I love this post. I rarely watch the news any more. I was surprised that during the beginning of this current era, I found myself watching news for the first time (like not just clips posted elsewhere, but explicitly seeking it out) and it's honestly degraded even more than I can imagine. Most major news networks talk to their audience like children. They provide entertainment or promote the agenda of their advertisers.
Years ago I stopped watching satire news too. I use to love Colbert and Stewart, but I also realized I was laughing at .. genocide. I thought that such a format might make people more aware and such news more palatable, but I came to believe that it just makes us numb and dumb to some of the harsher realities of the time we occupy.
If you do have to listen to something, I suggest the No Agenda Podcast (one of the oldest podcasts in existence) and the Corbet Report. Even then, take them in limited doses.
I'd also plug Last Week Tonight if folks are looking for informational satire. John Oliver and his staff do a fantastic job investigating a lot of current and ongoing issues while presenting them in ways that are approachable for a layman.
I would also highly recommend your local NPR affiliate radio station. They can vary in quality, but tend to be pretty excellent at just telling you "what's happening" without much agenda.
I think Colorado has the best NPR affiliate of all time -- they go by CPR. Really popular, even among younger people. Highest quality news and radio... I wonder if any other states/cities have similar quality public radio?
I use to listen to Democracy Now back then too, but I really don't think either news source as really held up over the years. They're both very polarized, and the quality of their content has gone down as well.
Strongly relate. I gave up TV news a long time ago and became an NPR fan for a while, but that grew old after a few years. BBC World Service radio was my last refuge before all of my news consumption became print/reading. I'd still go back to the BBC, but their broadcast schedule doesn't mesh well with US time zones.
I thought this was going to be a plug for podcasts, which are indeed supplanting some aspects of the news business (see the NYT article about Joe Rogan the other day).
> If that’s the case, what’re you actually getting from the news? Aggravated? Wound up? Certainly not informed about anything important.
This seems like the author is explicitly arguing for the tragedy of the commons. Yes, any one individual getting 'wound up' doesn't accomplish much, but the public 'at large' getting wound up can and does effect real change sometimes.
Like, it's very easy to point to a variety of topics, about which there was sufficient public outrage from a news story to cause some change. For example, the recent killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger in Georgia. Before the public outrage that followed the release of the video, the killers had not even so much as been arrested.
If the author here had gotten his way, nobody would've seen the video, nobody would've been outraged, and nothing would've happened after Ahmed was murdered. Am I supposed to believe that this is an improvement?
My understanding is that the Arbery murder became widely known because of Twitter, not the "news." The news reported on it after it became a phenomenon, not as the original source.
And this is where the "conversation" piece may come in with a 21st century twist. Enough folks highlighted it as the "most important thing" to make it widely known via retweets and likes.
Given the angle the author is taking here, I can hardly believe that he'd be saying "yeah but spending your time on Twitter is good and productive", considering its reputation as a source of constant outrage seems even worse than for internet or TV news. So, the same reasoning applies.
You could also look at something covered more by regular news sources, like how the GOP's attempted repeal of Obamacare was blocked by public response once it became clear how many people would lose health insurance coverage. Suddenly, the repeal that was reasonably popular overall (and very popular on the right) was much less so. Would the repeal having quietly passed through Congress because nobody was paying attention to national news have been an improvement?
The author's argument is one in favor of selfishness: being a well-informed citizen of your state or country does not benefit you personally, so why bother? I actually think that the logic does hold, it's just that the implication of everyone listening to his advice is that the country becomes less informed as a whole, which sounds really, REALLY bad to me. People's average level of political and current event knowledge already seems dreadfully low, someone pushing to make it lower yet...why?
> The author's argument is one in favor of selfishness: being a well-informed citizen of your state or country does not benefit you personally, so why bother?
I don't think that the author point at all. He is arguing that the news in their modern form have mostly become a form of entertainment.
I will hasard that someone who would forever stop following the news but actually engaged in any form of local actions connected to their outrage of choice even in the most sporadical of manners would have a disproportionally larger impact on society than a well informed individual. Heck, any kind of local engagement, be it the knitting club or kids soccer, will probably have a larger impact. The news is thankfully not the only source of news.
> Aside from feeling bad for the victims –and worrying the same thing might happen to you – you’re powerless to make a positive impact. Hearing the news is merely a distraction.
> “But,” you might argue, “everything on the news doesn’t revolve around tragedies. I need to know what’s going on in the world!”
> Do you really?
> When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”?
> I’ll answer for you: probably never.
> If that’s the case, what’re you actually getting from the news? Aggravated? Wound up? Certainly not informed about anything important.
> Most of the time, watching the news is as useful as watching The Jersey Shore. You’re watching it to turn off your brain and mainline outrage.
He's not arguing about something that's not "real news"; an enormous tragedy occurring somewhere, like a tsunami killing many people, obviously qualifies as real news. He's arguing that it leading to "just outrage", just sentiment, is not productive. But that's only true if you look at it in an individual sense, of being productive in your own life. If you look at it being productive in aggregate, in society as a whole, the reasoning doesn't work anymore.
Now, you could make the argument that the author is unaware of the many thousands of times that outrage in its various forms -- like protests, or riots, or revolutions -- has led to significant changes; perhaps he is simply astoundingly ignorant of essentially all history, and thus doesn't know that outrage can do things like, say, get America to leave the Vietnam war, or get a President to resign from office, to use two well-known examples. But I'm not sure that's a more charitable or plausible take.
> But that's only true if you look at it in an individual sense, of being productive in your own life. If you look at it being productive in aggregate, in society as a whole, the reasoning doesn't work anymore.
That's where we disagree and I think I see the root of our disagreement. Reading your last paragraph, you seem to link news consumption and actual actions like protests, riots and revolution. I don't think this link exists. Most of those are actually started by activists and stem from local engagement (unionism, political organizations). It is very removed from news consumption which is not the only way of being informed.
There are many similar cases where the outrage was wrong, the facts of the case weren't as originally reported, and the resulting outrage couldn't be rolled back or productively channeled. My heart breaks at the idea of a guy being murdered with no consequences, but that can't mean that we embrace anything and everything which delivers those consequences.
Yes, but what's the ratio where harm was done there, vs where the public outrage was entirely reasonable and good?
Public outrage is one check on societal institutions. The police are a check on general lawlessness and disorder, and the fact that sometimes they kill someone they really shouldn't have doesn't make us think, "well just get rid of the police then altogether I suppose". Why would we get rid of public outrage, just because sometimes it's wrong?
Public outrage is what makes journalism function as the fourth estate, after all. Investigative journalism of national-level issues in particular: what would the point of all of it be, if nobody read or cared? Thus, the author's argument is also an argument for investigate journalism of any non-'local' issue to cease to exist. Does this sound like a good idea?
I would guess the ratio isn't much below 1:1, which I don't find acceptable. If a friend told me shocking stories about my coworkers, and 50% of them or even 25% of them were wrong, I'd stop listening to her.
As I mentioned in another comment thread, I don't think the author objects (and I certainly don't object) to in-depth investigations of national or global issues. That's a vanishingly small portion of what the news as instantiated today does.
