I started my career as a reporter a decade ago. I can't tell you how many stories I filed that an editor twisted into something different to fit their narrative.
There were also stories I was directed away from because they would alienate our audience.
People really need to understand how journalism works as a business model. When you only consume news that reinforces your beliefs, that creates an incentive to produce news that conforms to your beliefs. This doesn't mean your beliefs are wrong, just that you should be aware of your own biases and guard against them.
Excessive cynicism is a real danger too. Democracies rely on an informed electorate to guide decisions. If you throw up your hands and say the truth is unknowable so nothing matters anyway, you're giving into autocracy. There absolutely are forces that would like you to give up on the notion of being able to tell truth from falsehoods.
You may not know absolute truth for absolute certainty, but if you live in a democratic society and you'd like to keep it that way, you really ought to make an attempt to know what's going on.
I've been working in a PR-type space recently. That narrative is the subject of war between so many different actors.
The worst thing is watching everyone around me, even very intelligent people, get so angry over a space that is so heavily fabricated, optimised even for that very same outrage.
I know some very famous people and have been in the press myself a few times. The general attitude among people the press covers is that reports of them, their business, and the reason they are in the press is distorted to the degree it's fabrication. The news is cat herding of economic waves various industries and power brokers are trying to create for their advantage. There is no "news" only economic manipulation, of every possible kind.
> I started my career as a reporter a decade ago. I can't tell you how many stories I filed that an editor twisted into something different to fit their narrative.
I think it's important to read news with that in mind, but almost treat it as game of spotting and anticipating the way things will be twisted to fit the narrative. It's helpful to familiarize oneself with concepts such as "burying the lede," and read some snarky media criticism from a perspective that cuts against the typical bias of the mainstream media.
Technically, how the narrative is established? What is the procedure?
When several news organizations follow the same narrative in a coordinated manner, is it because their editors just advertently sense "the party line"? Or the are some meetings where they are instructed? Or some written instructions distributed among them?
In Russian and Ukrainian practice I heard the term "themnik" - brief written instructions of how to present various themes.
Given that in the early post-soviet times, when this started, they all hired and learned from western (mostly american) political technologists, maybe this practice came from the west?
Have you ever saw or heard of such instructive, narrative establishing docs?
The blending of comedy/entertainment with news, going back to the GWB era with the Daily Show is a good example of this problem. People consuming junk food thinking they are getting their vegetables.
Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
I think you do political satire - because that's what the Daily Show is - a disservice. Spitting Image (for example) massively shaped people's perceptions of British politicians in the 80s. That Maggie puppet is still an iconic image of the woman herself.
Frankly the Daily Show/Last Week Tonight are the best news, because the news isn't vegetables to begin with, it's alluring toxic slop that makes us feel like shit when we consume it. At least TDS/LWT make us feel good while getting mildly (and mostly unnecessarily) informed.
What's your opinion of John Oliver? I just watched a YouTube video of his show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqK3_n6pdDY. It seemed pretty good, but I'm also very ignorant.
What's the best way to become informed about a topic? Or, is it better to stay ignorant?
Multiple studies over those years showed that The Daily Show watchers were significantly better informed on issues than cable news viewers.
Cable news is the junk food, and TDS showed it to be so bad that even a parody news show could do a better job of informing people, a point made very often by the host. Using it as an example of junk news is missing the point by a rather wide margin.
> Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
It's all coming from the same six companies, as per the article. It all has a lot of the same messaging - trust the police, the good guys always win, torture is bad but if you have a good reason it's ok, Islam is super scary yo, capitalism is cool actually, being too smart isn't cool, and leave the status quo the fuck alone or get Avengered.
... Turn your brain off at your peril. Junk food can kill. If you really feel the need to watch absolute garbage and ignore the news, you probably need to work less and/or sleep more.
The more I think about the state of news, the more I'm convinced that we need independent rankings of news sites and journalism. Something similar to a health inspection score. With considerations like:
- News needs to be verifiable. Direct links to data sources.
- News need to have history of modifications to their article.
- Factual errors will cause dings to their score.
- Revenue sources/tax forms need to be public to find conflicts of interest.
If a news site wants to sell it's soul to make ad money, that's fine, but I want to see some sort of "F" rating on that site. There's no incentive for news sites to make good news right now.
Edit: Or, linking to this article: a sort of "nutrition facts" label for news
I think you're going about this in a way that won't make sense to anyone but individuals like yourself.
People watching Fox News all day can't possibly think that it's a picture of reality, unless they use their intuition and rational systems in exactly the opposite sense that you are doing here (and this system of ratings would serve). People are not interested in more information, they are interested in the right information. Information that's belief affirming.
These individuals are using their "survival mode" default setting of understanding reality, not the scientific, rational, system 2 type thinking you're using here.
They feel like they're constantly under attack, so they join a system-world where constantly being under attack is validated for them.
There's no overlap between "let's give people more information" and fixing the actual problem. The actual problem isn't lack of information, but the overwhelming lack of emotional balancing and maturity to take in information you don't like.
We should start understanding that "independent" rankings won't ever work. Let's not even get started with "fact-checking" places which we can count by dozens per country now, as they all have their own interpretations (or otherwise a single one alone would be enough).
For such a thing to work, it needs to be funded. At the end, it doesn't matter if it comes from public or private hands, it's going to be leaning towards one direction or another, then a group of people will consider it the absolute truth and other group of people will create their own site for "fact-checking".
If humans cannot possibly be objective and independent (yes, that's what I believe after 30+ years in this planet and having met multiple people), then news cannot possibly be. Bearing in mind such a limitation, let's think how this can be possibly improved.
I personally gave up on news being informative and just see it as entertainment - it's a narrative business.
I also want news organizations to be more transparent and honest. The incentives are complicated. Perhaps some sort of ratings system could help.
I think I’d be willing to go further. Purely from an economic perspective, there are negative externalities that result from poor quality news organizations. Current market mechanisms seem to reward polarization.
So what do we do?
A common response is: let’s educate people to pay more attention to their critical thinking and media diet. This can work if people change habits to align with higher level thinking. With more high-quality aggregation options, the easier this gets for individuals.
An uncommon response (that would attract the ire of many) would be to impose economic penalties on the organizations that correspond to their negative externalities. Perhaps tax them like cigarettes. It is hard to think of targeted policy interventions that don’t have all sorts of loopholes.
In broad strokes, perhaps the best solutions I know about at present are carrots. Spend generously on high-quality news organizations.
(This is just a first draft and could stand a lot of improvement.)
There's a problem that traditional news gathering regards it as valid to print X if they can find a source saying X and print "X said ...". They consider that to have done their duty. In an era where political figures have neither a sense of honour nor an obligation to the truth, and therefore routinely lie about everything, this leads to the newspaper repeating and amplifying those lies.
(a recent example: a lot of places had to issue apologies and corrections over Imane Khalif due to quoting disreputable sources at face value)
I love the idea of nutrition facts. AllSides has sort of started doing this. They measure left/right lean for articles and news sources. Newsweek has now included a left/right lean indicator in all of their articles from AllSides.
While the lean of an article is not a measure of factual errors. It at least is a move in the right direction. Maybe one day they will include a nutrition facts.
The other problem I see is who does the fact checking? That cannot be cheap.
You can't have news be a business. Period. It's really that simple. It's like having schools be a business, or healthcare, roads, regulation agencies, etc.
You can't produce a system where the EPA gets its funding from the amount of pollution it stops for example. That's a perverse incentive. These types of organizations are by definition cost centers. And must be treated as such.
Whoever does the scoring will do so based on whether they agree with the sites bias or not instead of any of those criteria. So you're back to square one but now with a false sense of legitimacy
> the more I'm convinced that we need independent rankings of news sites and journalism.
