't matter anyway.
- Almondsetat 2y agoHow many of them do you remember? How many of them have had an impact in your life?
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago> However, every unread tab I close feels like a personal failure to keep up. I used to think so about books... but after some thought... why? If you still read enough articles/books/whatever (so it's not your attention span failing), and if the article/book wasn't "good enough" to keep you reading it, why does it matter if you didn't finish it? There are many more articles and books than you are able to read, keep with the 'good ones' and forget about the rest.
- TySchultz 2y agoI think there should be a middle ground where you dont have to completely remove yourself from the news, just the endless feeds and opinions. It does seem helpful to know what is going on with the world. Whether thats socially or just understanding other events. I fully agree there is a limit and most of what is out there is junk but not all of it. I have been actively trying to build something to get away from the endless feeds of news. Essentially a modern day newspaper. So you can read what is important and then be done for the day. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131
- alamortsubite 2y agoYou might like Axios: https://www.axios.com/ https://www.axios.com/
- TySchultz 2y agoYa im a big fan. The way they break down topics is great. But I was still left scrolling and scrolling. I am using LLMs for what I am building and i'm envisioning a system that understands what you read yesterday so its able to give you more concise and direct information. I also enjoy the completeness of a set amount of stories.
- mulhoon 2y agoYour app is awesome. I’m going to use this from now on.
- vouaobrasil 2y agoI stopped reading the news because of this. When 90% of the articles on the BBC are irrelevant to me and have titles like "Taylor Swift Vienna concerts cancelled after attack threat", "The 'absurd' real-life sting operation that inspired a movie", or "Behave yourselves, China tells its Olympic fans", I lose all interest. The news has become like intellectual sugar, written more for page views than for merely informing, and I find that exceptionally irritating. Writing so-called "catchy headlines" and an overwhelming bias towards bad news has made me sick with all news organizations. Of course, I am sure some people like it. Probably most. I am in the minority for most things, but I simply hate it.
- gnz11 2y agoThe BBC targets a general audience so it will naturally have a wide swath of topics reported on. The alternative is "Personalization" but then critics complain this keeps people in their own bubbles.
- forinti 2y agoA decade ago I switched from my local morning news to a French show. Instead of violence, traffic accidents, and soccer, the French show talked about recipes, books, travelling, etc. It didn't really try to be a news show, just something light to start off the day. Nowadays I prefer silence during breakfast.
- Loughla 2y agoWe watch classic cartoons during breakfast. It's an amazing way to start your day. I cut out news (except here) about three years ago. My life has not changed, except that I'm not pissed off as much. Turns out all that the 24 hour news cycle really doesn't teach you very much.
- forinti 2y ago> except that I'm not pissed off as much There's a radio show in the mornings in my country that I call "the hour of indignation". A "news" presenter rants on for many minutes about something that is very wrong with the nation. There's another one later in the day, so I think this radio station has a lot of success making people mad.
- just_mc 2y ago100%. Very insightful. Follow the money. I used to be a huge news junky. After a while I realized it's all designed as entertainment to drive ad revenue. Gave it up and I've been happier ever since.
- jtwoodhouse 2y agoI started my career as a reporter a decade ago. I can't tell you how many stories I filed that an editor twisted into something different to fit their narrative. There were also stories I was directed away from because they would alienate our audience. It's a narrative business.
- create-account 2y agoI contracted sat TV for a while. I had to pay extra for movies but news channels were free. It was like someone was paying for me to watch that movie
- specproc 2y agoI've been working in a PR-type space recently. That narrative is the subject of war between so many different actors. The worst thing is watching everyone around me, even very intelligent people, get so angry over a space that is so heavily fabricated, optimised even for that very same outrage.
- narrator 2y agoI think the idea that news does things for ratings and therefore money is not really true. Control of the narrative is vastly more lucrative for other stakeholders in these organizations. Some of these news organizations like the Washington Post for example lost $77 million last year. Fox news fired Tucker Carlson, the most popular news anchor in the channel's history. This is not an economically driven business, at least in terms of the news outlet's own profit and loss. Non-profits give away billions and billions for non-economic reasons, they'd probably fund these loss making news outlets, and they indeed fund many non-economic advocacy organizations because they help them change the widely believed narratives to support their respective missions.
