I was surprised to learn that Bukowski submitted poems and stories to The Atlantic in his early, hungry years. In my lifetime, I've only known it as an outlet for partisan opinion pieces.
On the occasions that I do visit the site, I wonder what he would say about what The Atlantic has become. Not in terms of how it would suit his political biases, but in the agenda first, logic last, unimaginative partisan hackery. I imagine him ranting at length or condemning them eloquently.
People in the (very small) poetry world used to know the Atlantic as one of the premier places to have a poem published. If you pick up a physical copy there are two or three poems and those are guaranteed to be by someone huge in the American poetry scene at the moment.
In the last decade or so things have changed, online has boomed, spoken word/slam poetry took off and left it's mark. And now the markers which signify status in the poetry world are shifting. And for the first time in a while I was actually reading the Atlantic for the articles (online) and surprised to find how much of it was, as you said, partisan, ideology-first, logic-last type reporting.
> After controlling for household income, education, age, gender, race, marital status, and political views, I found that people who were “very interested in politics” were about 8 percentage points more likely to be “not very happy” about life than people who were “not very interested” in politics.
If we could locate these philosopher-kings from Aristotle and put them in charge, then ignoring politics might be safe.
But your disdain for bossing others around isn't reciprocated by the Chads and Karens seeking office.
This, detachment from the swamp is a sin of omission. You and your wallet will be punished.
I am very interested in policy, but I do not watch the news.
Why? Because it contains no actionable information that changes my decisions: I'm still going to vote in every election, I'm still going to research the candidates when the time comes, I'm still going to volunteer at the polls...
The news is trivia, generally speaking. When I have a more active life in politics I'll take the Chomskian approach to news, but for now I'll vote with my ideals (which don't change with the passing tides of the news cycles)
Instead of drinking the koolaid, you complain that companies are manufacturing koolaid, despite the fact that you are currently using an I.V. drip of the stuff. Turn the dial on your I.V. up to 11, while you lean back and realize that you are glad that you’re not thinking about linguistics.
> says person commenting on a news aggregation site
This story didn't contain anything actionable that changes your decisions either, and yet you still read it and spent the time to comment. I don't see a substantive difference between reading HN and reading following political news. Nearly everything on this site (not even just this piece) will not affect your ability to accomplish your goals in anyway. It's a distraction at best.
Let's suppose for a moment that we ever reach a point where the democratic process gets involved with the question of how best to manage the western forests (what's left of them) in the USA. There will be people arguing for regular understory and brush burning, and others arguing against it.
Let's suppose that you're a citizen who gets to vote in some way on this matter. What will you base your vote on? The materials circulated at the time by those for and against various policies? Perhaps. But how will you judge those materials if you have not even a basic understanding of forest ecology.
Now, if you sit down and read about forest ecology today, it will have no impact on your ability to accomplish your goals in anyway. But is is not a distraction: it's the groundwork and the preparation for you to be able to participate meaningfully in democratic decision making, perhaps tomorrow, or next year or some other time in the future.
In short: it is education. You just have to be careful that you're learning about the actual world.
Agree, educating oneself is a great investment even if not immediately actionable. The knowledge you gained will pay dividends later when it comes in handy.
The issue with news is that I'm not sure reading all news sources is an effective way of educating yourself.
Another problem though is that of shared values and goals. In your example you said:
> the democratic process gets involved with the question of how best to manage the western forests
But how does it even get to this point? Does news play a bigger role in that part of the democratic process? The part where we decide on our values and our priorities?
I don't watch the news either but I do scan headlines here and on AP and/or Reuters every day and follow up on what interests me.
I can't say "it contains no actionable information that changes my decisions". For example the news that Obama wanted to renegotiate the "SOFA" agreement before he even took office made me regret my decision to vote for him in `08 and I did not vote for him again in 2012 because I already knew he would not end those wars.
The only actionable thing I've really done since is keep others informed via FB of our progress to end those wars but for the most part interest in that fell off long ago with their yellow ribbon car magnets so it hasn't amounted to much real action.
It isn't non participation though. You can participate in politics (local, state or federal) without consuming the 24/7 news cycle. The "news" is usually pushing doom gloom and fear no matter which side of the spectrum you are on because that gets the clicks. Rarely do political issues have meaningful developments everyday so continually checking not actually enhancing your ability to participate.