How much do you personally spend subscribing to independent journalism? There are great outlets and journalists closing down and moving on every day, because when push comes to shove, people don't want to pay a dollar to read important news that they care about, even in their own communities.
I think most journalists these days are not much more than poorly informed and poorly paid professional sh*tposters/provocateurs who learned how to write an inverted pyramid in j-school. I can easily find poorly informed and attention-grabbing opinions from a number of places, including even here :).
Disclosure: I learnt to write an inverted pyramid in j-school but dropped out after a year, I didn't want to work in this industry. Also maybe I just wouldn't have been a good journalist.
An interesting book on this subject is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, it's where the term "Churnalism" was coined.
I think this makes a common mistake that this has anything to do with "journalists these days" or editorial slants or anything else.
I mean, go back and read some random New York Times issues from the 1950s and you'll see the same thing.
The simple reality is that there is not enough happening every day that is relevant to our lives that people actually need to pay attention to.
If you're not actually making some change your life, your diet, your finances... SOMETHING...then the news is just entertainment same as watching a Sunday morning cartoon.
For example, multiple studies have shown that in communities that aren't addressed by a robust local news outlet, local corruption goes up. Having a good newsroom _does_ improve an understanding of what your representatives are up to, and a lack of information _does_ allow them to get up to more behind our backs.
I think the biggest failure of this piece is to make all news equivalent. Yes, cable news is junk; yes, many of the corporate newsrooms that churn out hundreds of articles a day are junk. They use engagement as a metric for success rather than finding ways to align themselves with impact and creating an informed, empowered electorate. That last thing - an informed, empowered electorate - is what it's all about.
Real journalism that is diligently undertaken in the public interest does make a real difference. (Should we know whether Clarence Thomas was taking corrupt bribes? Yes. Should we know how climate change is progressing? Yes. Should we know if the police are killing innocent people? Yes. Should we know that the police at the Uvalde school shooting hung around for over an hour doing nothing? Yes.) Telling people not to pay attention to the world around them results in an electorate who cannot meaningfully vote on real issues.
For those of us who build software, we need to know the factors that impact the lives of the people we're serving. We need to know the trends in the marketplaces and communities where we show up. The news is good for that, too.
Turn off cable news; pay more attention to non-profit news; go for long-form written journalism. Stay informed.
It's absolutely true that we take a psychic hit for doing so. I'd say that's more to do with the world than it is the media overall. Perhaps we should spend more time trying to make it better?
I think there should be a middle ground where you dont have to completely remove yourself from the news, just the endless feeds and opinions. It does seem helpful to know what is going on with the world. Whether thats socially or just understanding other events. I fully agree there is a limit and most of what is out there is junk but not all of it.
I have been actively trying to build something to get away from the endless feeds of news.
Essentially a modern day newspaper. So you can read what is important and then be done for the day.
It just occurred to me that my grandfather used to watch the news only once a week, and the program was called something like "Weekly News." I think it's a good approach.
Bite-sized articles have their value. I don't know how many mobile tabs I have open, Chrome stops displaying the number when you reach 100. Most of the tabs contain a deep dive into a particular topic and it's not feasible to actually read every one of them.
However, every unread tab I close feels like a personal failure to keep up.
I can see the value of news articles and short videos like those from Fireship: It might be educational and/or entertaining, but if not, it hasn't been a serious time investment, so it doesn't matter anyway.
> However, every unread tab I close feels like a personal failure to keep up.
I used to think so about books... but after some thought... why?
If you still read enough articles/books/whatever (so it's not your attention span failing), and if the article/book wasn't "good enough" to keep you reading it, why does it matter if you didn't finish it? There are many more articles and books than you are able to read, keep with the 'good ones' and forget about the rest.
"News" is such a huge category though. I just try to be more selective to subjects which may have some effect on me. Bookmark some articles as potential trends. Bookmark some as potentially important reading. Put a budget on it.
One interesting idea I have been toying with is to use prediction markets as a filter. Like, ask myself if I can make a prediction based on this. Then go to a prediction market and actually put a bet on a prediction. Either find one which already exists, or make one. What I have found interesting is how the situation develops into me being wrong. And how hard it is to get above zero. If I can't gain by making predictions on a situation I'm somewhat interested in, then how might being in the red on less informed topics be messing with my thinking?
Probably not realistic, but I have been thinking about how I could make it work.
I used to be a huge news junky. After a while I realized it's all designed as entertainment to drive ad revenue. Gave it up and I've been happier ever since.
A decade ago I switched from my local morning news to a French show. Instead of violence, traffic accidents, and soccer, the French show talked about recipes, books, travelling, etc. It didn't really try to be a news show, just something light to start off the day.
We watch classic cartoons during breakfast. It's an amazing way to start your day.
I cut out news (except here) about three years ago. My life has not changed, except that I'm not pissed off as much. Turns out all that the 24 hour news cycle really doesn't teach you very much.
I don't read news but I read too much twitter. I curated my following base carefully so now almost everything on the timeline is interesting/insightful/funny. Problem is it's still junk food and of little long term value. I really need to step away for a while.
I curated twitter in a similar style with following in my niche interest categories of academics and others with a really good signal-to-noise ratio but post musk purchase most of the accounts I followed either got off the platform, tweet much less frequent and with paid subscribers getting priority the replies feature much less relevant tweets than before. I so desire a space similar to my little corner of twitter but not able to find one anywhere after having tried with X, Mastadon(multiple servers) Bluesky, Threads. Does it still work for you?
I haven't watched the news for my entire adult life (almost 20 years). Why would I? I have countless other things I could do with my time and I have no idea why I'd allocate some of that to daily news. I skim over headlines and read articles that look interesting but only in heavily curated places like this very website.
People I know who do consume news interestingly only bother telling me about super shocking stuff that I don't need to know, e.g. "someone got murdered", "a celebrity said so and so" etc. They rarely tell me stuff I might need to know like "income tax is changing next year".
I have struggled with the negative aspects of news as well and personally think there is a middle route over cutting it out.
I built attabit.com to summarize the news for friends, family, and myself to remove as much sensationalism, bias, and 'junk food' as possible.
The site has been having all kinds of problems today with the claude 3.5 sonnet outage but outside of that, its become the main news source of high level news for me and a lot of my friends and family.
It lets you know what's happening without getting sucked into it. If you check it out, let me know what you think?
I agree that social media is largely junk, especially getting news from social media. Personally, I have just eliminated any _real time_ source of news. I control (instead of an algorithm controlled by corporate policy) what I want to catch up on.
Want to catch up on Olympic event medal status for my home country? Sub to the email newsletter.
Want to follow politics in your state? Sub to the email newsletter at local and state orgs.
Want to follow updates in tech industry in general or a specific subfield (ie, nanotechnology, or the latest hype?). Sub to the email newsletter.
With this method, I can choose when to catch up on these topics. Sure, I might be 1-2 days out of sync compared to the news junkie. But with this method I can at least guarantee a variety of sources come out and get a much better view of the issue. Rather than the often sensationalized version presented at _real time_.
One very hilarious instance of where real time junkies got it very wrong: JD Vance, the VP choice for GOP, was allegedly sexually involved with a couch. Original author of post cited a random page in JD Vance’s autobiography in tweet. What was clearly supposed to be a joke, but turned very viral.
“Influencers”, comedians, and I think even some mainstream news outlets ran with it.
I don’t recall _when_ it was debunked, but had to have been within 24 hours of that tweet.
To me it always seemed that reading a good, weekly news paper would help. The lack of real time news would make it focus on broader trends and I would not be distracted with the breaking news that is not important. For a while it seemed the Economist was close. But they have breaking news, what happened today and they publish articles that appear in the weekly edition already during the week.
Financial Times is still pretty good. The ultimate in sound, realtime news is of course the Bloomberg terminal, but that's very expensive.
What do those and the Economist have in common? They're oriented at business users who are using the news to make decisions on, not to maintain their sense of identity, stoke their rage, or share on Facebook.