Yes. About a quarter of the time I hear about some public outrage, I've definitively concluded that it's misinformed. It's possible there's selection bias in which outrages I hear about, but I don't have a strong reason to expect that.
I think we're applying different standards here. Judging from your comments on the recent outrage over delivery apps, I'm guessing you'd use that as an example of substantially misreported/inaccurate outrage news?
I guess I was implicitly focusing on outrages targeting specific named people. I wouldn't say the stories about delivery apps are misreported, and agree that news on that kind of thing is much less likely to be just completely false.
Commercial news by definition is looking to shock/sensationalize/rile up. It may not be on a conscious level but it's a race to gather & keep attention - boring stuff won't cut it.
I'm not supporting author's point mind you, I believe education/informedness is the only thing we have approaching a silver bullet. But the amount of internet justice and vigilanteism we have today, a lot of it inspired by various kinds of news - from local cable TV news indicating our suburbian neighbourhoods are a pithole of violence, to politically charged national news, to hilarious reporting on science and medicine... it all outrages and most of it is at best numbing, at worst utterly wrong.
There's a certain amount of sensationalization to get eyeballs with things like headlines, obviously, but I'd be surprised if you looked at the various news stories that caused public outrage over the course of a year, if more than a small percentage were actually mis-reported/factually incorrect when it came to mainstream news coverage by reputable organizations.
Possibly. I don't think either one of us has immediate access to a solid survey or report/analysis - so it's an interesting point of its own that we have a wildly different initial estimate/assumption ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just as an example, a friend of mine had a fishing video get picked up by a few different news outlets. He gave a small writeup explaining the video to each of them. Not one of them reported the correct information. None of them got the location correct, only one got the kind of fish correct and one of them might as well have been talking about a totally different video, they literally contradicted what you could see in the video.
The way I see it, of something as trivial as a fishing video can be reported on so completely and utterly incorrectly, without the slightest regard for even the tiny amount of facts provided alongside the video, then why should i assume anything else is reported correctly?
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Agree that public outrage is useful. Sadly Trump is the counterpoint where people over identify with a subject to the point that the subject has total immunity.
> My heart breaks at the idea of a guy being murdered with no consequences, but that can't mean that we embrace anything and everything which delivers those consequences.
We don't. The outrage isn't even remotely what it ought to be. We see the videos, we perform grief, and then we forget. I don't see where this belief that we're somehow overreacting comes from: every couple of months, one of these murders in broad daylights happens to have the cop fired, only for them to be later rehired elsewhere. If your fear of overreaction reflected even a tenth of reality, they simply wouldn't be wearing, "I can't breathe," shirts.
Civic responsibility is not “anything and everything,” nor was it invented yesterday. Glancing over the day’s headlines and top stories every once in a while, having some idea of what’s going on, and factoring in that information at the voting booth is not an unreasonable expectation for a citizen in a democracy.
The 24 hour cable news cycle is toxic, yes, but there are still daily papers and even less frequent periodicals with generally calmer perspectives.
Completely agree. Sacrificing engagement with the social structures and historical progression that we as a species depend on is not an option that can deliver a healthy society.
No, “the news”, as in the propaganda emanating from the corporate hegemony machine, does not count. But, checking out entirely is nonetheless the worst thing one can do.
The author isn't proposing checking out entirely - documentaries are one of his suggested replacements. Disengaging with the news is just about not being flooded daily.
Exactly. An argument about better vs worse news sources I could totally understand. Checking out when it's anything that's not explicitly a local issue? That's...not great.
Not to mention, some of his reasoning conflicts with itself. Behold:
> When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”?
> I’ll answer for you: probably never.
> ...
> But it's different from hearing about the tsunami destroying a village thousands of miles away.
Surely the author is aware that people commonly do, in fact, take action and donate money when tragedies -- such as tsunamis -- take place very far away. In some cases, the foreign donations add up to quite a lot! So I'm not sure how he reconciles this in his head, both in the sense of the way he's describing things is factually incorrect, and also that the implication here is that you'd get less people helping with tragedies simply because they occurred somewhere foreign.
> This seems like the author is explicitly arguing for the tragedy of the commons. Yes, any one individual getting 'wound up' doesn't accomplish much, but the public 'at large' getting wound up can and does effect real change sometimes.
There's an easy compromise: it's likely that some people are better off not watching the news. This group might be more sensitive to disruptive news and opinion pieces. It'd do them good to stay away from news.
This is similar to certain food allergies. Peanuts are good stuff, but some people have negative reactions to it. They are better off without peanuts.
Similarly, if your response to news is highly psychologically disruptive, you'd do well to stay away from it. It doesn't have to mean that you are shirking your responsibilities as a citizen. Rather than exhaust yourself by responding to local and temporal events, you could conserve your energies for longer-term projects that help the society at a fundamental level.
This would be a better take. If you genuinely feel that being more informed about current events doesn't outweigh the psychological damage involved, especially if it stops you from being a contributing citizen in other ways, I could see an argument for checking out.
My counter-argument is specifically that if you scale up this advice to everyone or even most people, the implications are really awful.
> Peanuts are good stuff, but some people have negative reactions to it. They are better off without peanuts.
In the book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt talks about how schools were so concerned about Peanut allergies, a lot of places removed peanuts from school lunches and banned them from lunches people brought in. The result? Peanut allergies went up. Kids weren't being exposed to peanuts and it made the situation worse.
He uses it as an analogy to our ability to deal with things psychologically and how any attempt to remove bad/dangerous ideas (he calls this the "What ever doesn't kill you makes you weaker" fallacy) has made it more difficult to deal with controversial ideas and leads to a cultural of "safetyism" (e.g. safe spaces) in University/Academic environments.
>If the author here had gotten his way, nobody would've seen the video, nobody would've been outraged, and nothing would've happened after Ahmed was murdered. Am I supposed to believe that this is an improvement?
Well you need to compare against wasted time on framed narratives, misguided outrage leading to self-defeating policies, etc.
It's like saying poking holes in the ground randomly is a good method for discovering oil because someone lucked out.
It takes mental energy to suppress and control emotional outrage, which is bad for your overall mental health and personal productivity.
>Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit.
-- Daniel Kahneman
I don't think the author is arguing you should NEVER be outraged, just that you should be more selective about your attention.
It's actually up for debate whether ego depletion is a real thing.
> Some meta analyses and studies have questioned the size and existence of the ego depletion effect.[3] The ultimate validity of those later studies is not universally agreed.[5] Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisrantis, whose 2010 meta-analysis seemed to support the existence of the ego depletion effect,[5] subsequently performed a pre-registered 23 lab replication study which found no ego-depletion effect.[6]
> ...