If you’re upset about the system or the options, your other option is to vote a write-in. This sends a stronger message in my opinion: we call such votes “protest votes”, whereas not voting all all leaves the situation a bit more ambiguous to the rest of us.
This is a good point: opting out of reality is a worse strategy for happiness on a longer timescale. However, reading the 24-hour news cycle and being aware of the real political landscape is not perfectly correlated; I'd argue it's 50% overlap at the upper bound and sub-ten % at the lower. Furthermore, reading the news cycle and being politically active in a way that affects your, your family's, and your "heirs'" wellbeing is probably almost negatively correlated.
Any political wins made by groups exploiting and dominating mainstream media (Trump) are explained by the fact that the barrier to entry in political action is so low—just getting a few people to vote is politically effective because almost everyone is just watching the news instead of doing anything real. Meanwhile Trump's team meets with money and accrues powerful stakeholders by annexing their agenda, building support in institutions and markets.
So ignoring political news and pursuing interfaces with actual nexuses of power is far more politically effective than the hundreds of people with twenty tabs of The Atlantic open and the WSJ draped across their lap like a religious shawl every morning. Go out, meet politically active people in your city, email representative staff, make friends with people with money and vested interests that are vulnerable to political changes.
I won’t call some of these reporters journalists, they are more like activists. They aren’t interested in keeping society informed, they just want to push their agenda.
Agreed. However, it would be a good reason to hedge expectations accordingly. Everyone has a bias. Much of the current political acrimony could be avoided if both speakers and listeners acknowledged this.
Instead we have appeals to 'truthiness' and 'fact-check' that defy the basic premises of human nature.
I am not sure admiting that there is a bias would make any difference. Its plain to see. I think the fundamental problem is that the bias is the main thing now. It trumps everything, including decency, respect for your fellow citizen or the profession. Activism has become the mission. The people who think this is OK seem to lack the imagination to realize how quickly the BS firehose can turn towards when unencumbered by the facts.
I'm not sure they are aware of what they are doing. It isn't hard to imagine them claiming they're only reporting 'the truth'. Deep convictions have a way of shaping perceptions.
Partisan 'fact-check' outlets are a good example of this.
An admission of bias would serve as a disclaimer and a reminder for the consumer of news. Integrating the disclaimer into the writing could actively influence how the article is written.
Let's take WaPo as an example. They changed their tagline to "Democracy dies in darkness" after Trump won.
I imagine they know they don't like the guy, but in their minds it is justified. I suspect there's a fair proportion of their staff who believes enacting Godwin's law isn't hyperbole.
For them, selectively misquoting the Charlottesville press conference isn't misleading, because they believe that they know the _truth_ about his intentions.
All right, but these are intelligent adults, not children, why wouldn’t they see the exact issues you mention? Isn’t it a more natural explanation that they of course see it, but believe their misinformation is justified because Trump in their eyes is an existential threat to democracy?
More or less, but the belief may be strong enough that they don't view it as misinformation. If they already believe Trump is a racist, selectively quoting his press conference in a way that construes him as a racist is accurate in their eyes. The full quote where he criticizes the racist groups could be viewed as Trump lying or hiding his true intentions, so they may feel it is their duty to not report that.
Of course journalists are individuals and there's a spectrum of this behavior on both sides of the aisle, but this is my take. Willful ignorance isn't only for children or idiots. Let's also observe the volume of illogical and often emotional arguments presented.
Sorry, that is exactly the attitude that got us into the mess we are in. I for one care very little for activists doing journalism. Just tell people the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as best as you can ascertain it and let them make their own choices.
You aren't really addressing what I am getting at. There's too much happening for the simple editorial decisions that go into choosing what to talk about for an hour to not end up looking like bias.
Maybe that makes a little sense for live media. Maybe. But you cannot tell me the nyt or wpost do not have the resources for thoughtful editorialization.
This opinion is quite new. Unfortunately journalism has been coopted by such folks.
We do need activists, but they don’t have to be journalists. Maybe these groups on youtube that are just filming things without interrupting with questions are the journalists of the future ... https://youtu.be/pW_jsS_JnMY
I wouldn't call them journalists either, more like royal scribes speaking to a class of courtiers. Real journalists have agendas other than uncritically repeating what some unnamed intelligence source told them.