I would call it a paradox of interconnectedness. We can write, photograph or broadcast about an immediate event and have that instantly shared with a huge audience online. The stories that bubble up and make it to the top attract a disproportionate amount of our attention and blur our perception of the surrounding reality.
It seems like for every human desire or appetite or source of value, there exists a quick hit, instantly gratifying satisfaction that is bad for long-term health. And there also exists a slowly-acquired, initially difficult or unpleasant, eventually-rewarding satisfaction that is good for long-term health.
Wouldn't a healthy society encourage its members to pursue the more stable, initially uncomfortable, initially difficult, but long-term good option on as many axes as possible?
We should seek out and eat nutritious, wholesome food rather than eat junk food non-stop every day. We should read books and articles rather than consume infotainment and social media. We should go to the gym rather than sitting on the couch and doing nothing. We should commit to real relationships instead of participating in infinite hookup culture. We should find real social circles to belong to and become loyal to them instead of embracing abstract political tribalism that tickles the "belonging" nerve but leaves us with no one who personally knows or cares about us when we're in actual need. We should buy things when we need them and when they're a good value rather than spending impulsively as a therapeutic exercise. The list goes on and on.
I'm concerned that the currently-most-common set of societal norms across pretty much every Western culture I'm aware of seems to encourage the opposite of all that. And I think it's gotten that way, not least at any rate, because sad, scared, addicted, unhappy, immature, overstimulated, overmedicated, physically and spiritually unhealthy humans are simply easier for corporations to make money off of than the alternative. Which suggests that this situation didn't just happen by accident—there's pressure coming from influential people and groups to make it this way. And that means there's systemic resistance to be expected when trying to swim against that current, whether for oneself or, for e.g., for one's kids.
I agree with the article that there is a lot of low-quality "journalism" out there, designed to outrage or entertain rather than inform.
However, that does not mean that all journalism should be disregarded. I read the Washington Post and listen to NPR (regardless of how you feel about their cultural programming, their news organization is excellent.) Citizens in a free society have a duty to be informed about the issues facing that society. I reject the idea that there aren't readily available high quality sources of information about the world. Are any of them perfect? Clearly, no. But ignoring them because they're not perfect strikes me as nihilistic.
There's one quote from the article that alarmed me:
> The news is overwhelmingly about things you cannot possibly influence
Poor Chuck. I read this and think he needs more _older adults_ in his life. Kidding/not kidding. Chuck’s argument lumps social media with “the news”
>“The news (and social media use) is indicative of a poor information diet.”
When I was young my grandfather would listen to KCBS news radio in the morning and KTVU 10 o’clock news in the evening. That’s it. My dad read the local Argus newspaper. That’s it.
As a youth I didn’t, but the impression was made.
Now I listen to WNYC (NPR) radio in the morning when I get up. That’s it.
News doesn’t have to be what they offer—24/7/365–but a habit of keeping yourself informed about local, regional, national and world events. I prefer one dose in the morning (“should I go back to bed?”)
I had a high school English/Literature teacher who used to dismiss the class by saying "Go play in the street, children!" They also said "Don't watch anything that tells you how to feel."
Anyway, I feel like the human species has arrived at a time when we have the internet, without having a great way to deal with everyone's feelings.
Some news media orgs make junk food, some news media orgs make information poison - they make it harder to understand what is going on in the world.
"It's always in the last place you look" - if you already know how you FEEL about something, you don't have to think about it in information or factual terms at all. You don't have to keep looking.
This is right on the money. I never really used social media, and I started disregarding mainstream news about 8 years ago, relapsing every once in a while when I’m boored only to be reminded the only things reported makes me feel horrible.
All it takes to ditch the news is being on the inside of a breaking story, and realizing how much information being spewed out is just plain incorrect... then the next few articles you read, you realize it's not just your article they warped for clicks, but all of them.
When newspapers were the primary news consumption, it was a bit better - journalists had a few hours to collect facts before publishing. Now there's zero time so they will publish anything. Empty calories.
My experience of being quoted by respected news organisations (Reuters and the BBC) is that quotes will be random and out of context, or just made up (I did get an apology from the BBC for the latter and they removed it from their website).
It does not even need to be a particular story. Experts in almost every field complain about how bad coverage of their field is, and you can extrapolate to coverage being bad in general. What Michael Crichton dubbed Gell_Mann amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
I would also add knowing a country that gets covered in the news but which is not important enough to be prominent (Sri Lanka in my case) also soon shows you the media are sloppy and make huge mistakes and write with little understanding.
I stopped reading the news because of this. When 90% of the articles on the BBC are irrelevant to me and have titles like "Taylor Swift Vienna concerts cancelled after attack threat", "The 'absurd' real-life sting operation that inspired a movie", or "Behave yourselves, China tells its Olympic fans", I lose all interest.
The news has become like intellectual sugar, written more for page views than for merely informing, and I find that exceptionally irritating. Writing so-called "catchy headlines" and an overwhelming bias towards bad news has made me sick with all news organizations.
Of course, I am sure some people like it. Probably most. I am in the minority for most things, but I simply hate it.
The BBC targets a general audience so it will naturally have a wide swath of topics reported on. The alternative is "Personalization" but then critics complain this keeps people in their own bubbles.
Journalism has always been a rather shady business. "Remember the Maine."
Also, most of what you hear or read is just a reflection of who is spending money to get press. For example, Taylor Swift, AI companies and the Olympics all have a formula to turn press coverage into cash, so it should be no surprise that they are constantly in the news.
It's difficult for me to completely deprive myself of the news agenda of the world. But sometimes I do a sort of detox for a month from world news and focus more on articles in scientific journals, for example. My friend likes to go to the forest for a week every six months where he has no connection at all to the outside world
Compared to all the garbage on social media, professional articles by actual journalists don’t make us dumber I think, even if they serve a narrative. Something about reading an actual article makes us think and reason in a way that a tweet or, worse, a thread of tweets just doesn’t.
It makes me angry to read news that are aimed at ignorant people, especially when you can see that the writer is smart and is using strategies to fit his narrative into the news.
I like the system in UK and Germany where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news.
I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.
> I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age
On the one hand, I agree that it’s necessary to be informed to some degree.
On the other, I think this can be done without consuming the news the way most people do, i.e. the daily dose and certainly the sensationalized stuff are not necessary.
I’ve stopped watching/reading the news on a daily basis, and instead I’ll catch up on the recent major events every week or two, sometimes less depending on the general temperature of things.
I value being informed, but also found that the majority of news changes nothing about my day to day actions, and of the news that does change my actions/help me make better decisions, it almost never needs to be consumed the instant it’s published.
Given the current landscape, personal habit change around news consumption seems like the ideal place to focus as an average person.
> taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference)
The fee instead of tax isn't to avoid political interference. It's for fee stability, without cuts whenever the budget is tight.
Politicians/the government meddle all the time. The governing body of the public broadcasters has about a third of its members from the government (the rest is the churches and certain social and political associations).
At least in Germany publicly financed broadcasters and news tend to waste a lot of money and they keep asking for more. I’d much rather have a choice to support organizations I want than to support stuff like Y-Kollektiv or STRG F that produce low quality content and sometimes straight out lie.
> you have be informed in order to make good decisions.
Surely, one of the key points in TFA is that almost all news is
about things we have no real influence over and are removed from
effect on us to a large degree. Unless you are a stock-market trader,
or there's news of an approaching storm I think most of us just
succumb to "Oh Dearism" and chalk it up as "no action necessary" [0]
For voting, you can probably be reasonably informed with several hours of research right before each election.
If you trade individual stocks or other asset classes directly, finance news is pretty important.
Maybe staying on top of the field you personally work in. But that's probably best served by papers and long form articles in specialty blogs and web sites.
Other than that, how does "the news" help you make good decisions?