- _wire_ 2y ago> Fox news fired Tucker Carlson, the most popular news anchor in the channel's history. This is not an economically driven business Nonsense example. Carlson was the figurehead for a narrative that cost Murdoch $800 million in defamation. https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/26/tucker-carlson-fox-news-firing-condition-dominion-settlement https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/26/tucker-carlson...
- gardaani 2y agoWelcome to Hacker News!
- axpvms 2y agoI think most journalists these days are not much more than poorly informed and poorly paid professional sh*tposters/provocateurs who learned how to write an inverted pyramid in j-school. I can easily find poorly informed and attention-grabbing opinions from a number of places, including even here :). Disclosure: I learnt to write an inverted pyramid in j-school but dropped out after a year, I didn't want to work in this industry. Also maybe I just wouldn't have been a good journalist. An interesting book on this subject is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, it's where the term "Churnalism" was coined.
- freddie_mercury 2y agoI think this makes a common mistake that this has anything to do with "journalists these days" or editorial slants or anything else. I mean, go back and read some random New York Times issues from the 1950s and you'll see the same thing. The simple reality is that there is not enough happening every day that is relevant to our lives that people actually need to pay attention to. If you're not actually making some change your life, your diet, your finances... SOMETHING...then the news is just entertainment same as watching a Sunday morning cartoon.
- Levitz 2y ago>I mean, go back and read some random New York Times issues from the 1950s and you'll see the same thing. I've got to really disagree and I can provide proof. This is The New York Times, today: https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/ This is The New York Times, May 3rd, 2001: http://web.archive.org/web/20010503145505/https://www.nytimes.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20010503145505/https://www.nytime... This is The Washington Post, today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/ This is The Washington Post, October 3rd, 2001: http://web.archive.org/web/20011003085017/http://www.washingtonpost.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20011003085017/http://www.washing... The difference in style of writing, specifically headlines, is more than noticeable.
- freddie_mercury 2y agoI feel like you and I focusing on different things. I don't care what the headline says. I'm saying the entire content of the article is pointless. Who cares that Snyder backs his coach? What are you going to do with that information? Who cares that Hollywood holds in breath? How do you change your life based on that? (From your Oct 3 2001 link.) No amount of "less clickbait headline" will fix the fundamental pointlessness of those articles to anyone's family, career, or daily life.
- cdrini 2y agoThe more I think about the state of news, the more I'm convinced that we need independent rankings of news sites and journalism. Something similar to a health inspection score. With considerations like: - News needs to be verifiable. Direct links to data sources. - News need to have history of modifications to their article. - Factual errors will cause dings to their score. - Revenue sources/tax forms need to be public to find conflicts of interest. If a news site wants to sell it's soul to make ad money, that's fine, but I want to see some sort of "F" rating on that site. There's no incentive for news sites to make good news right now. Edit: Or, linking to this article: a sort of "nutrition facts" label for news
- outime 2y agoWe should start understanding that "independent" rankings won't ever work. Let's not even get started with "fact-checking" places which we can count by dozens per country now, as they all have their own interpretations (or otherwise a single one alone would be enough). For such a thing to work, it needs to be funded. At the end, it doesn't matter if it comes from public or private hands, it's going to be leaning towards one direction or another, then a group of people will consider it the absolute truth and other group of people will create their own site for "fact-checking". If humans cannot possibly be objective and independent (yes, that's what I believe after 30+ years in this planet and having met multiple people), then news cannot possibly be. Bearing in mind such a limitation, let's think how this can be possibly improved. I personally gave up on news being informative and just see it as entertainment - it's a narrative business.