> In 2016, a major study (2141 participants) carried out at two dozen labs across the world using a single protocol failed to find any evidence for ego depletion.[3][31] In response, Baumeister argued that his original protocol was rejected by the project coordinators, and after discussion was stalled, he only reluctantly agreed to a task that differed to some degree from the original 1998 studies.[32] Replication difficulties have also emerged for 5 additional protocols (operationalizations) of the basic ego depletion effect.[33]
> A 2010 meta analysis of 198 independent tests found the effect significant with a moderate effect size (d = .6). Even after accounting for possible unpublished failed studies, the analysis concluded that it is extremely unlikely that the effect doesn't exist.[34]
> In 2015, a meta analysis of over 100 studies by Carter and McCullough argued that the 2010 meta-analysis failed to take publication bias into account. They showed statistical evidence for publication bias. When they statistically controlled for publication bias, the effect size estimate was small (d = .2) and not significantly different from zero.[35][36] Michael Inzlicht and colleagues praised Carter's meta analysis, but argued that bias-correction techniques are not precise enough to give a precise control size estimate.[5][37] In response, Cunningham and Baumeister argued that Carter and McCullough analysis contained errors in its data collection and in the various analyses used.[5]
> Ulrich Schimmack (2016) conducted a meta-analysis of published studies and found that most studies could produce significant results only with the help of random sampling error. Based on the low power of studies, one would expect a large number of non-significant results, but these results are missing from published articles. This finding confirms Carter and McCullough's meta-analysis that showed publication bias with a different statistical method. Schimmack's replicability report also identified a small set of studies with adequate power that provided evidence for ego-depletion. These studies are the most promising studies for a replication project to examine whether ego-depletion effects can be replicated consistently across several independent laboratories.[38]
The summary is that controversial issues are the ones that go viral. Not the ones that necessarily deserve to go viral. That is the theory of the post I linked -- I do not make any commentary whatsoever about any individual event.
You combine that behavior with social media, especially Twitter, and the symbiotic relationship with the news media. It's a non-stop anger generation machine. Rapidly iterating on these thoughts, packaging and surfacing the most potent, viral version. Any nuance and context long ago removed.
But if you actually watch the news you'll see that most of what is reported won't get better with any amount of being "wound up". Natural disasters, crime, accidents etc. There is no sense at all in learning about such things.
There are definitely benefits to the 24 hour news cycle, like the Ahmaud Arbery case you mentioned, but I don't think it is clear that those benefits are worth the cost to society as whole. For every case where the outrage is justified, there are cases where there was public outrage that was based on completely false information, or directed to the wrong individual. And this also can motivate people to do things like mass shootings, since you know that the story of what you did will be talked about around the country for days.
Outside of people being targeted for no reason, this news cycle just polarizes the American public. People have their set of news sources that only push them the news supporting their opinion, and spin the news in their favor, moving peoples opinions further to the extremes - politics stops being about real issues, and there is no room for real debate. In a building I lived in they had CNN constantly playing in the games room, and all they ever seemed to have was talking heads discussing Trump, mostly speculation about Russia at the time - does that really lead to anyone being more informed, or cause any positive action? I don't think this cost is worth the few cases where the public outrage was correct and effective.
I think it would be a huge problem if the general public stopped consuming any national/international news at all, since injustice would go unnoticed unless it affected you directly. And of course with things like COVID it is important to be informed about what is going on. But I think we would all be better off if instead of looking at the news every day, we just looked at the top stories once or twice a week on a set of reputable news sites, and stayed out of the comments.
The entirety of human civilization and progression up to the last decade or so happened without being constantly outraged by the news and social media. At some point I have to choose my own health over whatever people think they are achieving by getting pissed off.
That’s not true at all. TV, and newspapers before that have inspired outrage when they expose wrongdoing for a very long time now. No, it’s not constant like social media, but it’s still been a powerful force. There’s a reason the printing press is regarded as such an important invention!
This is the way to do it. Serious kudos for this post OP.
Turn off notifications about "breaking news" on your phone, declutter your inbox by unsubscribing to newsletters from media outlets, and unfollow news co's on social media (hint: using Twitter's keyword filter is a peach for this). Completely and utterly disengage. I've done this for the past year or so and have completely mellowed out and gotten a lot more done.
The funny part? Nothing has really changed in the world, even with a pandemic tossed in. Barring opinion pieces and in-depth journalism, it's all a machine designed to keep you angry, helpless, and unthinking.
> This guy must be loads of fun at dinner parties ;)
There's nothing wrong with saying "I have no interest in participating in the outrage circus with you". The whole point is that that cycle is not fun, dinner party or not.
That's a fair point about tone. In my mind it's the difference, when being asked "Would you like a beer", between answering "No thanks", and "No thanks, I don't drink". One says simply no, the other says no, that's something I specifically abstain from. I suppose that could be seen as smug, and the difference would largely be in tone, as you say.
The Church committee hearings in 1975 had the CIA admitting they had key people in magazine and print media, but when pressed if they had people in TV, they requested a closed session.
If this clip showed just one set of news stations (all NBC stations) saying the same line, that would be one thing (they're just getting phrases to include from higher up) but it's tons of different networks.
Sure they could just be cutting up and reporting the same AP article they licensed or a press release (Occam's Razor) but it's also likely this particular narrative is pushed, at best, by advertisers wanting a specific message, and at worst, by the government or the CIA. It has happened before (Operation Mockingbird and COINTELPRO). It's silly to think it's not happening now.
For those who still want news, I think reuters provides the most balance. They do still lean left at times though with overuse of phrases like "far right".
Doing a Google search 'site:reuters.com "far right"' I couldn't find any hit where the "far-right" would be inappropriate. Could you give an example where Reuters is left-leaning in your opinion.
In 2020, "far right" has become a cheap epithet frequently applied to half of the country. (cf "deplorables") As such, it really has no application by a neutral news source anymore.
Or, to put it another way, if half of the electorate holds fairly similar views, they cannot reasonably be described as "far right" (or "far left", for that matter). The "far" end would be maybe one percent, not fifty.
In any case, I appreciate journalists that simply describe the situation, and allow me to decide for myself what I think about it. Hard to remember now, but that's how it actually used to be.
"Far right" and "far left" are both garbage terms, as they frame the political gamut to favor some reasonable "center", with that supposed "center" being economically-expedient authoritarianism. Use of the prefix "far-" is essentially just Overton window policing.
I hardly watch the news anymore. I let myself read the papers at night. But I found myself checking and checking, so once a day. (I was photo editor of my college paper, so I have a soft spot for newspapers).
I do listen to my local public radio statio. I'm in Boston and WGBH, is pretty good.
They even have a radio talk show (worst title: Boston Public Radio) which has news, events and other discussions. Lots of local (which was more relevent when there where events to discover...) I don't always listen, but it can be pretty funny when people call in.
They go for entertainment and selling ads so they have to make it exciting with a lot of controversy. News is actually quite boring and uneventful if you read only reuters or apnews.
List of political activities ordered by actual effects on the world, more to less:
1) involvement in local politics (say, with a party or with advocacy groups),
2) voting in local politics,
3) involvement in state or national politics,
...
1,000) voting in state or national elections.
You're arguably a better citizen if you ignore everything past your county or metro area entirely but get really involved in the local stuff—internal party activity, commission meetings, GOTV, activism, that kind of thing, maybe even run for office—compared with your average only-votes-every-two-years-at-best-but-reads-the-NYT folks. Caring about Federal politics, unless you get really involved, only makes sense as entertainment or out of some kind of categorical-imperative obligation.
Ever seen a news broadcast that said "well, nothing really important happened today, so we're not doing a show - instead here's an hour of cat videos instead"? This is 24 times worse with the proliferation of dedicated news channels.