We can't just redesign the news because the incentive structure isn't there to do so. You have to Foster a culture where people don't treat politics like religion. When the culture doesn't give undue attention to self important people who wear suits and ties, then the incentive structure changes how news is produced to fit that environment. But if we just treat issues like these as engineering problems, tweaking variables to fit a broken environment without considering the human aspect, the system simply won't support whatever improvements we try to make.
I hear you — but I can also see the opposite perspective, at least in the case of TV journalism. Once we lost the almost religious reverence for the nightly news anchor, it devolved into pure spin.
I also think that in a case like the news, there is a real need to step outside of the current cultural phenomena and engineer it — what are the known requirements for the news and how do we move from here to there.
I think the problem isn't the news, but the obvious injustice that politics gets away with.
In germany, the minister of transportation lost the taxpayer 500 million euros, with a publicity stunt to bolster his party in a local election.
He is now lying in people's face about it, everyone knows it and he does not have to step back.
Instead, they wrote a fluff piece about him, because he managed to buy some masks for the nation by using some connections from his home town. The article that came out two weeks later about these masks being fake and another million euros lost was for some reason behind the paywall of the online newspaper.
It's not the news that makes people unhappy, it's the blatant bullshitting we have to endure.
If you want to get really depressed you should look into the state of our media where they themselves have something at stake. One examples from the top of my head would be Peer Steinbrücks destruction in the weeks running up to the 2013 election where they collectivly decided that fighting against tax evasion is bad. Or the reporting about Article 13 where they forgot to ask critical questions about how some of the arguments made absolutely no sense and could someone please explain that in more detail?
On the other hand if you are looking for more nuanced reporting I've come to like deutschlandfunk radio lately.
It's a good time to re-visit old friends on the shelf, or find new ones.
I picked up a series that I'd stuck a bookmark in 30 years ago, and I wish I'd continued reading it back then. On the other hand, I have roughly 2,000 pages of greenfields escapist fantasy to crawl into. [For a number of reasons, I won't mention the series]
I agree with this approach. However, politicians and talking heads generally lack self-irony. Many refuse to acknowledge the farce they are participating in.
Even worse, audiences have a tendency to take it all a bit too seriously.
Everyone would be better off if pundits would look into the camera and wink occasionally. Just let us know that they know we know it is all a spectacle. A little acknowledgement goes a long way here.
You do other things to improve your life and the lives around you. This culture where everyone is compelled to be a participant in politics is relatively new, or wasn't common once civilization made small tribes obsolete.
When Trump caught Covid I actually thought to myself that this is a soap opera plot from a parallel dimension and the writers had just jumped the shark.
The news actually feels like it's just messing with me now. We live in the timeline where Osama Bin Laden's QAnon conspiracy theorist neice went on Fox News to say that she is really an American at heart and to give Trump her endorsement.
WHAT??? Looks like the writers decided to bring back a reference to two seasons ago.
I'm actually curious to understand why it was such a big deal. A fair amount of world leaders, ministers, representatives and all did get sick. Was this not mentioned in the news at all in the US?
The US media's coverage of Covid-19 outside the US mostly seems to be focused on pushing the narrative that the US is uniquely failing at dealing with it due to Trump. Most of the time they don't actually lie to do this, but the facts they include are very selectively chosen. So for example Boris Johnson's Covid infection got a lot of attention since he's seen as a kind of Trump analogue, but I don't think others did so much.
(There was a really... interesting progression in the NYT's coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak in Spain where they downplayed it as obviously less severe than say Florida, omitting the already much worse trajectory it was on, then when it finally and inevitably became too bad to ignore they turned that whole thing into an allegory for Trump's failings too.)
Its living in a fucked up society that is bad for your well being. These fucks would rather have you stay ignorant happy and complacent. Fuck them. I wish I could jam political news down the throat of everyone that is dumb enough to say I dont give a shit about politics.
Does this approach seem like it will bring people around to your point of view? I think this sort of toxic aggression is exactly what produces the partisanship that leads to a lack of progress on all sides.
I think this article is pretty constructive. It specifically argue there’s value in being informed. And it even goes on to suggest active involvement in the community over passive consumption of news.