- cdrini 2y agoI think it can work, but will require a very well designed set of rules. For example, with fact checking, some fact checking is easy. Eg if an article says "the unemployment rate last year was X%". You have to do some research to determine what measure of unemployment they're using, but boom, you can say it is factually incorrect if no measure lists that number. This process is even easier if it's linked to the data source. These are likely the only types of facts that can be checked. This is limiting, but at least it creates some sort of check on what feels like a runaway industry. Statements like "he was the best president since X" is an unverifiable statement. "best" isn't qualified. An article with a statement like this should immediately be dinged. And it's fine to have a site that makes statements like this! But just not a news site. Things like bias or swing are not really possible to do as part of this. This is mostly trying to make it matter when news sites drop their standards.
- base698 2y agoSimilar to this post, which I believe I saw here a decade ago: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
- _rrnv 2y agoIt always has been. It always will be. But you have a choice to stop eating this junk food and turn to fine dining (non-profit info sources) or home cooking (books and own research). https://offstream.news/longread/2017/04/4/the-post-truth-and-the-context.html https://offstream.news/longread/2017/04/4/the-post-truth-and...
- dosinga 2y agoTo me it always seemed that reading a good, weekly news paper would help. The lack of real time news would make it focus on broader trends and I would not be distracted with the breaking news that is not important. For a while it seemed the Economist was close. But they have breaking news, what happened today and they publish articles that appear in the weekly edition already during the week. Is there something better out there?
- jimbokun 2y agoMaybe force yourself to only read the Economist in paper form?
- dosinga 2y agoDefinitely considered that. I'm a tad nomadic, but I guess I can just change the addresses.
- xpe 2y agoDo they offer an offline viewing option to subscribers? Apple News does offline reading FWIW.
- pachydermballet 2y agoI'm a subscriber and read the Economist on my phone almost entirely - sometimes on desktop - I dropped the print subscription as it takes nearly a week to be delivered to me. I read pretty much only the weekly (which is made available late on Thursdays UK time) on the app- it's a button at the bottom of the app - and very often do so offline. I mostly ignore the articles suggested during the week.
- dosinga 2y agoI try doing that. But they are definitely trying to be a daily publication if not hourly by now
- ph1l337 2y agoI think reading weekly news instead of daily news helps you stay in the loop, but cuts out a lot of information junk. That being said I’m still looking for some good weekly news(papers) in English. Would love some recommendations.
- bubblebeard 2y agoThis is right on the money. I never really used social media, and I started disregarding mainstream news about 8 years ago, relapsing every once in a while when I’m boored only to be reminded the only things reported makes me feel horrible.
- apples_oranges 2y agoCompared to all the garbage on social media, professional articles by actual journalists don’t make us dumber I think, even if they serve a narrative. Something about reading an actual article makes us think and reason in a way that a tweet or, worse, a thread of tweets just doesn’t.
- meiraleal 2y agoIt makes me angry to read news that are aimed at ignorant people, especially when you can see that the writer is smart and is using strategies to fit his narrative into the news.
- gordondavidf 2y agoI have struggled with the negative aspects of news as well and personally think there is a middle route over cutting it out. I built attabit.com to summarize the news for friends, family, and myself to remove as much sensationalism, bias, and 'junk food' as possible. The site has been having all kinds of problems today with the claude 3.5 sonnet outage but outside of that, its become the main news source of high level news for me and a lot of my friends and family. It lets you know what's happening without getting sucked into it. If you check it out, let me know what you think?
- xpe 2y agoPart of the premise sounds appealing. Is it only using AI summarization? If so, I wouldn't go for it.
- JR1427 2y agoI stopped reading the news, having been someone who thought it was morally "right" to be "informed". I feel much better since I quit. I still end up hearing about things, through talking to people etc, and I will still read articles on stuff that was important enough to still be written about weeks after the event. But daily news is just 99% not worth reading.
- nsagent 2y agoI had the same underlying reason to stay informed and also quit reading the news. It's certainly jarring to hear major events like the assassination attempt from friends and family first, but it's very reminiscent of my experience before the rise of internet news.
- csours 2y agoI had a high school English/Literature teacher who used to dismiss the class by saying "Go play in the street, children!" They also said "Don't watch anything that tells you how to feel." Anyway, I feel like the human species has arrived at a time when we have the internet, without having a great way to deal with everyone's feelings. Some news media orgs make junk food, some news media orgs make information poison - they make it harder to understand what is going on in the world. "It's always in the last place you look" - if you already know how you FEEL about something, you don't have to think about it in information or factual terms at all. You don't have to keep looking.