At the same time, the recipe for click-bait has been perfected, and that's bled over into TV news as well. Sensationalism and outrage sell.
It also seems like there's a strong culture that being first is far more important than being correct, and so even when there is news I might care about, it's hard to get actual details: It's early and inaccurate information, or worse, just various "talking heads" going on for hours speculating but not really adding anything useful.
24 hour news channels are almost useless. I still like the daily news magazine that's put together by networks, like NBC Nightly news. Weeklies like 60 minutes are usually fine too.
A democracy only works if people know what's going on. Otherwise, the collective decision-making process is no longer connected to politician's actions and the whole process breaks down.
That's the most basic theory of any regulated system: air conditioning needs a thermometer. A driver needs to keep their eyes open to stay on the road. Any such system is a feedback loop of actuators (wheels / politicians), sensors, and some sense-making equipment in between.
Yes, I know it feels insignificant to cast a ballot once every four years, as one of hundreds of millions. But that election carries a lot of power and recognising and getting over the collective action problem inherent in democracy is sort-of among the duties of being a citizen, as opposed to a mere consumer.
On a large scale, perhaps so. But in terms of what I individually can accomplish, the answer is "nothing". The chances that my vote, my petition, my call to a politician, my letter to a newspaper, my post on social media, will affect the world in any way are infinitesimally small. Weighed against near certain negative mental health effects, it makes a lot of sense to just check out. Or at least to stop spending more than a few minutes per month on it.
If you really want to make a difference, spend five more minutes each day with your kid. Or checking in with someone in your life that's going through hard times.
>The chances that my vote, my petition, my call to a politician, my letter to a newspaper, my post on social media, will affect the world in any way are infinitesimally small
they are but that's not actually participating in politics. Participating in politics can mean joining a party yourself, joining a city council. Running for a local office. Participating in a local activist campaign, and so on.
The author's thesis declares news unecessary on the basis that it has no influence on your life. That's only true if you're already detached from public life or citizenship to begin with. The word 'idiot' actually literally translates to 'private person'. In ancient Greece it used to be an epiphet for a person not participating in public life. That's essentially what the author is encouraging, literal idiocy, when the task should be to rekindle participation.
> Participating in politics can mean joining a party yourself, joining a city council. Running for a local office. Participating in a local activist campaign, and so on.
By my estimate, those would also have an infinitesimal chance of significantly changing the world, compared to just staying home and pushing my kid on a swing.
If that makes me an "idiot", so be it.
(And if it makes you feel any better, that should make it easier for you to push politics in your direction.)
News doesn't connect the collective decision-making process to politicians' actions - it connects it to what the news tells us politicians are doing and why. Effectively, it makes democracy less about rule by the people and more about rule by the press. That system is starting to break down in some countries and journalists are not happy about it.
I work in the larger media [Canada], and I am constantly engaged with the news. I like knowing what's going on in the world. I like being current with it. Especially local news.
I've never watched the news, but I regularly read sites like HN and Reddit. I feel like from there I get the 'outrage overload' effect as well, but IDK what to do about it. I could stop going on those sites, but then I would truly feel like I'm cut off from an absolute wealth of information. It feels different from being 'cut off' from TV news channels or websites that I would only really read if I was referred from Reddit or HN anyways.
also, get off facebook - it's just stealing your attention and rotting your brain.
stopped watching the news 15 years ago. this one mostly gets this right. stop watching the news. if something so important happens that you should know about it, other people will tell you about it.
also, you can direct your attention to things that do a good job to give you a signal to noise ratios: hackernews and very specific subreddits work wonders.
It seems like a weird time to post this article to HN. Aren't we all living through an extremely good example of why paying attention to the news pays off? Generally speaking, people I know who read the news prepared for SARS-CoV-2 by mid-February, and those who were disconnected from the news were caught off guard a month later when everything shut down.
One thing I will happily grant is that _watching_ the news is a terrible idea. TV twists everything into being frivolous entertainment, regardless of the topic. Newspapers aren't much better. Too short a time horizon, too much blow-by-blow, meaning no time for context and low signal to noise.
I find that weekly and monthly magazines strike a better balance. Authors have time to write up background and provide context, and little blips and false starts get smoothed over by the passage of time.
People I know who read the news were prepared in mid-February, but they're now extraordinarily neurotic. One of them won't allow visits from even his girlfriend and expects that American manufacturing will collapse within a few months; another doesn't plan to visit restaurants or stores until 2021. They're the ones who I most want to shake and say, hey, it won't hurt you to stop seeking out bad news.
Yeah, people can take things too far. There are definitely safe ways to go to a store, if the store is taking precautions. I'm not so sure about indoor restaurants right now in the US, but I guess you could make a case for it.
On the other hand, I can see why being gaslit for a few months would make lots of people neurotic. The sky was really falling for awhile before anybody in power in the US seemed willing to acknowledge it. Personally, I've lost a lot of faith in our public health departments to have the freedom to tell it like it is, or to have the budget to do anything about it. Being in New York City for the last few months probably doesn't help.
I learned about the risk from individuals on twitter long before mass media took it seriously. A news channel is a pre curated collection of editors and reporters. I don't think many do a good job of it, due to my ideosyncracies and their incentives. I find it much better to curate my own channel from around the web ... like HN. Modern tech makes it easy.
Fair, but I think for the purposes of this article, social media accounts (could be friends or corporations) that talk about breaking events would also count as "the news". Both in the plusses and the minuses! Upside, you're more aware of what's going on. Downside, you still can't do anything about it. Only faster.
In a lot of ways, current-events Twitter is more like cable news than it is like reading a weekly. All hot takes, no time for context. But like you said, for idiosyncratic folks, the "lifestyle" content is going to be much more relevant on Twitter than on CNN.
On the other hand many people (I can think of a number of them from my personal circle of acquaintances alone) learned to be terrified of the virus to a wholly unreasonable and panicked degree that doesn't even let them rationally consider risks vs. benefits in going out for a bit of exercise or to buy needed groceries.
This happened because of the news, frequently reporting tentative theories and information about worse case scenarios or extremes as if both were given and much more common things.
Just one example: A piece of recent WaPo reporting whose headline very clearly implied that a whole wave of deaths among young children was being caused by "strange symptoms" of COVID.
Then when one actually read the piece, a slow admission that they were talking about only a very small number of cases out of thousands of pediatric COVID cases.
This is just one example, and considering how many users of social media don't even bother to read news pieces, instead simply sharing them among their friends because the titles sounded scary, it's irresponsible nonsense for a major news outlet to phrase its headlines with so much hyperbole.
Agree. And there's actually empirical data to back that up: individuals dramatically overestimate the infectiousness and fatality rate of COVID-19 relative to expert opinion.
I'm dubious of this claim that those paying attention to the news were those best prepared for COVID. The mainstream news didn't really seem to think it was a huge deal mid-February. I feel like the people that were "prepared" were those listening to certain experts sounding the alarm.
Even then, what was anybody really able to do to prepare? The best you could have done was to have gotten your shopping in during mid to late February before the panic buying started. And even then, most goods weren't that hard to come by. The other thing would have been having a good emergency fund, to prepare for the economic turmoil and potential job losses. But that's something you would have needed to prepare for much, much earlier, and should be something everyone does, regardless of their news intake.
