411–420 of 502 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to ruin my own chances, but New Zealand is apparently quite welcoming to a high-skilled professional. I mean, yes, you then have to live in a boringly peaceful country on the other side of the world from anything exciting. But right now, that means you're on the other side of the world from anything "exciting".
Except for things like volcanoes and earthquakes... Though grantedly that is a different kind of excitement. You're still subject to much the same kind of media merry-go-round, and subjectively is probably not even that far away.
Call me silly, but that really is different to me. There's always some chance a natural disaster will wreck things up for you, but as long as society works together to respond to natural disasters, I feel fairly comfortable coping with that. Likewise, actually, to the terrorism problem in Israel.
The kind of "excitement" I really don't want to live with is the breakdown of social trust: having to worry that my own neighbors or local institutions will turn on me.
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…
this is an intentional ploy designed to conflate the issues of tabloid-trash and dissent.
we don't even need a ban for the tabloid trash... but once we link it to dissenting from the mainline and call it the deciding factor of the election (a huge leap...), we put the mainstream media who have proven to be incompetent and dishonest back at the wheel.
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>operate with only the sketchiest understanding of what's happening in the world. What sort of practical utility do you gain from being "informed" by "the news"? Could you give an example or two of how being informed by the news made you operate differently in your day to day life?
Good question (apart from the scare quotes!). I run a software consultancy based in the UK. I work with a variety of subcontractors, most of whom are based in Europe. The outcome of Brexit might potentially have a significant impact on my way of working with Europeans; I don't think it will, but keeping abreast of that (developing) situation is fairly important to me. I'm going to Venice on Wednesday. If there had be…
And haven't news organizations been known to exaggerate/mischaracterize small peaceful protests as large scale riots? I would think simply looking up "Venice riots" on YouTube and filtering for the last week or month would provide you the information you'd need rather than watching a talking head read a teleprompter while the same short video clip plays on repeat.
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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…
Michael Crichton? The xenophobe and anthropocentric climate change denier? Pot, meet kettle. He should have stuck to fantasy land, err, show business.
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…
I'm a fan of extremely selective news following - having tested, it makes me much happier and has very little negative effect - but it comes with an important corollary: if you're going to avoid a topic, it's very important to also understand that means you don't know much about it . I make rather a point of saying "I don't know much about that" when the topic of current affairs that I'm not following come up. Then a…
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.…
Then you get people who lack critical thinking reading crap published by anonymously owned (read: Russian or Russian sympathizers) "news" websites, and they believe it because, "you need to decide for yourself what you believe" and "everyone lies anyway".
Maybe it's less noticeable in different countries, because Russia is not investing as much into distorting the public opinion there, but in Central and Eastern Europe you can see it quite easily.
>The city where the protesters went into war and was bombarded for years and nobody displayed it on the news. Now it is displayed every single day because the people the US is supporting is losing there. Now it is so important civilians in this city, when for years they simply did not exist.
Reusing old/different footage and claiming it's something else. What else is new?
>The city where the protesters went into war and was bombarded for years and nobody displayed it on the news. Now it is displayed every single day because the people the US is supporting is losing there. Now it is so important civilians in this city, when for years they simply did not exist.
You don't mention any specifics, so it's impossible to disagree.. "Now", what is now? Since when? Bombarded for years? Starting when?
What is this manifestation you speak of, where did it happen?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good question (apart from the scare quotes!). I run a software consultancy based in the UK. I work with a variety of subcontractors, most of whom are based in Europe. The outcome of Brexit might potentially have a significant impact on my way of working with Europeans; I don't think it will, but keeping abreast of that (developing) situation is fairly important to me. I'm going to Venice on Wednesday. If there had be…
Weren't the newspaper polls misinforming regarding the Brexit result? Perhaps their interest in Brexit is contrary to yours. And haven't news organizations been known to exaggerate/mischaracterize small peaceful protests as large scale riots? I would think simply looking up "Venice riots" on YouTube and filtering for the last week or month would provide you the information you'd need rather than watching a talking he…
(Incidentally, the Brexit polls were somewhat wrong, but they were not conducted by the newspapers.)
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…
That's a rather normal phenomenon, sometimes when someone coins a new term, everybody else jumps on the bandwagon.Sometimes the term makes it into the fixed inventory of the language, sometimes the fad goes away. That's as true for "fake news" as it is for "abso-fucking-lutely" or "glashole".
> Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate death throes of an outdated and superfluous institution.
What an utter nonsense! You must have been brainwashed by social media and shitty blogs that sell opinions as news.
There is a fairly good reason why mainstream outlets "move in lockstep with each other": They let one and the same reality dictate their news rather than making it up like the online trolls from St. Petersburg. I'd be rather worried if they didn't "move in lockstep" and each of them was reporting something else as news...
One of the contributors of FiveThirtyEight made an observation that, along with this article, has convinced me to start filtering out the news. They were discussing what public policy initiatives we could expect from the incoming administration, and she said that she could not speculate on the subject because Donald Trump's signal-to-noise ratio in his public statements was so low as to render forecasting initiatives…
I don't get sucked in, and also just get an idea of what people think is important that day/week. Usually it is just noise but it can be at least helpful to know when things have happened. The headlines are enough for me.