Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 262 posts

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#131

Post by gernb »

groceryheist wrote: post #126
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #18

I’m going darker by the day. I don’t seek out news, and when I do read it, I tend to feel disturbed by how little it presents as reporting, and instead, how much it appears to have an agenda. I could do better. I followed the Ukraine-Russia war for a while, and although I wasn’t glued to it, I put too much focus on it. There is literally nothing that happens if I know what’s going on there. Nothing at all. It distrac…

> There is literally nothing that happens if I know what’s going on there. > Nothing at all. It distracts me from my family, friends, work, and myself. > I have no interesting insights or original thoughts about it, and if I did, > absolutely no one would care. So why read it? Do you vote or participate in politics in any way or do events in the news directly affect your life? One reason it's rational to read the new…

> > I tend to feel disturbed by how little it presents as reporting, and instead, how much it appears to have an agenda.

> If you don't read the news, then you're at risk of lacking important contextual knowledge about society and social norms.

Unfortunately there's very little news that doesn't have an agenda. So I'm not getting the news. I'm getting someone's opinions with various facts spun in a way so as to try to get me to vote one way or another. Is that a better way to be informed on how to vote?

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#132

Post by pjscott »

I look at the news and I see almost ubiquitous low-grade dishonesty. It's not that the people writing it were deliberately trying to lie, for the most part; it's that they wanted to persuade, or just push a worldview, and very few people really care all that much about being honest except in the abstract. From left to center to right, and to all corners of whatever political compass you favor, the people writing the news are usually spinning things in order to manipulate you. Fact checking probably helps, but it's easy enough to deceive without literal lies if you have any skill with words. Institutional reputability may help for a while, but any institution with a reputation for truth has an incentive to slowly burn that reputation by bending the truth just a little bit, and then a bit more, and so on. And of course every side angrily accuses every other side of being dishonest, and they're all technically right.

I can't resist quoting Lord Vetinari from Discworld:

----

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”

He waved his thin hand toward the city and walked over to the window.

“A great rolling sea of evil,” he said, almost proprietorially. “Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!” He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back.

“Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no."

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#133

Post by alkonaut »

I don’t quite follow. You say “news” but then mention only social media?

Even if I completely stopped using social media I wouldn’t stop reading and watching news. I read news on news sites and newspapers, and watch news programs on TV (yes regular broadcast television).

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#134

Post by Vespasian »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #18

I’m going darker by the day. I don’t seek out news, and when I do read it, I tend to feel disturbed by how little it presents as reporting, and instead, how much it appears to have an agenda. I could do better. I followed the Ukraine-Russia war for a while, and although I wasn’t glued to it, I put too much focus on it. There is literally nothing that happens if I know what’s going on there. Nothing at all. It distrac…

Getting involved in local politics was what helped me to scratch the itch of doing something to improve society.

At least in my area there is a surprising large number of things the city council can do to improve (or not improve) the everyday lives of me and my loved one.

I love that those decisions are usually very accessible in that they don't concern themselves with big sweeping legal frameworks and fundamental political ideologies.

Even without being a council member it feels nice to ride on a bike lane that you helped to bring to live.

You don't "win" everytime of course but you tend to learn a lot about how other political factions think on a local level.

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#135

Post by arisbe__ »

Is reading news often really necessary? Is it wise?

News is so specific and subject to biased coverage. Really most news should be replaced with general statistical trends. One doesn't have to examine those as often and the generality abstracts away the emotionality and hopefully bias.

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#136

Post by _nalply »

syrkis wrote: post #96
SanjayMehta wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sources of news are reliable on the conflict? I can't find anything which doesn't reek of propaganda: Western or Russian.

I use understandingwar.org. to me it does not seem like western propaganda, but rather an attempt to convey accurate information. But then again, to me mainstream news (which I stay away from) seems sensationalistic, not propagandistic.

Sensationalistic because of their need to sell attention. Especially rage is profitable. In other words, the agenda of news is to earn money with advertisement and not giving useful information.

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#137

Post by kortilla »

socialismisok wrote: post #93
Test0129 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to like NPR a lot. I listened every single day on the way to work and back home. It seemed around 2013 or so the agenda became far less neutral and far more one-sided. I haven't really found a source that is truly neutral. Reuters does an okay job and that's about it. Journalism is more-or-less dead in the era of eyeballs.

There is no such thing as a neutral news source. The act of editing a publication necessarily requires you to choose which stories you publish and whose viewpoints you leave out. Furthermore, most folks don't really want a neutral news outlet - do I want to see equal time given to white supremacists and Black civil rights leaders? No, I'm just not interested in any "neutral" discussion of human rights. I don't want t…

Ah yes, the false equivalence of “I just want a news source that actually critically evaluates what leftist politicians in power say” with “I wish they would bring Hitler back”.

> There is no such thing as a neutral news source.

No there isn’t, but there are news sources that try to be critical of the points they normally support and don’t let people get away with bullshit for “the greater good”.

NPR (KQED in particular in the Bay Area) just went batshit after 2016. No more news, just wild conspiracy sessions about Trump nuking countries, etc. It was no longer about events, it was about how every presidential tweet made the hosts and guests feel.

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#138

Post by shaky-carrousel »

groceryheist wrote: post #126
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #18

I’m going darker by the day. I don’t seek out news, and when I do read it, I tend to feel disturbed by how little it presents as reporting, and instead, how much it appears to have an agenda. I could do better. I followed the Ukraine-Russia war for a while, and although I wasn’t glued to it, I put too much focus on it. There is literally nothing that happens if I know what’s going on there. Nothing at all. It distrac…

> There is literally nothing that happens if I know what’s going on there. > Nothing at all. It distracts me from my family, friends, work, and myself. > I have no interesting insights or original thoughts about it, and if I did, > absolutely no one would care. So why read it? Do you vote or participate in politics in any way or do events in the news directly affect your life? One reason it's rational to read the new…

I'm too old to feel embarrassed over what other people think about me.

And I already gave up the game of trying not to offend people. I say what I think, and if it happens that I offend someone, I'll consider it when it happens and apologize or ignore it, depending on if it makes sense to me.

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#139

Post by tomjakubowski »

skellington wrote: post #123
socialismisok wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drug overdoses are probably a pretty minor impact to safety though, right? And vaccination rates are a pretty standard way to indicate the safety of a community against a virus...

Sure, so I guess you're being willingly misled here because the most important thing is dunking on red states due to your politics. So, if some random article says "Dallas is less safe than NYC," you are forced to believe it even though the article weighted covid vaccine rate at 90% and murder at 10%.

The average American is much more likely to die from Covid than from murder (and, in the recent past, Covid was the far more likely fate), so this doesn't seem crazy on its face.
Post reply on HN