The debate between Trump and Biden epitomizes why political news is a mental health risk. No questions about long term goals and how we get there. Yes Trump is bad but I don't think it would be any different without him. Just questions that lead to petty, divisive tit for tat.
This is incredible. I wish I knew about this years ago. I have long been looking for impartial news sources. I used to listen to CBC, NPR, and ABC (Australia) to try and get more angles to a story, but that got tiring.
Reuters TV[0] is pretty good for this too, you can even set how much time you want to watch it and it will pair down the information. Extremely boring for the most part.
> Sites from local TV news groups seem to be the most dispassionate reporting these days.
Really? Our local TV news websites are:
1) absolutely terrible user experiences -- like, so many ads that the scrolling lags on my 16 inch MBP.
2) clearly just reposting whatever their parent networks feed them for everything except local news (so, Fox and NBC, the two mentioned in this article, are literally feeding lines to these "local" channels that are ostensibly totally different from their parent networks)
IMO: the death of local newspapers is a problem but the death of local TV news can't happen fast enough.
The OP link is to September, but if you go to the main/parent link, it’s always the current month, which conveniently has today’s news at the top (reverse chronological):
That's a very good resource, I find that even if one truly believes that the news or political media is not warping your vision of reality and your beliefs that is not the case. Once you step back and view the situation from the outside, then you really start to understand how people's nervous systems are being regulated and influenced by the media.
I read only Reuters and APNews these days. They report things but not in a way to make you emotional. They make news outright boring which is a good thing.
I don’t know what happened to CNN. Seems they have decided to become the left wing FoxNews.
I've been trying to cut news and social media out of my daily habits as much as possible, and am attempting to replace it with reading books whenever possible. It sure isn't easy, but I feel significantly more productive, healthier, happier and overall more human on days where this works particularly well.
What helps is to not have the phone in your bedroom and charge iit elsewhere instead - replace it with a Kindle or a book and rread that instead for a few minutes upon waking up.
You can read one book that recaps the events of multiple years in a fraction of the time that it takes to consume the news daily in fragment form, with the bonus that it comes with appropriate context. It is also easier to avoid sensational gore or celebrity tales that are for the most part meaningless (or the opposite if that is one's proclivity).
Right. Probably says something more about the Atlantic editors than the people who actually do incredible and productive things either on Show HN or Product Hunt to even waste an hour on reading dreadful articles like this one.
Now if you excuse me, I have to continue counting the pages of sales from my paid customers for this week.
We have to learn to compartmentalize political news and keep it separated from our personal life.
And we have to be honest with ourselves about our personal life. For many of us, and it's probably fair to say most of us here on HN, life is pretty good. But we have to put that statement in perspective to see it that way. Where I live, in the Ozarks, life 100 years ago was pretty tough and even compared to when and where I grew up life is pretty good here right now.
In fact it's pretty amazing. Stuff I find here on HN amazes me almost daily.
I put myself into a news bubble about six weeks ago. I still very occasionally read local news and a mainstream front page (say, every few days), which seems sufficient to let me know what's going on in broad terms. Stuff leaks into the bubble (e.g., via HN) but the point is not to be totally isolated, just not to get caught in hours-long doom spirals.
I've given money to the campaigns that are going to get money from me. I voted yesterday (which answered the question, "are we going to get our mail-in ballots on time?"). I'm done.
As a consequence I'm getting more done and I'm happier. I'm reading a lot more books.
Same, my new routine is I receive a daily news briefing email in the morning and read that, and then don't read/watch any other news for the rest of the day. I feel relatively informed but no longer feel as depressed as when I would check the front page of news sites every hour.
The other plus side to this is that the whiplash of rapidly developing news is never an issue. Previously the news headlines would speculate on new developments so frequently that you felt like you were always behind on what was current, but truthfully most news can wait 24 hours (and if it can't it's probably an emergency).
I also instituted a news blackout about three weeks ago, with the intent to (perhaps) resume reading the news on Nov 5. In 2016 I spent an inordinate amount of time hooked on election news. This year I decided to spend my time more productively (as a Canadian, I can’t even vote in the US elections, so I’m ultra powerless).