In the Netherlands as well, and the main news source (on public broadcasters) is a cooperation between all the broadcasters, which in theory means it's an independent and neutral organization that provides the news. In theory.
There's news on commercial channels as well but it's more aimed at entertainment, often has some lighter subjects and informal newsreaders, and of course ad breaks.
I stopped reading news around 2012, while working at a large newspaper in Switzerland. Or maybe better put, replaced it with slower forms of information.
Instead of doom scrolling news sites and social media for things that happen right now, you wait for some people to actually have time to investigate, synthesize, etc. There is just little to no actual information in the former way of consumption.
There is a good The Guardian article from back then.
“News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier” (2013
It's not fair to the taxpayer to have to pay for a broadcaster which is biased against you. Even Media Bias agrees that the BBC is left wing: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bbc/ .
State news organizations shouldn't exist because it's impossible to build a one which is unbiased. It will always be biased toward the establishment (which is center left in the UK but varies by country).
I am a german citizen and I always wondered why people hate SO MUCH on that system. Yes, there might be some corrupt people that give themselves too much pocket money, but overall the system works really good.
I didn't stop reading news, but I mostly stopped reading news that are not funded by the "Rundfunkbeitrag", because the funded news organizations are encouraged to be rather neutral and they don't use that much weird rhetoric. All the other private news companies are just trying to clickbait with stupid headlines.
> I like the system in UK and Germany where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news.
In the UK it does not improve the quality of available news very much.
> I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.
Bad information does not make for good decisions. Your argument is addressed by the article.
It is far better to read long analytical articles, and even more to read books, on the issues you wish to be informed about. A smaller number of works (i.e. books and articles) that give you real understanding, rather than a lot of superficial information that you will mostly not retrain.
Consuming lots of news, gives you a lot of information, but makes it harder retain, analyse and comprehend it.
I had this moment during the prelude to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
First the experts were confindent that the troop movements in Russia were just posturing and saber rattling, there's no way they'll do anything.
Next, once they'd entered Ukraine, it would be over in a few weeks. The Russians would win. When the Russians were getting their asses kicked and it looked really bad, the Ukrainians would win by the end of the summer. Next it would be over by the winter. Next the russians would run out of materiel soon. Next the russians would run out of men soon.
They confidently made every prediction except the multi-year trench war that actually ensued.
I rather enjoy doing that. It reduced my anxiety greatly when I realized just how little anyone making news understands what is going on. Doing it for the week, month, year and decade was even more educational.
I recommend picking up "NYTimes complete front pages" from ~1850-2000. You can see for yourself how the news was so much more intelligent in the 1800's.
What happened?
In 1909, 1976, and 1998, Congress greatly expanded copyright. Instead, they should have done the opposite, and abolished it. It's mathematically dumb, and is the root cause of our toxic information environment.
I stopped reading the news, having been someone who thought it was morally "right" to be "informed".
I feel much better since I quit. I still end up hearing about things, through talking to people etc, and I will still read articles on stuff that was important enough to still be written about weeks after the event.
I had the same underlying reason to stay informed and also quit reading the news.
It's certainly jarring to hear major events like the assassination attempt from friends and family first, but it's very reminiscent of my experience before the rise of internet news.
A theory has been proposed for the structure of MSM news, called the "propaganda model," which can provide a framework for scientific investigation of ownership bias in news.
//The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns. The domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.//
//The fact of the matter is, Ronald Reagan had a hands-off policy. In fact, Ronald Reagan probably didn’t even know what the policies were. The fact of the matter is, for the last- I mean the media had to put on a big pretense about this, but most of the population knew, that for the last eight years the country hasn’t had a chief executive. I think that’s a step forward in manufacture of consent, and in fact it’s maybe a sign of the future of political democracy. I think the United States made a leap into the future in the last eight years. If you could get to the point where voting is simply a matter of selecting purely symbolic figures, then you would have gone a long way towards marginalizing the public. And that pretty well happened. You had somebody who probably didn’t know what the policies were. His job was to read the lines written for him by the rich- what he’s been doing for the last thirty or forty years. And he seems to enjoy it and he gets well paid for it, and everybody seems happy, but to vote for Ronald Reagan is like voting for the Queen of England.//
THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB IS YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB
//Let me return to the prediction of the propaganda model that I mentioned...//
//...However well confirmed it may be, it’s not going to be part of the discussion, it’s going to be outside the spectrum of discussion, it’s very validity guarantees that for the reasons that I mentioned. And that conclusion, again, is quite well confirmed, and one can assume with reasonable confidence that that will continue to be the case.//
EH/NC: What you refer to as the Propaganda Model’s ‘five filters’ requires some clarification. (a) Ownership and (b) advertising belong to straightforward institutional analysis — these are the kinds of institutional arrangements that predominate among US media firms and elsewhere. (c) Sourcing and (d) flak are two well-established processes to which any elite-serving media will adapt, whether we are talking about the elite US or British media or the elite media under Stalin and Hitler. On the other hand, (e) anti-communism, as a major theme of media production during the twentieth century, was reflective of the prevailing system of belief in the Western states, and has evolved with the collapse of the Soviet bloc since the first edition of Manufacturing Consent. In a crucial sense, and extending from the most minor comic books and cartoons all the way up to the highest academic discussions of the so-called Cold War (i.e. the system of propaganda known as the ‘Cold War’), anti-communism was a staple that provided content, narratives, heroes and villains. Since 1989, this staple has morphed into an array of substitutes. But the structural role that anti-communism and its successors have played, namely, the provision of an Enemy or the Face of Evil, remains as relevant as ever.
//
So all together we have a theory of ownership and selection bias in news.
And the web is nothing if not a study of structures for attention-seeking by media.
Between agenda-setting and attention mgmt, what else do you need to understand about the structure of MSM news?
The obvious question is: what structure of news is required to further free and coherent public participation in policy?
Okay, this is interesting as I am myself now on day five of an intentional news fasting and it is amazing. So, I'm going to take some effort here; mainly for the purpose of active reflection.
===
> Reducing my intake of what is essentially junk information has significantly reduced anxiety and worry in my day to day life, and has freed up more of my time to pursue other interests and deeper reading.
Confirmed.
> My view is that "the news" primarily exists to keep consumers entertained rather than keeping citizens informed, ...
No, it exists primarily for two reasons:
1) Making a financial profit.
2) Political control over citizens.
The entertainment and dopaminergic aspects of it are simply means to those ends.
> most commonly in the form of advertisements, but also in the form of news that's constantly competing for our attention
Advertisement and news are often indistinguishable.
> I think any news junkie reading this will immediately go on the defensive.
I'm a news junkie in recovery.
> In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore. The 24 hour news cycle is something to be ignored.
Harari is a very uninteresting journalist writing shallow and irrelevant books. And those borderline pun based sound bites are indicative of it. There is no meaningful "power" in knowing what to ignore.
> resulting in "alternate" sources of information being either absurd conspiracy theories or "takes" of mainstream news on social media.
I do not agree. "Alternate" sources are the only sources of some of the news I care about. Some are maybe overly conspiracy theoretical but our governments and industries are conspirative. Regular news sources are almost worthless beyond providing a very high-level idea about what happened.
> Stories themselves are often slanted to please advertisers and company shareholders.
Or governments. And that is in and of itself highly conspirative.
> a small number of companies control 90% of the media - not just "the news". That's 90% of what we read, watch, and listen to.
And that's why people flock to "alternative" media ...
> A common argument against cutting out the news is that "ignorance is bliss", suggesting that those who do not consume the news are ignorant.
Isn't that more an argument for ignorance with regard to news?
> Let that sink in.
And that's why even X is relevant here. Cause where else will I be informed about who was stabbed again by a refugee somewhere in Germany if not there - and this is something I _DO_ care about. But also one major reason why I refuse to further bother with it as I lack the power to change anything about it.