- globular-toast 2y agoI haven't watched the news for my entire adult life (almost 20 years). Why would I? I have countless other things I could do with my time and I have no idea why I'd allocate some of that to daily news. I skim over headlines and read articles that look interesting but only in heavily curated places like this very website. People I know who do consume news interestingly only bother telling me about super shocking stuff that I don't need to know, e.g. "someone got murdered", "a celebrity said so and so" etc. They rarely tell me stuff I might need to know like "income tax is changing next year".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cfiggers 2y agoThe comparison with junk food is an apt one. It seems like for every human desire or appetite or source of value, there exists a quick hit, instantly gratifying satisfaction that is bad for long-term health. And there also exists a slowly-acquired, initially difficult or unpleasant, eventually-rewarding satisfaction that is good for long-term health. Wouldn't a healthy society encourage its members to pursue the more stable, initially uncomfortable, initially difficult, but long-term good option on as many axes as possible? We should seek out and eat nutritious, wholesome food rather than eat junk food non-stop every day. We should read books and articles rather than consume infotainment and social media. We should go to the gym rather than sitting on the couch and doing nothing. We should commit to real relationships instead of participating in infinite hookup culture. We should find real social circles to belong to and become loyal to them instead of embracing abstract political tribalism that tickles the "belonging" nerve but leaves us with no one who personally knows or cares about us when we're in actual need. We should buy things when we need them and when they're a good value rather than spending impulsively as a therapeutic exercise. The list goes on and on. I'm concerned that the currently-most-common set of societal norms across pretty much every Western culture I'm aware of seems to encourage the opposite of all that. And I think it's gotten that way, not least at any rate, because sad, scared, addicted, unhappy, immature, overstimulated, overmedicated, physically and spiritually unhealthy humans are simply easier for corporations to make money off of than the alternative. Which suggests that this situation didn't just happen by accident—there's pressure coming from influential people and groups to make it this way. And that means there's systemic resistance to be expected when trying to swim against that current, whether for oneself or, for e.g., for one's kids.
- gexla 2y ago> The comparison with junk food is an apt one. I don't know if you used an AI chatbot for this, but this is an often used starting point.
- cfiggers 2y agoI did not use an AI chatbot. This all-organic cliched human writing comes to you courtesy of my... all-organic cliched human brain, I guess.
- xyst 2y agoI agree that social media is largely junk, especially getting news from social media. Personally, I have just eliminated any _real time_ source of news. I control (instead of an algorithm controlled by corporate policy) what I want to catch up on. Want to catch up on Olympic event medal status for my home country? Sub to the email newsletter. Want to follow politics in your state? Sub to the email newsletter at local and state orgs. Want to follow updates in tech industry in general or a specific subfield (ie, nanotechnology, or the latest hype?). Sub to the email newsletter. With this method, I can choose when to catch up on these topics. Sure, I might be 1-2 days out of sync compared to the news junkie. But with this method I can at least guarantee a variety of sources come out and get a much better view of the issue. Rather than the often sensationalized version presented at _real time_. One very hilarious instance of where real time junkies got it very wrong: JD Vance, the VP choice for GOP, was allegedly sexually involved with a couch. Original author of post cited a random page in JD Vance’s autobiography in tweet. What was clearly supposed to be a joke, but turned very viral. “Influencers”, comedians, and I think even some mainstream news outlets ran with it. I don’t recall _when_ it was debunked, but had to have been within 24 hours of that tweet.
- mediumdave 2y agoI agree with the article that there is a lot of low-quality "journalism" out there, designed to outrage or entertain rather than inform. However, that does not mean that all journalism should be disregarded. I read the Washington Post and listen to NPR (regardless of how you feel about their cultural programming, their news organization is excellent.) Citizens in a free society have a duty to be informed about the issues facing that society. I reject the idea that there aren't readily available high quality sources of information about the world. Are any of them perfect? Clearly, no. But ignoring them because they're not perfect strikes me as nihilistic. There's one quote from the article that alarmed me: > The news is overwhelmingly about things you cannot possibly influence In democracies, we do have elections...