Anecdotally, I do feel happier. I’ve also poured the time I previously spent on news consumption into studying and making music, and it’s just generally a more positive mental environment for me.
I may decide to switch to a less in-the-moment mode of news consumption, such as getting an Economist subscription and only reading the paper magazine when it arrives. Or maybe the NYT Saturday paper only, or something. I feel a duty to be an informed citizen but the ceaseless noise and sense of angry powerlessness doesn’t make me feel happy or satisfied.
I did this too. I gave up reading the news about four months ago. I'm much happier and sleep much better. I found I was constantly reaching for something like the guardian to kill time (including if I woke up at night).
I wanted to still read something current so I subscribed to the New Yorker and love their long articles.
I put myself in a semi news bubble about 6 months ago, no longer check the news daily or watch TV news. Now if I could only stop checking HN multiple times a day....
This point rings strongly true to me. I have a number of members of friends/family who have become very difficult to be around, because they’ve become so intense/constantly outraged about politics, even if they are on the same end of the political spectrum as me:
> The research doesn’t reveal precisely why we tend to dislike overly political people, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to guess that constant foam-flecked political outrage makes one quite tedious. It also impedes our ability to think clearly: At least one experiment has shown that people become less accurate in interpreting data when the data concern something politically polarizing.
This is basically why I stopped using Twitter. Reading a dozen of my friends expressing basically the same thought at the same time, even though I agreed with it, was just getting tideous. In hindsight it took me way too long to realise how much time I was wasting on it.
A couple years ago all you heard about was kids who didn't want to get shot in school. Now it's communities of color who don't want to get shot by police. It sure is a lot nicer to keep my head in the sand.
There are always tonnes of terrible things going on in the world, throughout human history. Hell, my grandfather was an Auschwitz survivor, and his entire immediate family was murdered by Nazis.
I think Trump is a terrible, terrible President, causing a tonne of damage to America, but he’s not exactly Hitler, more of a poor man’s Putin. I’m all for having political conversations, even reasonably frequent ones, but barring a legitimate Hitler situation, I don’t want it to be the ONLY thing I talk about. There’s a lot more to life. Some members of my friends/family can talk about nothing else anymore, it’s nonstop outrage, and they completely ignore all social queues from people who want to change the subject. These people suck to be around. The article sums it up well:
> it doesn’t take too much imagination to guess that constant foam-flecked political outrage makes one quite tedious
What is the point of this comment? communities of people of colour and the poor were being brutalised by police and school shootings were regular occurrences long before the Trump presidency.
I like to call that "violently agreeing". "You all seem to be having a violent agreement" usually defuses the situation with some humour ... the first time anyway.
> They found that those watching the most partisan television news sources—on both the left and the right—were often less knowledgeable about world events than those who consumed no news at all.
This is some very fancy footwork to leave out some key information. The study found that those watching only Fox News and MSNBC answered worse than people who watch no news programs at all. As far as I can tell, this latter group doesn't exclude people who read newspapers, blogs, political websites, etc. Meanwhile, all of the viewers of other programs/networks (NPR, Daily Show, CNN, etc.) score higher than average, so saying "often less knowledgable" kind of buries the lede if you ask me, which is that some "partisan" viewers are in fact, much more informed than others. Also, since the quiz the survey participants answered was split into domestic and international topics, FOX is the only network whose viewers consistently failed both on exceeding the average number of correct questions than achieved by "no news" viewers—MSNBC at least seems to be informing their viewers on domestic issues better than that baseline.
> MSNBC at least seems to be informing their viewers on domestic issues better than that baseline.
The difference is only about 5% to the "no news" crowd. Also, people that are better-educated tend to lean liberal and therefore might prefer to consume liberal outlets, but that doesn't mean liberal outlets are better at informing people. Looking at the frontpage of MSNBC, it's almost exclusively political opinion pieces centered around the US.
Moreover, the key question is not whether you're being informed better by consuming this media, but whether it is worth risking some of your well-being by consuming it. Research has found that media that is upsetting is the most addictive. People with addictions make up all kinds of rationalizations on how their addiction has upsides. The idea that you've been wasting time consuming ultimately useless information that irritates you - it's not very attractive.
100% of Americans believe, that 50% of the American population is filled with morons, the rest of them are either average or intelligent. To find out, if the person is intelligent or not, all you have to do, is check is if they support the same party that I support.