> I find that weekly and monthly magazines strike a better balance
I agree on this. Do you have any recommendations for good monthly magazines that do this well?
> The mainstream news didn't really seem to think it was a huge deal mid-February.
I have to disagree, or maybe we have a different idea of what is mainstream. The New York Times front page was making a big stink about the coronavirus in Wuhan as early as mid-January. By mid-February they were already quoting experts in European countries telling people to be prepared for a pandemic.
> Even then, what was anybody really able to do to prepare?
For me, more critical than stocking up on anything, was just more time to adjust to the new reality and grieve for what would be lost. I cancelled a number of trips ahead of time, and correctly called that our office wouldn't reopen in two weeks as it had originally been planned to do. I think it's just made the adjustment easier.
> Do you have any recommendations for good monthly magazines that do this well?
The Economist is solid, and in the last few years they added professionally recorded audio versions of their content available in tandem with the digital edition that drops every Thursday. It's like a podcast, except fact checked and with a good sense of perspective. I put it on when I'm cooking or cleaning. I'm also a fan of the Financial Times's Big Read (their weekly magazine stories) and they too put those out in audio form.
When I have more time, I like reading Harpers, the Atlantic, and the NY Times magazine.
> I have to disagree, or maybe we have a different idea of what is mainstream. The New York Times front page was making a big stink about the coronavirus in Wuhan as early as mid-January. By mid-February they were already quoting experts in European countries telling people to be prepared for a pandemic.
Fair, maybe it's the fact that the media is constantly catastrophizing everything that I didn't pay attention to coverage like that. I did start paying attention as soon as I started hearing the warning bells from a bunch of experts in mid February.
Thanks for the recommendation of The Economist. I wish they had a monthly option, looks like they only do weekly? I've had so much trouble finding a good news source or magazine that has a monthly edition / subscription. Guess there's not much money in that.
Is this talking about TV news? If so, I might agree. TV oversimplifies and goes for the sensational and emotional. Plus, they have hours and hours to fill even if there's no content. These days TV news is almost completely a time waster.
But other kinds of news? Disagreed. Especially world and national news. Those are the most interesting. If you keep yourself focused on community news -- which are both relevant and at the same time the most inane -- you stay parochial, which is ok if you don't mind it, but I do. I find the world and world news interesting and relevant. My immediate community is not that interesting.
Also, the news is not only about taking action (though there is that, too). I can't possibly take action about a nuclear disaster in Japan or a famine in Africa, but I want to know about them. I want to know about world's events as they happen, not only in a documentary years later.
This guy Joseph Well runs some kind of writing course, right? Because I'm unimpressed with his essays...
> Those are the most interesting. If you keep yourself focused on community news -- which are both relevant and at the same time the most inane -- you stay parochial, which is ok if you don't mind it, but I do. I find the world and world news interesting and relevant. My immediate community is not that interesting.
As someone who deals with anxiety, I don't find world news interesting and relevant. I find it panic and anxiety inducing, and it's rarely ever actionable. Local news is generally much more useful and actionable for my daily life.
I still find it important to stay informed of general world events, but I just can't mentally follow it on a daily or even weekly basis anymore.
That's ok. What you say makes sense. Note I did mention "actionable" doesn't factor into what I consider interesting. I find the world interesting, I guess.
What I find annoying are blanket statements like "don't follow the news". Says who? Who is this guy to tell me what is reasonable to consider interesting, and whether following world news is something I do "to worry"?
> When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”?
> I’ll answer for you: probably never.
The article is dated "July 29" so I'll assume 2019.
We have a pretty huge counterexample right now: the pandemic has led to a lot of critical information needing to be conveyed to everyone very rapidly. For example, people need to be aware that they cannot leave home, or that they should wear masks when doing so, etc.
Often, the government doesn't have a reliable way to reach the entire population quickly. For example, in the UK, the government sent a letter to every household outlining coronavirus guidance. This letter takes a few days to reach everyone.
The news can be leveraged by the government to relay important messages to the population without any effort.
At the end of the day people do need to be informed. Saying "stop watching the news" is like telling someone who's overweight to "stop eating".
As I see it the problem is the junk-news. It presents as news but there's little substance, it doesn't make you more informed, it makes you angry, upset, and most-importantly (to the new station), engaged.
Matt Taibbi's new book, Hate Inc does a great job of illustrating how the "junk news" (and he doesn't just go after the Right) industry is rotting our brains:
News (particularly in the US) is so caught up in Politics that no one ever knows what anyone's policies are any more.
My favourite part of this article is:
There is voting, of course, but to become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election. There’s no need to have to suffer through the daily back-and-forth of allegations and counter-allegations, of scurrilous lies and their refutations. Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics.
Among other things, it helped me understand why I was seeing and reading what media outlets were producing at the time, before and since then. Until I read this article I didn't understand how we got to the level of disconnect that is so clearly evidenced by US media. Well worth reading for anyone who cares enough to try and understand where this is coming from.
I actively ignore news because it can just lead to me getting upset at something I can't control, just like the author says. I don't advocate this for everyone, but I like it for myself. I've been told that it's my duty as an American citizen to pay attention to the news, but I disagree. My mindset is that, if something really matters, it will make its way into my view. For example, I didn't actively follow COVID-19 before the week prior to the beginning of America's national emergency, but it made enough of a splash on the platforms I use (Reddit and HN) and the people I talk to (friends, family, and coworkers) that I became aware, realized it was something I needed to pay attention to.
I don't want to focus on the constant back and forth of political rivalries, because it usually doesn't affect me directly, and why would I cause myself discomfort by indulging in stories I have no control over.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadYears ago I stopped watching satire news too. I use to love Colbert and Stewart, but I also realized I was laughing at .. genocide. I thought that such a format might make people more aware and such news more palatable, but I came to believe that it just makes us numb and dumb to some of the harsher realities of the time we occupy.
If you do have to listen to something, I suggest the No Agenda Podcast (one of the oldest podcasts in existence) and the Corbet Report. Even then, take them in limited doses.
I think Colorado has the best NPR affiliate of all time -- they go by CPR. Really popular, even among younger people. Highest quality news and radio... I wonder if any other states/cities have similar quality public radio?
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/wipedoffthemap/
I use to listen to Democracy Now back then too, but I really don't think either news source as really held up over the years. They're both very polarized, and the quality of their content has gone down as well.
This seems like the author is explicitly arguing for the tragedy of the commons. Yes, any one individual getting 'wound up' doesn't accomplish much, but the public 'at large' getting wound up can and does effect real change sometimes.
Like, it's very easy to point to a variety of topics, about which there was sufficient public outrage from a news story to cause some change. For example, the recent killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger in Georgia. Before the public outrage that followed the release of the video, the killers had not even so much as been arrested.
If the author here had gotten his way, nobody would've seen the video, nobody would've been outraged, and nothing would've happened after Ahmed was murdered. Am I supposed to believe that this is an improvement?
And this is where the "conversation" piece may come in with a 21st century twist. Enough folks highlighted it as the "most important thing" to make it widely known via retweets and likes.