> Rather it makes one less informed of the world and distracts you from what's going on in your own physical life and your own neighborhood, while instilling a very negative view of the world that's divorced from reality.
Yes. There is only so much attention you can give and if you waste it on what happens in Israel, Westjordanland, Ukraine or Venezuela then you have no attention left to what happens with yourself, your family, your neighborhood, your town. But those are usually not as exciting.
> Information junkies often have the most extreme views (on both sides of the US political spectrum) with a strong "us vs them" mindset where "them"
That matches my personal experience. Reading about all the terrible things happening all day long will put you into a constant mode of alarm and panic for which you have to find a release.
> That said, what difference does it make if I hear about the story hours after it happens?
Several times I've been lusting for live news on some exciting event on Twitter - hitting the F5 like in a fever. Last example probably was the assassination attempt on Trump. This always wrecks my entire day. My attention is glued to this object of excitement and my dopamine is going through the roof numbing my motivation management for anything else.
> we are today and governments and corporations are still getting away with murder and exploitation.
Yes, because they'll just produce news which is going to divert the attention somewhere else if it gets too hot. And the usual news agencies (all of them) are catering to their advertisers and certain political parties.
> Who is more ignorant of the world ... ?
I don't care about whether someone maybe considers me ignorant. The author shouldn't worry about that either. I care about my time and especially my mental health.
> Sharing your outrage of said article on social media makes it feel like you're doing something; that you're taking action, that you're doing gods work by spreading the word and keeping others informed of what's really going on.
Noticed this as well. But then again many of such people also search for ways to do something practical like going on demonstrations.
> ... but it leads us to make probabilistic errors with actual risks we face in real life.
Yes, but for many people school-shootings are not just exciting out of personal fear but also due to human compassion and empathy. For example my risk of getting stabbed by some crazy guy is negligible but I'm sick of reading about it, knowing somebody lost their life because we failed to deport someone who was a criminal long before.
> The truth is that we're far more likely to die in an auto accident or heart disease than we are from being shot or dying in a plane crash ...
Yes, but it's not like the former two examples aren't also used to feed people news. The entire Corona panic was based on a minimally raised risk of dying from it. And in some countries reporting on car crashes and other fatalities by displaying all the gory details is a relevant news segment.
> I'm not advocating a nihilistic worldview and if you think I'm being too cynical, I actually believe I'm being optimistic.
I'd advocate realism and fatalism. Nihilism is nonsense as life is valuable and all nihilists share this perspective while hiding it behind a mask of indifference. And cynicism is often simply a symptom of chronic depression - which isn't desirable either.
> Do you want news reporters setting the public agenda for what's important?
Well, they don't ... politicians and billionaires set the agenda.
===
I'm powerless with regard to each and everything that makes the news. So, why bother if all it does is consume time and make me miserable. That's my perspective.
Having said that ... I would prefer to have one reliable news source which I can consume for one hour once a week. That would be fantastic. But I just don't trust any newspaper anymore.
jtwoodhouse|1 year ago
There were also stories I was directed away from because they would alienate our audience.
It's a narrative business.
loudmax|1 year ago
Excessive cynicism is a real danger too. Democracies rely on an informed electorate to guide decisions. If you throw up your hands and say the truth is unknowable so nothing matters anyway, you're giving into autocracy. There absolutely are forces that would like you to give up on the notion of being able to tell truth from falsehoods.
You may not know absolute truth for absolute certainty, but if you live in a democratic society and you'd like to keep it that way, you really ought to make an attempt to know what's going on.
specproc|1 year ago
The worst thing is watching everyone around me, even very intelligent people, get so angry over a space that is so heavily fabricated, optimised even for that very same outrage.
bsenftner|1 year ago
create-account|1 year ago
passion__desire|1 year ago
shinycode|1 year ago
tivert|1 year ago
I think it's important to read news with that in mind, but almost treat it as game of spotting and anticipating the way things will be twisted to fit the narrative. It's helpful to familiarize oneself with concepts such as "burying the lede," and read some snarky media criticism from a perspective that cuts against the typical bias of the mainstream media.
avodonosov|1 year ago
When several news organizations follow the same narrative in a coordinated manner, is it because their editors just advertently sense "the party line"? Or the are some meetings where they are instructed? Or some written instructions distributed among them?
In Russian and Ukrainian practice I heard the term "themnik" - brief written instructions of how to present various themes.
Given that in the early post-soviet times, when this started, they all hired and learned from western (mostly american) political technologists, maybe this practice came from the west?
Have you ever saw or heard of such instructive, narrative establishing docs?
steveBK123|1 year ago
Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
flir|1 year ago
criddell|1 year ago
https://firstamendmentmuseum.org/exhibits/virtual-exhibits/a...
CuriouslyC|1 year ago
afpx|1 year ago
What's the best way to become informed about a topic? Or, is it better to stay ignorant?
mandmandam|1 year ago
Cable news is the junk food, and TDS showed it to be so bad that even a parody news show could do a better job of informing people, a point made very often by the host. Using it as an example of junk news is missing the point by a rather wide margin.
> Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
It's all coming from the same six companies, as per the article. It all has a lot of the same messaging - trust the police, the good guys always win, torture is bad but if you have a good reason it's ok, Islam is super scary yo, capitalism is cool actually, being too smart isn't cool, and leave the status quo the fuck alone or get Avengered.
... Turn your brain off at your peril. Junk food can kill. If you really feel the need to watch absolute garbage and ignore the news, you probably need to work less and/or sleep more.
cdrini|1 year ago
- News needs to be verifiable. Direct links to data sources.
- News need to have history of modifications to their article.
- Factual errors will cause dings to their score.
- Revenue sources/tax forms need to be public to find conflicts of interest.
If a news site wants to sell it's soul to make ad money, that's fine, but I want to see some sort of "F" rating on that site. There's no incentive for news sites to make good news right now.
Edit: Or, linking to this article: a sort of "nutrition facts" label for news
kranke155|1 year ago
People watching Fox News all day can't possibly think that it's a picture of reality, unless they use their intuition and rational systems in exactly the opposite sense that you are doing here (and this system of ratings would serve). People are not interested in more information, they are interested in the right information. Information that's belief affirming.
These individuals are using their "survival mode" default setting of understanding reality, not the scientific, rational, system 2 type thinking you're using here.
They feel like they're constantly under attack, so they join a system-world where constantly being under attack is validated for them.
There's no overlap between "let's give people more information" and fixing the actual problem. The actual problem isn't lack of information, but the overwhelming lack of emotional balancing and maturity to take in information you don't like.
outime|1 year ago
For such a thing to work, it needs to be funded. At the end, it doesn't matter if it comes from public or private hands, it's going to be leaning towards one direction or another, then a group of people will consider it the absolute truth and other group of people will create their own site for "fact-checking".
If humans cannot possibly be objective and independent (yes, that's what I believe after 30+ years in this planet and having met multiple people), then news cannot possibly be. Bearing in mind such a limitation, let's think how this can be possibly improved.
I personally gave up on news being informative and just see it as entertainment - it's a narrative business.
xpe|1 year ago
I think I’d be willing to go further. Purely from an economic perspective, there are negative externalities that result from poor quality news organizations. Current market mechanisms seem to reward polarization.
So what do we do?
A common response is: let’s educate people to pay more attention to their critical thinking and media diet. This can work if people change habits to align with higher level thinking. With more high-quality aggregation options, the easier this gets for individuals.
An uncommon response (that would attract the ire of many) would be to impose economic penalties on the organizations that correspond to their negative externalities. Perhaps tax them like cigarettes. It is hard to think of targeted policy interventions that don’t have all sorts of loopholes.
In broad strokes, perhaps the best solutions I know about at present are carrots. Spend generously on high-quality news organizations.
