Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

Democracy doesn’t work in uninformed passive society.

Anything pro-Russia is fairly suspect, but when you get the right cross channels it's fairly easy to identify real video vs Russian Ministry of Defense propo.

CNN reporting is generally ok, but for the most part they will show a few short clips of some actual footage before switching to the standard talking heads schema. That's the point in each video where I switch away.

Reuters and the AP are generally solid, if lacking in details and being many hours to a few days late.

Other than that I generally ignore most news about things because it's mostly fluff or skips over important things that are actually going on.

edit

Also I generally trust the BBC's international reporting. Their YouTube clips are generally in line with what I see from the more "on the ground" source channels, plus I always appreciate the more thorough interviews of public persons they do, mainly because they give their respondents time to actually reply thoughtfully rather than interrupting them continually like we see in US news agencies.

Also to add on to getting Ukrainian news: You have to be mindful of videos being released by the official Ukraine government sources. They are definitely promoting their country's successes and downplaying the losses. They are in no way as flagrant as Russian sources are, but you have to eat some salt with anything they release.

For example, I am continually seeing mixes of video clips from various drones about dropping grenades by drone onto RU troops, or different "angles" of artillery strikes on Russian assets. It's upsetting because in a few cases the official Ukraine sources are splicing together different clips from entirely different engagements. When you watch enough of them daily you start to see the overlaps. For example, the next time you see a video about Russian troops surrendering and it features a couple guys driving up their tank with a white flag on it, that happened months ago. But it keeps getting clipped into many new videos.

There are others that are similar. Like a new video a couple days ago from a soldier in heavy brush dealing with surrendering RU troops. Some a-hole in the back decided to throw a grenade and all it did was explode next to him. The trooper recording then approached carefully and shot the dumb fuck many, many times. The when the soldier got close, he shot a few more times into the body to make sure he was dead.

The problem is that video is really only viewable on Telegram and YouTube and major news outlets won't show it. And since they refuse to show the full context of the actual encounter I'm starting to see clips of that encounter being included in other videos which either don't entirely tell the story or are making stuff up completely.

Except everything is an emergency. Did you hear the latest X said about Y thing? Did you hear what is happening in X-istan? What about the climate?

I don't care about any of it. At the end of the day being more informed about the comings and goings of every atomized point of the world only causes me more existential stress. If I'm being honest I really only care about what happens in my locality, and by extension my state. If it's big enough, maybe I'll care what happens at the country level. But very, very few things rise to meet this and cause me to have a need to burden myself. What Trump, or Biden, or Zelensky, or whoever is in the media circuits today says has literally zero bearing on my life in my community. Sometimes it's best to turn off the brain melting box in the corner of the room.

I really like the date range selector. I can see this being very useful for getting a clear picture about what the world thought about certain topics before they blew up in certain directions in more recent times.