You could also look at something covered more by regular news sources, like how the GOP's attempted repeal of Obamacare was blocked by public response once it became clear how many people would lose health insurance coverage. Suddenly, the repeal that was reasonably popular overall (and very popular on the right) was much less so. Would the repeal having quietly passed through Congress because nobody was paying attention to national news have been an improvement?
The author's argument is one in favor of selfishness: being a well-informed citizen of your state or country does not benefit you personally, so why bother? I actually think that the logic does hold, it's just that the implication of everyone listening to his advice is that the country becomes less informed as a whole, which sounds really, REALLY bad to me. People's average level of political and current event knowledge already seems dreadfully low, someone pushing to make it lower yet...why?
I don't think that the author point at all. He is arguing that the news in their modern form have mostly become a form of entertainment.
I will hasard that someone who would forever stop following the news but actually engaged in any form of local actions connected to their outrage of choice even in the most sporadical of manners would have a disproportionally larger impact on society than a well informed individual. Heck, any kind of local engagement, be it the knitting club or kids soccer, will probably have a larger impact. The news is thankfully not the only source of news.
> But to what end?
> Aside from feeling bad for the victims –and worrying the same thing might happen to you – you’re powerless to make a positive impact. Hearing the news is merely a distraction.
> “But,” you might argue, “everything on the news doesn’t revolve around tragedies. I need to know what’s going on in the world!”
> Do you really?
> When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”?
> I’ll answer for you: probably never.
> If that’s the case, what’re you actually getting from the news? Aggravated? Wound up? Certainly not informed about anything important.
> Most of the time, watching the news is as useful as watching The Jersey Shore. You’re watching it to turn off your brain and mainline outrage.
He's not arguing about something that's not "real news"; an enormous tragedy occurring somewhere, like a tsunami killing many people, obviously qualifies as real news. He's arguing that it leading to "just outrage", just sentiment, is not productive. But that's only true if you look at it in an individual sense, of being productive in your own life. If you look at it being productive in aggregate, in society as a whole, the reasoning doesn't work anymore.
Now, you could make the argument that the author is unaware of the many thousands of times that outrage in its various forms -- like protests, or riots, or revolutions -- has led to significant changes; perhaps he is simply astoundingly ignorant of essentially all history, and thus doesn't know that outrage can do things like, say, get America to leave the Vietnam war, or get a President to resign from office, to use two well-known examples. But I'm not sure that's a more charitable or plausible take.
That's where we disagree and I think I see the root of our disagreement. Reading your last paragraph, you seem to link news consumption and actual actions like protests, riots and revolution. I don't think this link exists. Most of those are actually started by activists and stem from local engagement (unionism, political organizations). It is very removed from news consumption which is not the only way of being informed.
Public outrage is one check on societal institutions. The police are a check on general lawlessness and disorder, and the fact that sometimes they kill someone they really shouldn't have doesn't make us think, "well just get rid of the police then altogether I suppose". Why would we get rid of public outrage, just because sometimes it's wrong?
Public outrage is what makes journalism function as the fourth estate, after all. Investigative journalism of national-level issues in particular: what would the point of all of it be, if nobody read or cared? Thus, the author's argument is also an argument for investigate journalism of any non-'local' issue to cease to exist. Does this sound like a good idea?
As I mentioned in another comment thread, I don't think the author objects (and I certainly don't object) to in-depth investigations of national or global issues. That's a vanishingly small portion of what the news as instantiated today does.
Commercial news by definition is looking to shock/sensationalize/rile up. It may not be on a conscious level but it's a race to gather & keep attention - boring stuff won't cut it.
I'm not supporting author's point mind you, I believe education/informedness is the only thing we have approaching a silver bullet. But the amount of internet justice and vigilanteism we have today, a lot of it inspired by various kinds of news - from local cable TV news indicating our suburbian neighbourhoods are a pithole of violence, to politically charged national news, to hilarious reporting on science and medicine... it all outrages and most of it is at best numbing, at worst utterly wrong.
The way I see it, of something as trivial as a fishing video can be reported on so completely and utterly incorrectly, without the slightest regard for even the tiny amount of facts provided alongside the video, then why should i assume anything else is reported correctly?
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
We don't. The outrage isn't even remotely what it ought to be. We see the videos, we perform grief, and then we forget. I don't see where this belief that we're somehow overreacting comes from: every couple of months, one of these murders in broad daylights happens to have the cop fired, only for them to be later rehired elsewhere. If your fear of overreaction reflected even a tenth of reality, they simply wouldn't be wearing, "I can't breathe," shirts.
The 24 hour cable news cycle is toxic, yes, but there are still daily papers and even less frequent periodicals with generally calmer perspectives.
No, “the news”, as in the propaganda emanating from the corporate hegemony machine, does not count. But, checking out entirely is nonetheless the worst thing one can do.
Not to mention, some of his reasoning conflicts with itself. Behold:
> When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”?
> I’ll answer for you: probably never.
> ...
> But it's different from hearing about the tsunami destroying a village thousands of miles away.
Surely the author is aware that people commonly do, in fact, take action and donate money when tragedies -- such as tsunamis -- take place very far away. In some cases, the foreign donations add up to quite a lot! So I'm not sure how he reconciles this in his head, both in the sense of the way he's describing things is factually incorrect, and also that the implication here is that you'd get less people helping with tragedies simply because they occurred somewhere foreign.
There's an easy compromise: it's likely that some people are better off not watching the news. This group might be more sensitive to disruptive news and opinion pieces. It'd do them good to stay away from news.
This is similar to certain food allergies. Peanuts are good stuff, but some people have negative reactions to it. They are better off without peanuts.
Similarly, if your response to news is highly psychologically disruptive, you'd do well to stay away from it. It doesn't have to mean that you are shirking your responsibilities as a citizen. Rather than exhaust yourself by responding to local and temporal events, you could conserve your energies for longer-term projects that help the society at a fundamental level.
My counter-argument is specifically that if you scale up this advice to everyone or even most people, the implications are really awful.
In the book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt talks about how schools were so concerned about Peanut allergies, a lot of places removed peanuts from school lunches and banned them from lunches people brought in. The result? Peanut allergies went up. Kids weren't being exposed to peanuts and it made the situation worse.
He uses it as an analogy to our ability to deal with things psychologically and how any attempt to remove bad/dangerous ideas (he calls this the "What ever doesn't kill you makes you weaker" fallacy) has made it more difficult to deal with controversial ideas and leads to a cultural of "safetyism" (e.g. safe spaces) in University/Academic environments.
Well you need to compare against wasted time on framed narratives, misguided outrage leading to self-defeating policies, etc.
It's like saying poking holes in the ground randomly is a good method for discovering oil because someone lucked out.
>Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit.
-- Daniel Kahneman
I don't think the author is arguing you should NEVER be outraged, just that you should be more selective about your attention.
> Some meta analyses and studies have questioned the size and existence of the ego depletion effect.[3] The ultimate validity of those later studies is not universally agreed.[5] Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisrantis, whose 2010 meta-analysis seemed to support the existence of the ego depletion effect,[5] subsequently performed a pre-registered 23 lab replication study which found no ego-depletion effect.[6]
> ...