Yea and isn't HN always going on about how education != intelligence? It's great branding too, hook your cart up to the liberal party and suddenly you're smart, refined, enlightened, morally superior. No questions asked. SW/SV lives in a bubble. Most of eng is more conservative. Aero,EE,ME.. these are no dummies.
I find news as a concept quite weird, since it implies recent data is important data, with all its side effects. There is a ton of old news, maybe even years, that did not loose relevance, but we simply ignore it.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadOn the occasions that I do visit the site, I wonder what he would say about what The Atlantic has become. Not in terms of how it would suit his political biases, but in the agenda first, logic last, unimaginative partisan hackery. I imagine him ranting at length or condemning them eloquently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDiLfQUBnyA
In the last decade or so things have changed, online has boomed, spoken word/slam poetry took off and left it's mark. And now the markers which signify status in the poetry world are shifting. And for the first time in a while I was actually reading the Atlantic for the articles (online) and surprised to find how much of it was, as you said, partisan, ideology-first, logic-last type reporting.
If we could locate these philosopher-kings from Aristotle and put them in charge, then ignoring politics might be safe.
But your disdain for bossing others around isn't reciprocated by the Chads and Karens seeking office.
This, detachment from the swamp is a sin of omission. You and your wallet will be punished.
He advocated eugenics, and he also recommended lying to the citizens about how it was decided who would be paired up with who.
So...I'm not sure we should go down that road?
Why? Because it contains no actionable information that changes my decisions: I'm still going to vote in every election, I'm still going to research the candidates when the time comes, I'm still going to volunteer at the polls...
The news is trivia, generally speaking. When I have a more active life in politics I'll take the Chomskian approach to news, but for now I'll vote with my ideals (which don't change with the passing tides of the news cycles)
This story didn't contain anything actionable that changes your decisions either, and yet you still read it and spent the time to comment. I don't see a substantive difference between reading HN and reading following political news. Nearly everything on this site (not even just this piece) will not affect your ability to accomplish your goals in anyway. It's a distraction at best.
Let's suppose for a moment that we ever reach a point where the democratic process gets involved with the question of how best to manage the western forests (what's left of them) in the USA. There will be people arguing for regular understory and brush burning, and others arguing against it.
Let's suppose that you're a citizen who gets to vote in some way on this matter. What will you base your vote on? The materials circulated at the time by those for and against various policies? Perhaps. But how will you judge those materials if you have not even a basic understanding of forest ecology.
Now, if you sit down and read about forest ecology today, it will have no impact on your ability to accomplish your goals in anyway. But is is not a distraction: it's the groundwork and the preparation for you to be able to participate meaningfully in democratic decision making, perhaps tomorrow, or next year or some other time in the future.
In short: it is education. You just have to be careful that you're learning about the actual world.
The issue with news is that I'm not sure reading all news sources is an effective way of educating yourself.
Another problem though is that of shared values and goals. In your example you said:
> the democratic process gets involved with the question of how best to manage the western forests
But how does it even get to this point? Does news play a bigger role in that part of the democratic process? The part where we decide on our values and our priorities?
I can't say "it contains no actionable information that changes my decisions". For example the news that Obama wanted to renegotiate the "SOFA" agreement before he even took office made me regret my decision to vote for him in `08 and I did not vote for him again in 2012 because I already knew he would not end those wars.
The only actionable thing I've really done since is keep others informed via FB of our progress to end those wars but for the most part interest in that fell off long ago with their yellow ribbon car magnets so it hasn't amounted to much real action.
From this perspective, participation only validates the farce.
Any political wins made by groups exploiting and dominating mainstream media (Trump) are explained by the fact that the barrier to entry in political action is so low—just getting a few people to vote is politically effective because almost everyone is just watching the news instead of doing anything real. Meanwhile Trump's team meets with money and accrues powerful stakeholders by annexing their agenda, building support in institutions and markets.
So ignoring political news and pursuing interfaces with actual nexuses of power is far more politically effective than the hundreds of people with twenty tabs of The Atlantic open and the WSJ draped across their lap like a religious shawl every morning. Go out, meet politically active people in your city, email representative staff, make friends with people with money and vested interests that are vulnerable to political changes.
