News is bad for you (2013)

To vamp a little on vonnik's thread. Try this thought experiment. What would the Times say about you and your job if they wanted to dig up a scandal? Your taxes? Could a reporter truly understand the technical aspects of your job with a 15 minute interview where they are as interested in getting viewers as they are in understanding what you do? Then why do you think the Times can cover equally complex entities properly, like the military or largish businesses? How can they understand what a cop does on a day to day basis without long-term embedded coverage?

When's the last time you heard political reportage not about the actual issues, but about what that media organization's polls say what people think about the actual issues?

Or: visit a country or state or city you know nothing about. Hang around with the locals and listen to what's important to them. Now imagine how the Times would cover it. I know the media seem to have absolutely zero knowledge about the daily life of Chinese citizens, even when reporting from China. I only know because I have family there, and they're cogent, smart people. But it took me 15 years before I felt I could discuss China fairly.

How would the Times cover the local mining community? How many kids are in 4H in the USA? A lot more than the Times thinks, I bet. How much coverage do they get? How many Girl Scouts are there in the country? How many people donate massive amounts of time to their favorite causes and get a ton out of it? Why don't we hear when local church groups scrape together 5 semis worth of food for people in Haiti? Why don't we hear how effectively Joplin rebuilt itself after the hurricane with very, very little Federal help?

Turn the tables. What if you had to report on the job of a reporter for an hour. Could you report about that competently by midnight deadline? What if you were given a story about the last fight your best friend had with his or her spouse/life partner. Could you cover it fairly in 250 words with a linkbait title?

Goes way beyond that...

First, our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought.

Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Manufacturing consent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM https://vimeo.com/39566117

The corporate attack on education:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbMP-cy1INA

But books are written by dictator. I'd want something that's ranked like HN or reddit, without the newness bias. With wide range of topics and varying depth and length of article.

This only works if the community is cool. But I' have a hunch it would attract mostly cool people.

The reason I stopped reading news is that it's mostly noise: nothing in my life changed whether I knew this or that or not. After reading the paper, I had absolutely no idea of what I had just read. I can read a book at once and digest 90% of it on the first time: the news never stuck. I first dropped reading foreign affairs, then country-wide news, and finally local news, too.

It's not that I'm not interested at all but I prefer a) choose what is worth being interested in and 2) to digest the information in the form of an in-depth analysis later in time when I accidentally bump into (or search for) an article that summarizes something that has been flooding the news for years. Often even the summary doesn't really affect my life in any practical terms, so I skim it quickly to the extent of any academic curiosity I might have for the subject.