> In 2016, a major study (2141 participants) carried out at two dozen labs across the world using a single protocol failed to find any evidence for ego depletion.[3][31] In response, Baumeister argued that his original protocol was rejected by the project coordinators, and after discussion was stalled, he only reluctantly agreed to a task that differed to some degree from the original 1998 studies.[32] Replication difficulties have also emerged for 5 additional protocols (operationalizations) of the basic ego depletion effect.[33]
> A 2010 meta analysis of 198 independent tests found the effect significant with a moderate effect size (d = .6). Even after accounting for possible unpublished failed studies, the analysis concluded that it is extremely unlikely that the effect doesn't exist.[34]
> In 2015, a meta analysis of over 100 studies by Carter and McCullough argued that the 2010 meta-analysis failed to take publication bias into account. They showed statistical evidence for publication bias. When they statistically controlled for publication bias, the effect size estimate was small (d = .2) and not significantly different from zero.[35][36] Michael Inzlicht and colleagues praised Carter's meta analysis, but argued that bias-correction techniques are not precise enough to give a precise control size estimate.[5][37] In response, Cunningham and Baumeister argued that Carter and McCullough analysis contained errors in its data collection and in the various analyses used.[5]
> Ulrich Schimmack (2016) conducted a meta-analysis of published studies and found that most studies could produce significant results only with the help of random sampling error. Based on the low power of studies, one would expect a large number of non-significant results, but these results are missing from published articles. This finding confirms Carter and McCullough's meta-analysis that showed publication bias with a different statistical method. Schimmack's replicability report also identified a small set of studies with adequate power that provided evidence for ego-depletion. These studies are the most promising studies for a replication project to examine whether ego-depletion effects can be replicated consistently across several independent laboratories.[38]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion
Beyond that, how would you be more selective about your outrage if you're skipping the news to begin with?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
The summary is that controversial issues are the ones that go viral. Not the ones that necessarily deserve to go viral. That is the theory of the post I linked -- I do not make any commentary whatsoever about any individual event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
You combine that behavior with social media, especially Twitter, and the symbiotic relationship with the news media. It's a non-stop anger generation machine. Rapidly iterating on these thoughts, packaging and surfacing the most potent, viral version. Any nuance and context long ago removed.
Outside of people being targeted for no reason, this news cycle just polarizes the American public. People have their set of news sources that only push them the news supporting their opinion, and spin the news in their favor, moving peoples opinions further to the extremes - politics stops being about real issues, and there is no room for real debate. In a building I lived in they had CNN constantly playing in the games room, and all they ever seemed to have was talking heads discussing Trump, mostly speculation about Russia at the time - does that really lead to anyone being more informed, or cause any positive action? I don't think this cost is worth the few cases where the public outrage was correct and effective.
I think it would be a huge problem if the general public stopped consuming any national/international news at all, since injustice would go unnoticed unless it affected you directly. And of course with things like COVID it is important to be informed about what is going on. But I think we would all be better off if instead of looking at the news every day, we just looked at the top stories once or twice a week on a set of reputable news sites, and stayed out of the comments.
Turn off notifications about "breaking news" on your phone, declutter your inbox by unsubscribing to newsletters from media outlets, and unfollow news co's on social media (hint: using Twitter's keyword filter is a peach for this). Completely and utterly disengage. I've done this for the past year or so and have completely mellowed out and gotten a lot more done.
The funny part? Nothing has really changed in the world, even with a pandemic tossed in. Barring opinion pieces and in-depth journalism, it's all a machine designed to keep you angry, helpless, and unthinking.
This guy must be loads of fun at dinner parties ;)... i'd say stopping at "i don't know enough about it." would be the perfectly fine thing to say.
There's nothing wrong with saying "I have no interest in participating in the outrage circus with you". The whole point is that that cycle is not fun, dinner party or not.
In the case you describe, you're passing judgement on the other person.
People who pass judgement on other people are unlikely to be much fun to talk to at dinner parties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6U2Un5kEdI
If this clip showed just one set of news stations (all NBC stations) saying the same line, that would be one thing (they're just getting phrases to include from higher up) but it's tons of different networks.
Sure they could just be cutting up and reporting the same AP article they licensed or a press release (Occam's Razor) but it's also likely this particular narrative is pushed, at best, by advertisers wanting a specific message, and at worst, by the government or the CIA. It has happened before (Operation Mockingbird and COINTELPRO). It's silly to think it's not happening now.
I doubt this would be true for NYT, WaPo, etc., but I am indeed too lazy to look.
For those too young to remember what reasonable journalism used to look like, Reuters and AP are probably the closest, in the MSM.
How is that a good thing? "Far right" and "far left" are both perfectly fine terms to describe certain political ideologies and movements.
Or, to put it another way, if half of the electorate holds fairly similar views, they cannot reasonably be described as "far right" (or "far left", for that matter). The "far" end would be maybe one percent, not fifty.
In any case, I appreciate journalists that simply describe the situation, and allow me to decide for myself what I think about it. Hard to remember now, but that's how it actually used to be.
I do listen to my local public radio statio. I'm in Boston and WGBH, is pretty good.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/
They even have a radio talk show (worst title: Boston Public Radio) which has news, events and other discussions. Lots of local (which was more relevent when there where events to discover...) I don't always listen, but it can be pretty funny when people call in.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/boston-public-radio
I agree about local newspapers. We should worry more about what's going on close to us versus Washington.
They've done good work at times, but it's still TV.
1) involvement in local politics (say, with a party or with advocacy groups),
2) voting in local politics,
3) involvement in state or national politics,
...
1,000) voting in state or national elections.
You're arguably a better citizen if you ignore everything past your county or metro area entirely but get really involved in the local stuff—internal party activity, commission meetings, GOTV, activism, that kind of thing, maybe even run for office—compared with your average only-votes-every-two-years-at-best-but-reads-the-NYT folks. Caring about Federal politics, unless you get really involved, only makes sense as entertainment or out of some kind of categorical-imperative obligation.
At the same time, the recipe for click-bait has been perfected, and that's bled over into TV news as well. Sensationalism and outrage sell.
It also seems like there's a strong culture that being first is far more important than being correct, and so even when there is news I might care about, it's hard to get actual details: It's early and inaccurate information, or worse, just various "talking heads" going on for hours speculating but not really adding anything useful.
That's the most basic theory of any regulated system: air conditioning needs a thermometer. A driver needs to keep their eyes open to stay on the road. Any such system is a feedback loop of actuators (wheels / politicians), sensors, and some sense-making equipment in between.
Yes, I know it feels insignificant to cast a ballot once every four years, as one of hundreds of millions. But that election carries a lot of power and recognising and getting over the collective action problem inherent in democracy is sort-of among the duties of being a citizen, as opposed to a mere consumer.
If you really want to make a difference, spend five more minutes each day with your kid. Or checking in with someone in your life that's going through hard times.
they are but that's not actually participating in politics. Participating in politics can mean joining a party yourself, joining a city council. Running for a local office. Participating in a local activist campaign, and so on.
The author's thesis declares news unecessary on the basis that it has no influence on your life. That's only true if you're already detached from public life or citizenship to begin with. The word 'idiot' actually literally translates to 'private person'. In ancient Greece it used to be an epiphet for a person not participating in public life. That's essentially what the author is encouraging, literal idiocy, when the task should be to rekindle participation.