- fulladder 2y agoJournalism has always been a rather shady business. "Remember the Maine." Also, most of what you hear or read is just a reflection of who is spending money to get press. For example, Taylor Swift, AI companies and the Olympics all have a formula to turn press coverage into cash, so it should be no surprise that they are constantly in the news.
- gexla 2y ago"News" is such a huge category though. I just try to be more selective to subjects which may have some effect on me. Bookmark some articles as potential trends. Bookmark some as potentially important reading. Put a budget on it. One interesting idea I have been toying with is to use prediction markets as a filter. Like, ask myself if I can make a prediction based on this. Then go to a prediction market and actually put a bet on a prediction. Either find one which already exists, or make one. What I have found interesting is how the situation develops into me being wrong. And how hard it is to get above zero. If I can't gain by making predictions on a situation I'm somewhat interested in, then how might being in the red on less informed topics be messing with my thinking? Probably not realistic, but I have been thinking about how I could make it work.
- 2-3-7-43-1807 2y agoOkay, this is interesting as I am myself now on day five of an intentional news fasting and it is amazing. So, I'm going to take some effort here; mainly for the purpose of active reflection. === > Reducing my intake of what is essentially junk information has significantly reduced anxiety and worry in my day to day life, and has freed up more of my time to pursue other interests and deeper reading. Confirmed. > My view is that "the news" primarily exists to keep consumers entertained rather than keeping citizens informed, ... No, it exists primarily for two reasons: 1) Making a financial profit. 2) Political control over citizens. The entertainment and dopaminergic aspects of it are simply means to those ends. > most commonly in the form of advertisements, but also in the form of news that's constantly competing for our attention Advertisement and news are often indistinguishable. > I think any news junkie reading this will immediately go on the defensive. I'm a news junkie in recovery. > In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore. The 24 hour news cycle is something to be ignored. Harari is a very uninteresting journalist writing shallow and irrelevant books. And those borderline pun based sound bites are indicative of it. There is no meaningful "power" in knowing what to ignore. > resulting in "alternate" sources of information being either absurd conspiracy theories or "takes" of mainstream news on social media. I do not agree. "Alternate" sources are the only sources of some of the news I care about. Some are maybe overly conspiracy theoretical but our governments and industries are conspirative. Regular news sources are almost worthless beyond providing a very high-level idea about what happened. > Stories themselves are often slanted to please advertisers and company shareholders. Or governments. And that is in and of itself highly conspirative. > a small number of companies control 90% of the media - not just "the news". That's 90% of what we read, watch, and listen to. And that's why people flock to "alternative" media ... > A common argument against cutting out the news is that "ignorance is bliss", suggesting that those who do not consume the news are ignorant. Isn't that more an argument for ignorance with regard to news? > Let that sink in. And that's why even X is relevant here. Cause where else will I be informed about who was stabbed again by a refugee somewhere in Germany if not there - and this is something I _DO_ care about. But also one major reason why I refuse to further bother with it as I lack the power to change anything about it. > Rather it makes one less informed of the world and distracts you from what's going on in your own physical life and your own neighborhood, while instilling a very negative view of the world that's divorced from reality. Yes. There is only so much attention you can give and if you waste it on what happens in Israel, Westjordanland, Ukraine or Venezuela then you have no attention left to what happens with yourself, your family, your neighborhood, your town. But those are usually not as exciting. > Information junkies often have the most extreme views (on both sides of the US political spectrum) with a strong "us vs them" mindset where "them" That matches my personal experience. Reading about all the terrible things happening all day long will put you into a constant mode of alarm and panic for which you have to find a release. > That said, what difference does it make if I hear about the story hours after it happens? Several times I've been lusting for live news on some exciting event on Twitter - hitting the F5 like in a fever. Last example probably was the assassination attempt on Trump. This always wrecks my entire day. My attention is glued to this object of excitement and my dopamine is going through the roof numbing my motivation management for anything else. > we are today and governments and corporations are still getting away with murder and exploitation. Yes, because they'll just