-Oscar Wilde
Instead we have appeals to 'truthiness' and 'fact-check' that defy the basic premises of human nature.
Partisan 'fact-check' outlets are a good example of this.
An admission of bias would serve as a disclaimer and a reminder for the consumer of news. Integrating the disclaimer into the writing could actively influence how the article is written.
I imagine they know they don't like the guy, but in their minds it is justified. I suspect there's a fair proportion of their staff who believes enacting Godwin's law isn't hyperbole.
For them, selectively misquoting the Charlottesville press conference isn't misleading, because they believe that they know the _truth_ about his intentions.
More or less, but the belief may be strong enough that they don't view it as misinformation. If they already believe Trump is a racist, selectively quoting his press conference in a way that construes him as a racist is accurate in their eyes. The full quote where he criticizes the racist groups could be viewed as Trump lying or hiding his true intentions, so they may feel it is their duty to not report that.
Of course journalists are individuals and there's a spectrum of this behavior on both sides of the aisle, but this is my take. Willful ignorance isn't only for children or idiots. Let's also observe the volume of illogical and often emotional arguments presented.
We do need activists, but they don’t have to be journalists. Maybe these groups on youtube that are just filming things without interrupting with questions are the journalists of the future ... https://youtu.be/pW_jsS_JnMY
1. Stop publishing minority opinions as if they were representative.
2. Stop publishing minor stupidities because they are "exciting".
3. Stop trying to be entertaining or interesting. Stick with informative, and if you get less views, so be it.
4. ???? Open to suggestions. Maybe we could write up a set of voluntary rules for journalists with ethics.
I also think that in a case like the news, there is a real need to step outside of the current cultural phenomena and engineer it — what are the known requirements for the news and how do we move from here to there.
In germany, the minister of transportation lost the taxpayer 500 million euros, with a publicity stunt to bolster his party in a local election. He is now lying in people's face about it, everyone knows it and he does not have to step back.
Instead, they wrote a fluff piece about him, because he managed to buy some masks for the nation by using some connections from his home town. The article that came out two weeks later about these masks being fake and another million euros lost was for some reason behind the paywall of the online newspaper.
It's not the news that makes people unhappy, it's the blatant bullshitting we have to endure.
On the other hand if you are looking for more nuanced reporting I've come to like deutschlandfunk radio lately.
I picked up a series that I'd stuck a bookmark in 30 years ago, and I wish I'd continued reading it back then. On the other hand, I have roughly 2,000 pages of greenfields escapist fantasy to crawl into. [For a number of reasons, I won't mention the series]
Even worse, audiences have a tendency to take it all a bit too seriously.
Everyone would be better off if pundits would look into the camera and wink occasionally. Just let us know that they know we know it is all a spectacle. A little acknowledgement goes a long way here.
WHAT??? Looks like the writers decided to bring back a reference to two seasons ago.
[1] https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/tucker-...
(There was a really... interesting progression in the NYT's coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak in Spain where they downplayed it as obviously less severe than say Florida, omitting the already much worse trajectory it was on, then when it finally and inevitably became too bad to ignore they turned that whole thing into an allegory for Trump's failings too.)
I think this article is pretty constructive. It specifically argue there’s value in being informed. And it even goes on to suggest active involvement in the community over passive consumption of news.
Instead I use Wikipedia once a month : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/Septembe...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world
Sites from local TV news groups seem to be the most dispassionate reporting these days.
0: https://www.reuters.tv/
Really? Our local TV news websites are:
1) absolutely terrible user experiences -- like, so many ads that the scrolling lags on my 16 inch MBP.
2) clearly just reposting whatever their parent networks feed them for everything except local news (so, Fox and NBC, the two mentioned in this article, are literally feeding lines to these "local" channels that are ostensibly totally different from their parent networks)
IMO: the death of local newspapers is a problem but the death of local TV news can't happen fast enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
I don’t know what happened to CNN. Seems they have decided to become the left wing FoxNews.
De Botton's other books are worth a look, too.
What helps is to not have the phone in your bedroom and charge iit elsewhere instead - replace it with a Kindle or a book and rread that instead for a few minutes upon waking up.
Now if you excuse me, I have to continue counting the pages of sales from my paid customers for this week.
