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Things You Notice When You Quit the News

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Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#161

Post by theGimp »

etrautmann wrote: post #155

The biggest question for me is how to track important world or national events without tracking the 24 hour news cycle. I'd like to understand trends that unfold over weeks, but not days, like a low-pass filter on the news. The best I can come up with is reading the economist, but I'm looking for better ideas.

Every morning, I start my day by loading a bunch of news sites I enjoy reading and look at the top couple of headlines. If something piques my interest, I read it.

My news sources: NYT, BBC, CBC, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star. I'm Canadian, as you might be able to tell.

Sometimes I read what Brookings puts out, but it's important to keep in mind their biases as a think tank.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#162

Post by lisivka »

sean_patel wrote: post #144
dang wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't get why everyone is downvoting this. Care to explain, down-voters? Please don't change the subject to downvotes. The HN guidelines already contain two admonitions against this and I'd like not to add a third.

But what if I really want to know. There is no explanation.

I managed to get answer from one of such downvoters: "I don't know, but it looks contradictory to general knowledge, so I downvoted you".

I hope, it will help.

If you have high IQ but lazy at explaining of basic things for regular Joe, regular Joe will downvote you, because he cannot follow you nor discuss with you.

At work, to check is my explanation is simple enough, I play a challenging game while thinking (I use sopwith, my IQ is about 140): if I'm able to think and play at same time, then my brain has some power to spare, so it is simple enough for people with IQ about 120. If not, then they will not be able to follow me. I use that technique for almost decade. Works well at work, when I have time to explain, e.g. in comments to tickets, emails, and so on.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#163

Post by nandemo »

closeparen wrote: post #73
codingdave wrote: post #13

I quit watching the news right around 1999. My family once challenged me how I knew about important events, and I told them that people in my life would let me know if anything occurred that I needed to know. They challenged me by quizzing me on major recent events. When they did find one that I had no idea about, they asked, "See? Nobody told you about that!" I replied, "You just did." And they have not argued about…

Please don't conflate the news with the TV news, which "fell" long before the respectable national newspapers started to. I agree it is not a good idea to watch the news. It's probably a good idea to read it.

But OP is talking about TV:

> To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here

Title is clickbaity, but that's not any commenter's fault.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#164

Post by bloaf »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #140
pow_pp_-1_v wrote: post #139

I depend on NPR and PBS for the news. It might not be the most impartial source when it comes to U.S. involved foreign affairs but it is much better that all the rest that's available.

I would argue NPR is as impartial as it gets for a U.S news source. Could you name a source with less bias? I sure can't.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-biased-is-your-media/

I think the PBS Newshour has them beat. NPR's Morning Edition is slightly more liberal.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#165

Post by Spooky23 »

blhack wrote: post #105
cyberferret wrote: post #70

I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. The biggest problem to me, seems to be the 24 hour news cycle for things like wars, elections and the like. I was visiting friends during a couple of major air accidents in the past couple of years (The MH370 and MH17 incidents in particular), and was astounded at the propensity for news stations on ALL channels to fill every minute of…

>Not only that, I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources. This is true every time there is a news story on about anything that somebody around me is an expert on. It's always "what the hell are they talking about!?" I've seen this directly, too. I've been on the local news quite a fe…

Blame OJ Simpson and that fucking white Bronco.

That started this era of nonsensical analysis and up to the second coverage of random car chases, progressed to constant updates about other random things, and then the 9/11 ticker sent it to the moon.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#166

Post by [deleted] »

megablast wrote: post #77
codingdave wrote: post #13

I quit watching the news right around 1999. My family once challenged me how I knew about important events, and I told them that people in my life would let me know if anything occurred that I needed to know. They challenged me by quizzing me on major recent events. When they did find one that I had no idea about, they asked, "See? Nobody told you about that!" I replied, "You just did." And they have not argued about…

> I replied, "You just did." And they have not argued about it again. This is just silly.

[deleted]

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#167

Post by 3131s »

gbog wrote: post #40

I found out that having no news at all is not so good, because you don't want friends and colleagues to believe you're living in a cave. But you only need the two three important headlines in the week, and I get these from Wikipedia home page. Also, if you are concerned by a topic, say war in Syria, just get your meat from Wikipedia article, it's not perfect but it beats all other info sources by very far.

For political articles it's good practice to read the "Talk" page in addition, I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Syrian_Civil_War

It's worth noting that Wikipedia has collectively decided to call this conflict a "civil war", which is in itself a political judgment. There is mention in the lead paragraph of the other term being used to describe the Syrian conflict, which is "proxy war". I would prefer if this page were called something more neutral, maybe just "Syrian Conflict of 2011".

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#168

Post by Spooky23 »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #17
pipio21 wrote: post #12

5. You are being manipulated by mainstream news. You can learn Arabic or Russian and go to Ukraine or Syria or Iraq and inform yourself talking to the people there, both sides of the story, or you can let the TV media tell you what is happening. I have done it(I don't know much Arabic and a little Russian but I have traveled there) and it is quite an astonishment that what TV shows you has nothing to do with reality.…

Look at recent events if you need further evidence of this. The term "fake news" has exploded in just under a month in the mainstream media. If my memory serves me, tabloids like The Enquirer have been sitting on news stands for as long as I can remember. So how did this fervor over "fake news" coalesce so quickly and uniformly? Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate de…

The Enquirer was bullshit news, not fake. They always sourced their stories and were often sued, but rarely lost.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#169

Post by seandougall »

elsonrodriguez wrote: post #146
meric wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The media is shocked even after all newspapers and TV backed a single candidate, she lost. I speculate internally they blame alternative media, so now they run a campaign against 'fake news'. Of course it couldn't just have been the fact that most states and rural counties did not like Clinton much at all - the media's headquarters are all located in big cities so they were all blind. They are now blaming and accusin…

The media wants to be shocked that covering Trump 24/7 yielded a victory for Trump.

And by complete coincidence, they now have a lot more to get people riled up about (and more clicks to sell) for the next four years.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#170

Post by nether »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #118

This is incredibly relevant to me rn. I recently cut the cord and quit FB. I legitimately do feel much happier. My FB feed was just a stream of things to get pissed about and MSNBC was just filling my head with other people's opinions. Here's my daily routine: skim thehill.com, politico.com, reddit.com/r/news for headlines zerohedge.com when I want to see what's going on in right-wing land newsblok.com if I want to s…

You quit FB so that you could read a shitload more of news?
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