I can't really get onboard with this. A lot of the comments here, and the commentary in the article itself, talk about how depressing the news is, how biased it is, about Gell-Mann amnesia -- and they're all right. But from my own experience, the people I know who don't follow the news (either at all, or extremely minimally) are spectacularly ill-informed; they get their news either third-hand (which suffers from all of the aforementioned problems plus being re-reported poorly), or not at all, and operate with only the sketchiest understanding of what's happening in the world. They aren't going to "read three books on a topic" (from the article), they're just going to remain oblivious. And that's far worse, in my opinion.
Things You Notice When You Quit the News
261–270 of 502 posts
Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News
#2625. 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.…
You can learn Russian to be exposed even to more lies and propaganda :)
Source: I know Russian.
Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News
#2635. 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.…
>> both sides of the story That there is part of the problem. That is a very western phrase that reflects an ingrained system at the root of the problem. Binary is for silicon. There are multiple sides, or there is one. There is almost never exactly two. But we are trained to expect equal time for "both sides". It makes people think they are well-informed, when in reality if you are hearing exactly two stories you ar…
Related - the truth doesn't have any obligation to fall exactly in the middle between two extremes, or in a geometrical center between many points of view. It can really be, that one side is mostly wrong, and the other mostly right.
Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
What you're describing is Gell-Mann Amnesia: "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cau…
Funny. After reading this, I decided to comment that in my mind The Economist is a somewhat good counter example. Then I noticed that pretty much all other comments were already discussing TE. I guess I can keep on paying my subscription.
Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News
#265Nice thesis, especially since I agree with it :)
A few other things the author failed to note.
1. News delivery requires emotional engagement by the audience to keep them consuming and coming back. That means fear or people arguing. If you can get people arguing about things people are afraid of? Even better.
2. Investigative and beat reporters are being eliminated wholesale. Political reporters are the ones left. This means news outlets tend to tell stories in political terms -- even stories that may be technical in nature. Everything becomes politics. (Which we can then slot up people to fight about!)
3. Best form of journalism? Opinion pieces. That's because opinion pieces are required to show bias up front, have a thesis and some kind of logical structure to support that thesis, and provide contextual details from news and history as part of the argument. These details provide the context completely absent from most msm news sources.
4. Anything that can be used to drive engagement _will_ be used to drive engagement. Disgusting pictures, sexual titillation, mesmerizing graphics, misleading headlines... it's all fair game. This means that "fake news" is a sliding scale. On one end we have people admitting their bias and trying to report anyway, even if what they have to say is boring. On the other end we have people who have a bias and motives that are completely unknown to us trying to create any kind of content required to get us clicking.
Quitting news is probably the easiest thing to do to get a boost in mental health, and as long as you love reading, ironically you'll actually end up much more informed than before you quit.
Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News
#266Imagine if your demographic disproportionately heeds the author's advice while nobody else does. The first downside you might notice is when the next president gets elected on a platform of taxing your demographic into space, with zero opposition. You won't notice the coverage, obviously, but you will notice the decreased paycheck. You have not had to do much about what's in the news because your demographic have bee…
It's quite a jump from what's in the blog article to the claim that you end up "voting wrong". Actually, it seems to me you didn't pay any attention to what the text says at all. Please actually read it. The more I think about your point the less of a connection or relevance I see with the text I just read.
Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News
#267I can't really get onboard with this. A lot of the comments here, and the commentary in the article itself, talk about how depressing the news is, how biased it is, about Gell-Mann amnesia -- and they're all right. But from my own experience, the people I know who don't follow the news (either at all, or extremely minimally) are spectacularly ill-informed; they get their news either third-hand (which suffers from all…
I think this is inevitable. Even the effect of mass media going against so-called "fake news" won't have the effect they desire: In my estimation people will stop trusting and hence following all of it. It pays off, for as you and I have both gathered from the comments it is obvious that people do feel their lives improve once they "tune out". Since 2010 or so, this applies to me as well.
Besides, I don't know for how long mass media has existed in its entirety, but TV only existed for maybe 60 years. Before that we managed just fine without it and I think we'll manage just fine in the future as well. We'll find other ways to connect with matters we care about, which is the basis of news anyway.
When things such as what we need to spend our time on become obligatory, and enforced by social pressure, people will feel entrapped sooner or later. That's what's happening now. The media keeps dividing us into so many categories, and then passes judgment on all of us. To them, no one can escape, no one is free, no one is good - it's the only thing that sells. We're all stampeded on by editorials and pounded on by inducing guilt and forcing ads. Conflict is a cash cow.
Personally I think that the importance of news is terribly overrated - I've yet to hear of any reason for why it should be important that resonates with me. As I've said, I've tuned out for many years.
Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News
#268I can't really get onboard with this. A lot of the comments here, and the commentary in the article itself, talk about how depressing the news is, how biased it is, about Gell-Mann amnesia -- and they're all right. But from my own experience, the people I know who don't follow the news (either at all, or extremely minimally) are spectacularly ill-informed; they get their news either third-hand (which suffers from all…
I disagree.
In my experience, the people who actively don't follow any news at all are fully aware of their blindside. They just don't care (or have judged, quite reasonably, that they have more immediate personal concerns)
The worst people are those who are glued to the TV or net, closely watching things as if the future of the world depended on whether they knew politician X was fired right now or five minutes from now. They attach far too much drama and emotional involvement in matters which they have no control over. In addition, they're just as much in a bubble as the ones not engaged at all. The tragedy is that they don't realize it.
If you're in a discussion with somebody who doesn't follow the news, as long as they are reasonable, you can cover common ground fairly quickly, then get to whatever your point/question is. If you're in a discussion with somebody who is glued to the news, you can spend hours teasing out their bias and failing to reach any kind of common ground at all. That's because news promotes rhetoric instead of the dialectic. People are being taught to argue like lawyers over whatever beliefs they have because they spend hours invested in a medium that shows them lawyers arguing about events. They teach themselves how to have a closed mind.
Nope. I'll take a non-news consumer with an open mind over a msm news consumer any day of the week. Life is too short to program yourself to be so hard-headed and impervious to change.
Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News
#269I 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…
At my place (me, my wife, 6yo and 1yo daughters) we have done the same (got rid of our TV about 5 years ago). We watch the occasional TV show via on demand streaming (guilty pleasure="The Voice", food for thought="several long form journalistic features, tv documentaries etc") The improvement to our quality of life at home as been significant. In the little free time our daily chores still leave us, we simply play wi…
My advice to you would be to get a subscription to a quality newspaper, even if it's only on a weekly basis. Newspapers have come to terms with their position, as last in the news race, so they tend to make up for it with articles pondering the why's of news, rather than the what's. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for, and they will absolutely read a newspaper while eating breakfast, if you leave one out for them.
Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News
#270This is why the break from political news on HN is so welcome. Just about any topic that has a partisan angle is going to be reported with a big slant, or outright fabricated.
There are plenty of other venues for that.