By my estimate, those would also have an infinitesimal chance of significantly changing the world, compared to just staying home and pushing my kid on a swing.
If that makes me an "idiot", so be it.
(And if it makes you feel any better, that should make it easier for you to push politics in your direction.)
Just the same, it's no less than healthy to unplug... as beautifully put by one of the Nelson boys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPrPtDoaB3s
Once I stopped going on r/popular or r/all my mood when using the site improved drastically
stopped watching the news 15 years ago. this one mostly gets this right. stop watching the news. if something so important happens that you should know about it, other people will tell you about it.
also, you can direct your attention to things that do a good job to give you a signal to noise ratios: hackernews and very specific subreddits work wonders.
"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers." — Nassim Taleb
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/media/2013/...
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
https://www.docdroid.net/4wgVecr/why-speculate-michael-crich...
One thing I will happily grant is that _watching_ the news is a terrible idea. TV twists everything into being frivolous entertainment, regardless of the topic. Newspapers aren't much better. Too short a time horizon, too much blow-by-blow, meaning no time for context and low signal to noise.
I find that weekly and monthly magazines strike a better balance. Authors have time to write up background and provide context, and little blips and false starts get smoothed over by the passage of time.
On the other hand, I can see why being gaslit for a few months would make lots of people neurotic. The sky was really falling for awhile before anybody in power in the US seemed willing to acknowledge it. Personally, I've lost a lot of faith in our public health departments to have the freedom to tell it like it is, or to have the budget to do anything about it. Being in New York City for the last few months probably doesn't help.
In a lot of ways, current-events Twitter is more like cable news than it is like reading a weekly. All hot takes, no time for context. But like you said, for idiosyncratic folks, the "lifestyle" content is going to be much more relevant on Twitter than on CNN.
This happened because of the news, frequently reporting tentative theories and information about worse case scenarios or extremes as if both were given and much more common things.
Just one example: A piece of recent WaPo reporting whose headline very clearly implied that a whole wave of deaths among young children was being caused by "strange symptoms" of COVID.
Then when one actually read the piece, a slow admission that they were talking about only a very small number of cases out of thousands of pediatric COVID cases.
This is just one example, and considering how many users of social media don't even bother to read news pieces, instead simply sharing them among their friends because the titles sounded scary, it's irresponsible nonsense for a major news outlet to phrase its headlines with so much hyperbole.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w27245.pdf
Even then, what was anybody really able to do to prepare? The best you could have done was to have gotten your shopping in during mid to late February before the panic buying started. And even then, most goods weren't that hard to come by. The other thing would have been having a good emergency fund, to prepare for the economic turmoil and potential job losses. But that's something you would have needed to prepare for much, much earlier, and should be something everyone does, regardless of their news intake.
> I find that weekly and monthly magazines strike a better balance
I agree on this. Do you have any recommendations for good monthly magazines that do this well?
I have to disagree, or maybe we have a different idea of what is mainstream. The New York Times front page was making a big stink about the coronavirus in Wuhan as early as mid-January. By mid-February they were already quoting experts in European countries telling people to be prepared for a pandemic.
> Even then, what was anybody really able to do to prepare?
For me, more critical than stocking up on anything, was just more time to adjust to the new reality and grieve for what would be lost. I cancelled a number of trips ahead of time, and correctly called that our office wouldn't reopen in two weeks as it had originally been planned to do. I think it's just made the adjustment easier.
> Do you have any recommendations for good monthly magazines that do this well?
The Economist is solid, and in the last few years they added professionally recorded audio versions of their content available in tandem with the digital edition that drops every Thursday. It's like a podcast, except fact checked and with a good sense of perspective. I put it on when I'm cooking or cleaning. I'm also a fan of the Financial Times's Big Read (their weekly magazine stories) and they too put those out in audio form.
When I have more time, I like reading Harpers, the Atlantic, and the NY Times magazine.
Fair, maybe it's the fact that the media is constantly catastrophizing everything that I didn't pay attention to coverage like that. I did start paying attention as soon as I started hearing the warning bells from a bunch of experts in mid February.
Thanks for the recommendation of The Economist. I wish they had a monthly option, looks like they only do weekly? I've had so much trouble finding a good news source or magazine that has a monthly edition / subscription. Guess there's not much money in that.
Is this talking about TV news? If so, I might agree. TV oversimplifies and goes for the sensational and emotional. Plus, they have hours and hours to fill even if there's no content. These days TV news is almost completely a time waster.
But other kinds of news? Disagreed. Especially world and national news. Those are the most interesting. If you keep yourself focused on community news -- which are both relevant and at the same time the most inane -- you stay parochial, which is ok if you don't mind it, but I do. I find the world and world news interesting and relevant. My immediate community is not that interesting.
Also, the news is not only about taking action (though there is that, too). I can't possibly take action about a nuclear disaster in Japan or a famine in Africa, but I want to know about them. I want to know about world's events as they happen, not only in a documentary years later.
This guy Joseph Well runs some kind of writing course, right? Because I'm unimpressed with his essays...
As someone who deals with anxiety, I don't find world news interesting and relevant. I find it panic and anxiety inducing, and it's rarely ever actionable. Local news is generally much more useful and actionable for my daily life.
I still find it important to stay informed of general world events, but I just can't mentally follow it on a daily or even weekly basis anymore.
What I find annoying are blanket statements like "don't follow the news". Says who? Who is this guy to tell me what is reasonable to consider interesting, and whether following world news is something I do "to worry"?
> I’ll answer for you: probably never.
The article is dated "July 29" so I'll assume 2019.
We have a pretty huge counterexample right now: the pandemic has led to a lot of critical information needing to be conveyed to everyone very rapidly. For example, people need to be aware that they cannot leave home, or that they should wear masks when doing so, etc.
Often, the government doesn't have a reliable way to reach the entire population quickly. For example, in the UK, the government sent a letter to every household outlining coronavirus guidance. This letter takes a few days to reach everyone.
The news can be leveraged by the government to relay important messages to the population without any effort.
As I see it the problem is the junk-news. It presents as news but there's little substance, it doesn't make you more informed, it makes you angry, upset, and most-importantly (to the new station), engaged.
Matt Taibbi's new book, Hate Inc does a great job of illustrating how the "junk news" (and he doesn't just go after the Right) industry is rotting our brains:
https://www.amazon.com/Hate-Inc-Todays-Despise-Another/dp/19...
News (particularly in the US) is so caught up in Politics that no one ever knows what anyone's policies are any more.
My favourite part of this article is:
There is voting, of course, but to become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election. There’s no need to have to suffer through the daily back-and-forth of allegations and counter-allegations, of scurrilous lies and their refutations. Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...
Among other things, it helped me understand why I was seeing and reading what media outlets were producing at the time, before and since then. Until I read this article I didn't understand how we got to the level of disconnect that is so clearly evidenced by US media. Well worth reading for anyone who cares enough to try and understand where this is coming from.
I don't want to focus on the constant back and forth of political rivalries, because it usually doesn't affect me directly, and why would I cause myself discomfort by indulging in stories I have no control over.