From Sun Tzu (loosely): when an enemy is large in number, divide them.
Isn’t that what news does, especially the political crap we call news in the US - divide the population so they fight among themselves.
And we have to be honest with ourselves about our personal life. For many of us, and it's probably fair to say most of us here on HN, life is pretty good. But we have to put that statement in perspective to see it that way. Where I live, in the Ozarks, life 100 years ago was pretty tough and even compared to when and where I grew up life is pretty good here right now.
In fact it's pretty amazing. Stuff I find here on HN amazes me almost daily.
I've given money to the campaigns that are going to get money from me. I voted yesterday (which answered the question, "are we going to get our mail-in ballots on time?"). I'm done.
As a consequence I'm getting more done and I'm happier. I'm reading a lot more books.
The other plus side to this is that the whiplash of rapidly developing news is never an issue. Previously the news headlines would speculate on new developments so frequently that you felt like you were always behind on what was current, but truthfully most news can wait 24 hours (and if it can't it's probably an emergency).
Anecdotally, I do feel happier. I’ve also poured the time I previously spent on news consumption into studying and making music, and it’s just generally a more positive mental environment for me.
I may decide to switch to a less in-the-moment mode of news consumption, such as getting an Economist subscription and only reading the paper magazine when it arrives. Or maybe the NYT Saturday paper only, or something. I feel a duty to be an informed citizen but the ceaseless noise and sense of angry powerlessness doesn’t make me feel happy or satisfied.
I wanted to still read something current so I subscribed to the New Yorker and love their long articles.
> The research doesn’t reveal precisely why we tend to dislike overly political people, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to guess that constant foam-flecked political outrage makes one quite tedious. It also impedes our ability to think clearly: At least one experiment has shown that people become less accurate in interpreting data when the data concern something politically polarizing.
We are manipulated into constant outrage for someone else's profit.
So yea, emotions are running a little high right now.
I think Trump is a terrible, terrible President, causing a tonne of damage to America, but he’s not exactly Hitler, more of a poor man’s Putin. I’m all for having political conversations, even reasonably frequent ones, but barring a legitimate Hitler situation, I don’t want it to be the ONLY thing I talk about. There’s a lot more to life. Some members of my friends/family can talk about nothing else anymore, it’s nonstop outrage, and they completely ignore all social queues from people who want to change the subject. These people suck to be around. The article sums it up well:
> it doesn’t take too much imagination to guess that constant foam-flecked political outrage makes one quite tedious
This is some very fancy footwork to leave out some key information. The study found that those watching only Fox News and MSNBC answered worse than people who watch no news programs at all. As far as I can tell, this latter group doesn't exclude people who read newspapers, blogs, political websites, etc. Meanwhile, all of the viewers of other programs/networks (NPR, Daily Show, CNN, etc.) score higher than average, so saying "often less knowledgable" kind of buries the lede if you ask me, which is that some "partisan" viewers are in fact, much more informed than others. Also, since the quiz the survey participants answered was split into domestic and international topics, FOX is the only network whose viewers consistently failed both on exceeding the average number of correct questions than achieved by "no news" viewers—MSNBC at least seems to be informing their viewers on domestic issues better than that baseline.
http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/final.pdf
The difference is only about 5% to the "no news" crowd. Also, people that are better-educated tend to lean liberal and therefore might prefer to consume liberal outlets, but that doesn't mean liberal outlets are better at informing people. Looking at the frontpage of MSNBC, it's almost exclusively political opinion pieces centered around the US.
Moreover, the key question is not whether you're being informed better by consuming this media, but whether it is worth risking some of your well-being by consuming it. Research has found that media that is upsetting is the most addictive. People with addictions make up all kinds of rationalizations on how their addiction has upsides. The idea that you've been wasting time consuming ultimately useless information that irritates you - it's not very attractive.
Do you have any source for tjat research? (Not doubting you, just curious.)
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1528077
Then you can fill in the blanks faster and don't need quite as much spoon feeding
Do you have a source on this?
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/party-identi...
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/wp-content/uploads/site...
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/11/educat...
better educated, or indoctrinated?
I read Ann Landers and the comics
And know as much as the people of the left and the right
Some days it feels that way, even with things as urgent as they seem today in the US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzehb_yeZtU