(This is just a first draft and could stand a lot of improvement.)
pjc50|1 year ago
(a recent example: a lot of places had to issue apologies and corrections over Imane Khalif due to quoting disreputable sources at face value)
tiktir|1 year ago
While the lean of an article is not a measure of factual errors. It at least is a move in the right direction. Maybe one day they will include a nutrition facts.
The other problem I see is who does the fact checking? That cannot be cheap.
boxed|1 year ago
You can't produce a system where the EPA gets its funding from the amount of pollution it stops for example. That's a perverse incentive. These types of organizations are by definition cost centers. And must be treated as such.
cheeseomlit|1 year ago
carlosjobim|1 year ago
How much do you personally spend subscribing to independent journalism? There are great outlets and journalists closing down and moving on every day, because when push comes to shove, people don't want to pay a dollar to read important news that they care about, even in their own communities.
qbxk|1 year ago
axpvms|1 year ago
Disclosure: I learnt to write an inverted pyramid in j-school but dropped out after a year, I didn't want to work in this industry. Also maybe I just wouldn't have been a good journalist.
An interesting book on this subject is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, it's where the term "Churnalism" was coined.
freddie_mercury|1 year ago
I mean, go back and read some random New York Times issues from the 1950s and you'll see the same thing.
The simple reality is that there is not enough happening every day that is relevant to our lives that people actually need to pay attention to.
If you're not actually making some change your life, your diet, your finances... SOMETHING...then the news is just entertainment same as watching a Sunday morning cartoon.
benwerd|1 year ago
For example, multiple studies have shown that in communities that aren't addressed by a robust local news outlet, local corruption goes up. Having a good newsroom _does_ improve an understanding of what your representatives are up to, and a lack of information _does_ allow them to get up to more behind our backs.
I think the biggest failure of this piece is to make all news equivalent. Yes, cable news is junk; yes, many of the corporate newsrooms that churn out hundreds of articles a day are junk. They use engagement as a metric for success rather than finding ways to align themselves with impact and creating an informed, empowered electorate. That last thing - an informed, empowered electorate - is what it's all about.
Real journalism that is diligently undertaken in the public interest does make a real difference. (Should we know whether Clarence Thomas was taking corrupt bribes? Yes. Should we know how climate change is progressing? Yes. Should we know if the police are killing innocent people? Yes. Should we know that the police at the Uvalde school shooting hung around for over an hour doing nothing? Yes.) Telling people not to pay attention to the world around them results in an electorate who cannot meaningfully vote on real issues.
For those of us who build software, we need to know the factors that impact the lives of the people we're serving. We need to know the trends in the marketplaces and communities where we show up. The news is good for that, too.
Turn off cable news; pay more attention to non-profit news; go for long-form written journalism. Stay informed.
It's absolutely true that we take a psychic hit for doing so. I'd say that's more to do with the world than it is the media overall. Perhaps we should spend more time trying to make it better?
j7ake|1 year ago
Seeing the latest tragedies on the other side of the world catches headlines, but rarely actionable by regular people.
avodonosov|1 year ago
TySchultz|1 year ago
I have been actively trying to build something to get away from the endless feeds of news.
Essentially a modern day newspaper. So you can read what is important and then be done for the day.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131
interludead|1 year ago
alamortsubite|1 year ago
mulhoon|1 year ago
rustybolt|1 year ago
However, every unread tab I close feels like a personal failure to keep up.
I can see the value of news articles and short videos like those from Fireship: It might be educational and/or entertaining, but if not, it hasn't been a serious time investment, so it doesn't matter anyway.
ajsnigrutin|1 year ago
I used to think so about books... but after some thought... why?
If you still read enough articles/books/whatever (so it's not your attention span failing), and if the article/book wasn't "good enough" to keep you reading it, why does it matter if you didn't finish it? There are many more articles and books than you are able to read, keep with the 'good ones' and forget about the rest.
Almondsetat|1 year ago
gexla|1 year ago
One interesting idea I have been toying with is to use prediction markets as a filter. Like, ask myself if I can make a prediction based on this. Then go to a prediction market and actually put a bet on a prediction. Either find one which already exists, or make one. What I have found interesting is how the situation develops into me being wrong. And how hard it is to get above zero. If I can't gain by making predictions on a situation I'm somewhat interested in, then how might being in the red on less informed topics be messing with my thinking?
Probably not realistic, but I have been thinking about how I could make it work.
just_mc|1 year ago
Follow the money.
I used to be a huge news junky. After a while I realized it's all designed as entertainment to drive ad revenue. Gave it up and I've been happier ever since.
forinti|1 year ago
Nowadays I prefer silence during breakfast.
Loughla|1 year ago
I cut out news (except here) about three years ago. My life has not changed, except that I'm not pissed off as much. Turns out all that the 24 hour news cycle really doesn't teach you very much.
gniv|1 year ago
harshitaneja|1 year ago
donatj|1 year ago
I know a fair number of people who post fascinating things, but also retweet a lot of news and politics I don't want.
globular-toast|1 year ago
People I know who do consume news interestingly only bother telling me about super shocking stuff that I don't need to know, e.g. "someone got murdered", "a celebrity said so and so" etc. They rarely tell me stuff I might need to know like "income tax is changing next year".
gordondavidf|1 year ago
I built attabit.com to summarize the news for friends, family, and myself to remove as much sensationalism, bias, and 'junk food' as possible.
The site has been having all kinds of problems today with the claude 3.5 sonnet outage but outside of that, its become the main news source of high level news for me and a lot of my friends and family.
It lets you know what's happening without getting sucked into it. If you check it out, let me know what you think?
xpe|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
xyst|1 year ago
Want to catch up on Olympic event medal status for my home country? Sub to the email newsletter.
Want to follow politics in your state? Sub to the email newsletter at local and state orgs.
Want to follow updates in tech industry in general or a specific subfield (ie, nanotechnology, or the latest hype?). Sub to the email newsletter.
With this method, I can choose when to catch up on these topics. Sure, I might be 1-2 days out of sync compared to the news junkie. But with this method I can at least guarantee a variety of sources come out and get a much better view of the issue. Rather than the often sensationalized version presented at _real time_.
One very hilarious instance of where real time junkies got it very wrong: JD Vance, the VP choice for GOP, was allegedly sexually involved with a couch. Original author of post cited a random page in JD Vance’s autobiography in tweet. What was clearly supposed to be a joke, but turned very viral.
“Influencers”, comedians, and I think even some mainstream news outlets ran with it.
I don’t recall _when_ it was debunked, but had to have been within 24 hours of that tweet.
_rrnv|1 year ago
jimbokun|1 year ago
dosinga|1 year ago
Is there something better out there?
pjc50|1 year ago
What do those and the Economist have in common? They're oriented at business users who are using the news to make decisions on, not to maintain their sense of identity, stoke their rage, or share on Facebook.
jimbokun|1 year ago
bluetomcat|1 year ago
cfiggers|1 year ago
It seems like for every human desire or appetite or source of value, there exists a quick hit, instantly gratifying satisfaction that is bad for long-term health. And there also exists a slowly-acquired, initially difficult or unpleasant, eventually-rewarding satisfaction that is good for long-term health.
Wouldn't a healthy society encourage its members to pursue the more stable, initially uncomfortable, initially difficult, but long-term good option on as many axes as possible?
We should seek out and eat nutritious, wholesome food rather than eat junk food non-stop every day. We should read books and articles rather than consume infotainment and social media. We should go to the gym rather than sitting on the couch and doing nothing. We should commit to real relationships instead of participating in infinite hookup culture. We should find real social circles to belong to and become loyal to them instead of embracing abstract political tribalism that tickles the "belonging" nerve but leaves us with no one who personally knows or cares about us when we're in actual need. We should buy things when we need them and when they're a good value rather than spending impulsively as a therapeutic exercise. The list goes on and on.
