Things You Notice When You Quit the News

Yes, I have long wanted, and still want, to know what is important, both to me personally and more generally, about what is going on in the world so still make efforts to be so "informed". Then, over time, I went through much of the negative views about news in the OP: (1) One summer while in college, I was with my parents in DC and read The Washington Post, a lot of it, everyday and at the end of the summer concluded that I'd learned next to nothing and 99 44/100% had just wasted time. (2) Later, one day I counted and found that, in trying to be informed, I was getting 22 print periodicals, concluded that even the 22 were not telling me much of value, and cut way back. (3) I happened to notice in an Andy Hardy movie from the 1930s that then, too, apparently the movie makers believed that their audience would accept that the news was junk information. (4) I have left over from the past three quite good TV sets and with my phone and Internet service have some TV service for no extra charge. Still, I have no TV set connected to a cable or any other source and haven't watched TV in years with one exception: I tried to watch the first Republican debate on TV; mostly that was a flop. I watched the debate later on the Internet and got and read a transcript -- much better.

For the mainstream media, say AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, Boston Globe, LAT, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, Slate, Salon, Huffpo, Business Insider, and more, I have a triage:

(i) I am willing to glance at the headlines if only to see what nonsense the MSM is pushing onto the public now. And if there really is a big story, say, a nuke exploded somewhere, then I will want to know and likely that will be in the headlines. Also I get some lessons by example in, say, PR nonsense from some experts in getting attention from even usually next to nothing in meaningful content! Like in the remark about writing news stories of the reporter in the original version of the movie The Thing, if the real story is not good, then he "will make it good". So, the news distorting the truth is an old story. I also learn about "the common man in the street" -- from the fact that millions of people watch that stuff -- maybe the most important thing can learn from watching the news is about people from the fact that each day hundreds of millions of people pay attention to that stuff!

(ii) Any article written by a reporter or news organization, e.g., AP, I nearly always refuse to take seriously or even read at all anymore. From my huge sample of such articles I did read in the past, I assume that such an article fails even common high school term paper writing standards for meaningful, trustworthy content and that it is likely some or all of uninformed, misinformed, biased, and deliberately distorted, fabricated, or lying. I say that such articles are (borrowing from the Bogart movie The Maltese Falcon), with bitter contempt, by newsies and nearly always refuse to read them or, if read them for some special reason, flatly refuse to take the content at face value.

(iii) I am eager to pay attention to news stories on topics I'm interested in and signed by people with high credibility. Mostly for such an article, I keep a copy on my computer with a reference to the source and with an abstract and an entry in an index.

I believe that staying "informed" is important: E.g., here in the US we just had an election for POTUS. IMHO, the two main candidates were very different and promised significantly different, better/worse, results for the US and even my own life.

So, first, I tried to say informed and, to some extent, more superficial than I would like, did. And by watching the campaigns, the candidates, and the reactions of the newsies and citizens, I did get some education in such things -- I got some more insight into people, personalities, politics, e.g., stuff I didn't learn much about studying mathematics!

And, second, I got involved by practicing my writing and posting on-line -- so, I tried to do better as a US citizen.

So, sure, now I get essentially all my news from the Internet. One important approach is to use HN as a filter to find more important content.

Here at HN, often there are references to articles at the NYT. Unless such articles appear to be signed by people with credibility and independent of the NYT, I flatly, automatically refuse to read them. I have, maybe with one exception a decade, zip, zilch, and zero respect for anything the NYT thinks or believes.

The Internet permits a news organization, maybe just some one person, to reach nearly everyone who might be interested in content from that person. From that fact, I am guessing that the Internet -- that does permit deeper presentations of information -- is the key to an irresistible, radical transformation of public understanding and effectiveness in the US democracy.

So, net, with some nuance, I disagree with some of the OP and conclude that the news and staying informed, are important.

I find the Economist suspicious because no names are given for articles, and they contradict themselves every couple of issues. Well they used to about 4yrs ago when I stopped reading it.

For immediate news on whatever happening is going on I have a 4chan app as it's surprisingly an accurate source for unfolding events (Sam Hyde memes aside) and I can quickly regex the content. I also read the Syrian /sg/ general thread to get the other side of the war there as Syrians often post to it.

I try and find a book for anything else, Princeton University Press is great for this.