produce news which is going to divert the attention somewhere else if it gets too hot. And the usual news agencies (all of them) are catering to their advertisers and certain political parties. > Who is more ignorant of the world ... ? I don't care about whether someone maybe considers me ignorant. The author shouldn't worry about that either. I care about my time and especially my mental health. > Sharing your outrage of said article on social media makes it feel like you're doing something; that you're taking action, that you're doing gods work by spreading the word and keeping others informed of what's really going on. Noticed this as well. But then again many of such people also search for ways to do something practical like going on demonstrations. > ... but it leads us to make probabilistic errors with actual risks we face in real life. Yes, but for many people school-shootings are not just exciting out of personal fear but also due to human compassion and empathy. For example my risk of getting stabbed by some crazy guy is negligible but I'm sick of reading about it, knowing somebody lost their life because we failed to deport someone who was a criminal long before. > The truth is that we're far more likely to die in an auto accident or heart disease than we are from being shot or dying in a plane crash ... Yes, but it's not like the former two examples aren't also used to feed people news. The entire Corona panic was based on a minimally raised risk of dying from it. And in some countries reporting on car crashes and other fatalities by displaying all the gory details is a relevant news segment. > I'm not advocating a nihilistic worldview and if you think I'm being too cynical, I actually believe I'm being optimistic. I'd advocate realism and fatalism. Nihilism is nonsense as life is valuable and all nihilists share this perspective while hiding it behind a mask of indifference. And cynicism is often simply a symptom of chronic depression - which isn't desirable either. > Do you want news reporters setting the public agenda for what's important? Well, they don't ... politicians and billionaires set the agenda. === I'm powerless with regard to each and everything that makes the news. So, why bother if all it does is consume time and make me miserable. That's my perspective. Having said that ... I would prefer to have one reliable news source which I can consume for one hour once a week. That would be fantastic. But I just don't trust any newspaper anymore.
- breck 2y agoI recommend picking up "NYTimes complete front pages" from ~1850-2000. You can see for yourself how the news was so much more intelligent in the 1800's. What happened? In 1909, 1976, and 1998, Congress greatly expanded copyright. Instead, they should have done the opposite, and abolished it. It's mathematically dumb, and is the root cause of our toxic information environment.
- benwerd 2y agoThis is a pretty bad take. For example, multiple studies have shown that in communities that aren't addressed by a robust local news outlet, local corruption goes up. Having a good newsroom _does_ improve an understanding of what your representatives are up to, and a lack of information _does_ allow them to get up to more behind our backs. I think the biggest failure of this piece is to make all news equivalent. Yes, cable news is junk; yes, many of the corporate newsrooms that churn out hundreds of articles a day are junk. They use engagement as a metric for success rather than finding ways to align themselves with impact and creating an informed, empowered electorate. That last thing - an informed, empowered electorate - is what it's all about. Real journalism that is diligently undertaken in the public interest does make a real difference. (Should we know whether Clarence Thomas was taking corrupt bribes? Yes. Should we know how climate change is progressing? Yes. Should we know if the police are killing innocent people? Yes. Should we know that the police at the Uvalde school shooting hung around for over an hour doing nothing? Yes.) Telling people not to pay attention to the world around them results in an electorate who cannot meaningfully vote on real issues. For those of us who build software, we need to know the factors that impact the lives of the people we're serving. We need to know the trends in the marketplaces and communities where we show up. The news is good for that, too. Turn off cable news; pay more attention to non-profit news; go for long-form written journalism. Stay informed. It's absolutely true that we take a psychic hit for doing so. I'd say that's more to do with the world than it is the media overall. Perhaps we should spend more time trying to make it better?
- j7ake 2y agoThe key is to focus on local news: these are updates that a person can take action upon. Seeing the latest tragedies on the other side of the world catches headlines, but rarely actionable by regular people.
- benwerd 2y agoWe all have foreign policies. For example, in the US, our government is heavily involved in Gaza and Ukraine. It's far away, but it's also highly relevant to how our representatives work on our behalf. Should we give aid to other countries? How should we think about global society? Those things are all relevant, too.