I'm concerned that the currently-most-common set of societal norms across pretty much every Western culture I'm aware of seems to encourage the opposite of all that. And I think it's gotten that way, not least at any rate, because sad, scared, addicted, unhappy, immature, overstimulated, overmedicated, physically and spiritually unhealthy humans are simply easier for corporations to make money off of than the alternative. Which suggests that this situation didn't just happen by accident—there's pressure coming from influential people and groups to make it this way. And that means there's systemic resistance to be expected when trying to swim against that current, whether for oneself or, for e.g., for one's kids.
gexla|1 year ago
I don't know if you used an AI chatbot for this, but this is an often used starting point.
base698|1 year ago
mediumdave|1 year ago
However, that does not mean that all journalism should be disregarded. I read the Washington Post and listen to NPR (regardless of how you feel about their cultural programming, their news organization is excellent.) Citizens in a free society have a duty to be informed about the issues facing that society. I reject the idea that there aren't readily available high quality sources of information about the world. Are any of them perfect? Clearly, no. But ignoring them because they're not perfect strikes me as nihilistic.
There's one quote from the article that alarmed me:
> The news is overwhelmingly about things you cannot possibly influence
In democracies, we do have elections...
xtiansimon|1 year ago
>“The news (and social media use) is indicative of a poor information diet.”
When I was young my grandfather would listen to KCBS news radio in the morning and KTVU 10 o’clock news in the evening. That’s it. My dad read the local Argus newspaper. That’s it.
As a youth I didn’t, but the impression was made.
Now I listen to WNYC (NPR) radio in the morning when I get up. That’s it.
News doesn’t have to be what they offer—24/7/365–but a habit of keeping yourself informed about local, regional, national and world events. I prefer one dose in the morning (“should I go back to bed?”)
My opinion in reaction to an opinion piece.
csours|1 year ago
Anyway, I feel like the human species has arrived at a time when we have the internet, without having a great way to deal with everyone's feelings.
Some news media orgs make junk food, some news media orgs make information poison - they make it harder to understand what is going on in the world.
"It's always in the last place you look" - if you already know how you FEEL about something, you don't have to think about it in information or factual terms at all. You don't have to keep looking.
bubblebeard|1 year ago
boingo|1 year ago
When newspapers were the primary news consumption, it was a bit better - journalists had a few hours to collect facts before publishing. Now there's zero time so they will publish anything. Empty calories.
graemep|1 year ago
It does not even need to be a particular story. Experts in almost every field complain about how bad coverage of their field is, and you can extrapolate to coverage being bad in general. What Michael Crichton dubbed Gell_Mann amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
I would also add knowing a country that gets covered in the news but which is not important enough to be prominent (Sri Lanka in my case) also soon shows you the media are sloppy and make huge mistakes and write with little understanding.
vitaliyf|1 year ago
vouaobrasil|1 year ago
The news has become like intellectual sugar, written more for page views than for merely informing, and I find that exceptionally irritating. Writing so-called "catchy headlines" and an overwhelming bias towards bad news has made me sick with all news organizations.
Of course, I am sure some people like it. Probably most. I am in the minority for most things, but I simply hate it.
gnz11|1 year ago
fulladder|1 year ago
Also, most of what you hear or read is just a reflection of who is spending money to get press. For example, Taylor Swift, AI companies and the Olympics all have a formula to turn press coverage into cash, so it should be no surprise that they are constantly in the news.
interludead|1 year ago
gardaani|1 year ago
apples_oranges|1 year ago
meiraleal|1 year ago
ricardobayes|1 year ago
I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.
haswell|1 year ago
On the one hand, I agree that it’s necessary to be informed to some degree.
On the other, I think this can be done without consuming the news the way most people do, i.e. the daily dose and certainly the sensationalized stuff are not necessary.
I’ve stopped watching/reading the news on a daily basis, and instead I’ll catch up on the recent major events every week or two, sometimes less depending on the general temperature of things.
I value being informed, but also found that the majority of news changes nothing about my day to day actions, and of the news that does change my actions/help me make better decisions, it almost never needs to be consumed the instant it’s published.
Given the current landscape, personal habit change around news consumption seems like the ideal place to focus as an average person.
Tomte|1 year ago
The fee instead of tax isn't to avoid political interference. It's for fee stability, without cuts whenever the budget is tight.
Politicians/the government meddle all the time. The governing body of the public broadcasters has about a third of its members from the government (the rest is the churches and certain social and political associations).
spejson|1 year ago
hulitu|1 year ago
They are actually funding state propaganda. There are few news on public (and private) broadcasters.
nonrandomstring|1 year ago
Surely, one of the key points in TFA is that almost all news is about things we have no real influence over and are removed from effect on us to a large degree. Unless you are a stock-market trader, or there's news of an approaching storm I think most of us just succumb to "Oh Dearism" and chalk it up as "no action necessary" [0]
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07c6llv
jimbokun|1 year ago
If you trade individual stocks or other asset classes directly, finance news is pretty important.
Maybe staying on top of the field you personally work in. But that's probably best served by papers and long form articles in specialty blogs and web sites.
Other than that, how does "the news" help you make good decisions?
Cthulhu_|1 year ago
There's news on commercial channels as well but it's more aimed at entertainment, often has some lighter subjects and informal newsreaders, and of course ad breaks.
smoe|1 year ago
Instead of doom scrolling news sites and social media for things that happen right now, you wait for some people to actually have time to investigate, synthesize, etc. There is just little to no actual information in the former way of consumption.
There is a good The Guardian article from back then.
“News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier” (2013
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
2-3-7-43-1807|1 year ago
xdennis|1 year ago
It's not fair to the taxpayer to have to pay for a broadcaster which is biased against you. Even Media Bias agrees that the BBC is left wing: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bbc/ .
State news organizations shouldn't exist because it's impossible to build a one which is unbiased. It will always be biased toward the establishment (which is center left in the UK but varies by country).
blangk|1 year ago
dailykoder|1 year ago
I didn't stop reading news, but I mostly stopped reading news that are not funded by the "Rundfunkbeitrag", because the funded news organizations are encouraged to be rather neutral and they don't use that much weird rhetoric. All the other private news companies are just trying to clickbait with stupid headlines.
graemep|1 year ago
In the UK it does not improve the quality of available news very much.
> I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.
Bad information does not make for good decisions. Your argument is addressed by the article.
It is far better to read long analytical articles, and even more to read books, on the issues you wish to be informed about. A smaller number of works (i.e. books and articles) that give you real understanding, rather than a lot of superficial information that you will mostly not retrain.
Consuming lots of news, gives you a lot of information, but makes it harder retain, analyse and comprehend it.
Phiwise_|1 year ago
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Bed of Procrustes"
marginalia_nu|1 year ago
First the experts were confindent that the troop movements in Russia were just posturing and saber rattling, there's no way they'll do anything.
Next, once they'd entered Ukraine, it would be over in a few weeks. The Russians would win. When the Russians were getting their asses kicked and it looked really bad, the Ukrainians would win by the end of the summer. Next it would be over by the winter. Next the russians would run out of materiel soon. Next the russians would run out of men soon.
They confidently made every prediction except the multi-year trench war that actually ensued.
llm_trw|1 year ago
ph1l337|1 year ago
That being said I’m still looking for some good weekly news(papers) in English.
Would love some recommendations.
breck|1 year ago
What happened?
In 1909, 1976, and 1998, Congress greatly expanded copyright. Instead, they should have done the opposite, and abolished it. It's mathematically dumb, and is the root cause of our toxic information environment.
JR1427|1 year ago
I feel much better since I quit. I still end up hearing about things, through talking to people etc, and I will still read articles on stuff that was important enough to still be written about weeks after the event.
But daily news is just 99% not worth reading.
nsagent|1 year ago
It's certainly jarring to hear major events like the assassination attempt from friends and family first, but it's very reminiscent of my experience before the rise of internet news.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
_wire_|1 year ago
1988- PROPAGANDA MODEL
https://chomsky.info/consent01/
//The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns. The domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.//
1989- MANUFACTURING CONSENT
https://chomsky.info/19890315/
//The fact of the matter is, Ronald Reagan had a hands-off policy. In fact, Ronald Reagan probably didn’t even know what the policies were. The fact of the matter is, for the last- I mean the media had to put on a big pretense about this, but most of the population knew, that for the last eight years the country hasn’t had a chief executive. I think that’s a step forward in manufacture of consent, and in fact it’s maybe a sign of the future of political democracy. I think the United States made a leap into the future in the last eight years. If you could get to the point where voting is simply a matter of selecting purely symbolic figures, then you would have gone a long way towards marginalizing the public. And that pretty well happened. You had somebody who probably didn’t know what the policies were. His job was to read the lines written for him by the rich- what he’s been doing for the last thirty or forty years. And he seems to enjoy it and he gets well paid for it, and everybody seems happy, but to vote for Ronald Reagan is like voting for the Queen of England.//
THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB IS YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB
//Let me return to the prediction of the propaganda model that I mentioned...//
//...However well confirmed it may be, it’s not going to be part of the discussion, it’s going to be outside the spectrum of discussion, it’s very validity guarantees that for the reasons that I mentioned. And that conclusion, again, is quite well confirmed, and one can assume with reasonable confidence that that will continue to be the case.//
2009- TWENTY YEARS LATER
https://chomsky.info/200911__/
// ... Ownership Advertising Sourcing Flak Anti-communism
EH/NC: What you refer to as the Propaganda Model’s ‘five filters’ requires some clarification. (a) Ownership and (b) advertising belong to straightforward institutional analysis — these are the kinds of institutional arrangements that predominate among US media firms and elsewhere. (c) Sourcing and (d) flak are two well-established processes to which any elite-serving media will adapt, whether we are talking about the elite US or British media or the elite media under Stalin and Hitler. On the other hand, (e) anti-communism, as a major theme of media production during the twentieth century, was reflective of the prevailing system of belief in the Western states, and has evolved with the collapse of the Soviet bloc since the first edition of Manufacturing Consent. In a crucial sense, and extending from the most minor comic books and cartoons all the way up to the highest academic discussions of the so-called Cold War (i.e. the system of propaganda known as the ‘Cold War’), anti-communism was a staple that provided content, narratives, heroes and villains. Since 1989, this staple has morphed into an array of substitutes. But the structural role that anti-communism and its successors have played, namely, the provision of an Enemy or the Face of Evil, remains as relevant as ever. //
So all together we have a theory of ownership and selection bias in news.
And the web is nothing if not a study of structures for attention-seeking by media.
Between agenda-setting and attention mgmt, what else do you need to understand about the structure of MSM news?
The obvious question is: what structure of news is required to further free and coherent public participation in policy?
2-3-7-43-1807|1 year ago
===
> Reducing my intake of what is essentially junk information has significantly reduced anxiety and worry in my day to day life, and has freed up more of my time to pursue other interests and deeper reading.
Confirmed.
> My view is that "the news" primarily exists to keep consumers entertained rather than keeping citizens informed, ...
No, it exists primarily for two reasons:
1) Making a financial profit.
2) Political control over citizens.
The entertainment and dopaminergic aspects of it are simply means to those ends.
> most commonly in the form of advertisements, but also in the form of news that's constantly competing for our attention
Advertisement and news are often indistinguishable.
> I think any news junkie reading this will immediately go on the defensive.
I'm a news junkie in recovery.
> In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore. The 24 hour news cycle is something to be ignored.
Harari is a very uninteresting journalist writing shallow and irrelevant books. And those borderline pun based sound bites are indicative of it. There is no meaningful "power" in knowing what to ignore.
> resulting in "alternate" sources of information being either absurd conspiracy theories or "takes" of mainstream news on social media.
I do not agree. "Alternate" sources are the only sources of some of the news I care about. Some are maybe overly conspiracy theoretical but our governments and industries are conspirative. Regular news sources are almost worthless beyond providing a very high-level idea about what happened.
> Stories themselves are often slanted to please advertisers and company shareholders.
Or governments. And that is in and of itself highly conspirative.
> a small number of companies control 90% of the media - not just "the news". That's 90% of what we read, watch, and listen to.
And that's why people flock to "alternative" media ...
> A common argument against cutting out the news is that "ignorance is bliss", suggesting that those who do not consume the news are ignorant.
Isn't that more an argument for ignorance with regard to news?
> Let that sink in.
And that's why even X is relevant here. Cause where else will I be informed about who was stabbed again by a refugee somewhere in Germany if not there - and this is something I _DO_ care about. But also one major reason why I refuse to further bother with it as I lack the power to change anything about it.
> Rather it makes one less informed of the world and distracts you from what's going on in your own physical life and your own neighborhood, while instilling a very negative view of the world that's divorced from reality.
Yes. There is only so much attention you can give and if you waste it on what happens in Israel, Westjordanland, Ukraine or Venezuela then you have no attention left to what happens with yourself, your family, your neighborhood, your town. But those are usually not as exciting.
> Information junkies often have the most extreme views (on both sides of the US political spectrum) with a strong "us vs them" mindset where "them"
That matches my personal experience. Reading about all the terrible things happening all day long will put you into a constant mode of alarm and panic for which you have to find a release.
> That said, what difference does it make if I hear about the story hours after it happens?
Several times I've been lusting for live news on some exciting event on Twitter - hitting the F5 like in a fever. Last example probably was the assassination attempt on Trump. This always wrecks my entire day. My attention is glued to this object of excitement and my dopamine is going through the roof numbing my motivation management for anything else.
> we are today and governments and corporations are still getting away with murder and exploitation.
Yes, because they'll just produce news which is going to divert the attention somewhere else if it gets too hot. And the usual news agencies (all of them) are catering to their advertisers and certain political parties.
> Who is more ignorant of the world ... ?
I don't care about whether someone maybe considers me ignorant. The author shouldn't worry about that either. I care about my time and especially my mental health.
> Sharing your outrage of said article on social media makes it feel like you're doing something; that you're taking action, that you're doing gods work by spreading the word and keeping others informed of what's really going on.
Noticed this as well. But then again many of such people also search for ways to do something practical like going on demonstrations.
> ... but it leads us to make probabilistic errors with actual risks we face in real life.
Yes, but for many people school-shootings are not just exciting out of personal fear but also due to human compassion and empathy. For example my risk of getting stabbed by some crazy guy is negligible but I'm sick of reading about it, knowing somebody lost their life because we failed to deport someone who was a criminal long before.
> The truth is that we're far more likely to die in an auto accident or heart disease than we are from being shot or dying in a plane crash ...
Yes, but it's not like the former two examples aren't also used to feed people news. The entire Corona panic was based on a minimally raised risk of dying from it. And in some countries reporting on car crashes and other fatalities by displaying all the gory details is a relevant news segment.
> I'm not advocating a nihilistic worldview and if you think I'm being too cynical, I actually believe I'm being optimistic.
I'd advocate realism and fatalism. Nihilism is nonsense as life is valuable and all nihilists share this perspective while hiding it behind a mask of indifference. And cynicism is often simply a symptom of chronic depression - which isn't desirable either.
> Do you want news reporters setting the public agenda for what's important?
Well, they don't ... politicians and billionaires set the agenda.
===
I'm powerless with regard to each and everything that makes the news. So, why bother if all it does is consume time and make me miserable. That's my perspective.
Having said that ... I would prefer to have one reliable news source which I can consume for one hour once a week. That would be fantastic. But I just don't trust any newspaper anymore.
aitium12|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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ListeningPie|1 year ago