- xtiansimon 2y agoPoor Chuck. I read this and think he needs more _older adults_ in his life. Kidding/not kidding. Chuck’s argument lumps social media with “the news” >“The news (and social media use) is indicative of a poor information diet.” When I was young my grandfather would listen to KCBS news radio in the morning and KTVU 10 o’clock news in the evening. That’s it. My dad read the local Argus newspaper. That’s it. As a youth I didn’t, but the impression was made. Now I listen to WNYC (NPR) radio in the morning when I get up. That’s it. News doesn’t have to be what they offer—24/7/365–but a habit of keeping yourself informed about local, regional, national and world events. I prefer one dose in the morning (“should I go back to bed?”) My opinion in reaction to an opinion piece.
- interludead 2y agoIt's difficult for me to completely deprive myself of the news agenda of the world. But sometimes I do a sort of detox for a month from world news and focus more on articles in scientific journals, for example. My friend likes to go to the forest for a week every six months where he has no connection at all to the outside world
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- _wire_ 2y agoA theory has been proposed for the structure of MSM news, called the "propaganda model," which can provide a framework for scientific investigation of ownership bias in news. 1988- PROPAGANDA MODEL https://chomsky.info/consent01/ https://chomsky.info/consent01/ //The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns. The domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.// 1989- MANUFACTURING CONSENT https://chomsky.info/19890315/ https://chomsky.info/19890315/ //The fact of the matter is, Ronald Reagan had a hands-off policy. In fact, Ronald Reagan probably didn’t even know what the policies were. The fact of the matter is, for the last- I mean the media had to put on a big pretense about this, but most of the population knew, that for the last eight years the country hasn’t had a chief executive. I think that’s a step forward in manufacture of consent, and in fact it’s maybe a sign of the future of political democracy. I think the United States made a leap into the future in the last eight years. If you could get to the point where voting is simply a matter of selecting purely symbolic figures, then you would have gone a long way towards marginalizing the public. And that pretty well happened. You had somebody who probably didn’t know what the policies were. His job was to read the lines written for him by the rich- what he’s been doing for the last thirty or forty years. And he seems to enjoy it and he gets well paid for it, and everybody seems happy, but to vote for Ronald Reagan is like voting for the Queen of England.// THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB IS YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB //Let me return to the prediction of the propaganda model that I mentioned...// //...However well confirmed it may be, it’s not going to be part of the discussion, it’s going to be outside the spectrum of discussion, it’s very validity guarantees that for the reasons that I mentioned. And that conclusion, again, is quite well confirmed, and one can assume with reasonable confidence that that will continue to be the case.// 2009- TWENTY YEARS LATER https://chomsky.info/200911__/ https://chomsky.info/200911__/ // ... Ownership Advertising Sourcing Flak Anti-communism EH/NC: What you refer to as the Propaganda Model’s ‘five filters’ requires some clarification. (a) Ownership and (b) advertising belong to straightforward institutional analysis — these are the kinds of institutional arrangements that predominate among US media firms and elsewhere. (c) Sourcing and (d) flak are two well-established processes to which any elite-serving media will adapt, whether we are talking about the elite US or British media or the elite media under Stalin and Hitler. On the other hand, (e) anti-communism, as a major theme of media production during the twentieth century, was reflective of the prevailing system of belief in the Western states, and has evolved with the collapse of the Soviet bloc since the first edition of Manufacturing Consent. In a crucial sense, and extending from the most minor comic books and cartoons all the way up to the highest academic discussions of the so-called Cold War (i.e. the system of propaganda known as the ‘Cold War’), anti-communism was a staple that provided content, narratives, heroes and villains. Since 1989, this staple has morphed into an array of substitutes. But the structural role that anti-communism and its successors have played, namely, the provision of an Enemy or the Face of Evil, remains as relevant as ever. // So all together we have a theory of ownership and selection bias in news. And the web is nothing if not a study of structures for attention-seeking by media. Between agenda-setting and attention mgmt, what else do you need to understand about the structure of MSM news? The obvious question is: what structure of news is required to further free and coherent public participation in policy?