Sad to see that for the new generation, "news" is equivalent to shitty Instagram pictures. It's quite funny that they consider this as more trustworthy than conventional "news". Not saying conventional news is always right, but I'd still trust it more than pseudonymous accounts on a social network. > “Flop accounts have a lot of people fact-checking each other instead of just depending on one source giving us informa…
Yep, groupthink runs rampant on social media, just as it does on HN and other fora.
This thread will generate the usual boilerplate blathering about "Faux News" and "Wapo" and on and on and on, when the total news output of Fox, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WP, and the rest of the outlets that get people all frothing at the mouth and picking up their tribal pitchforks and torches is less than 1% of the actual news published in America on any given day.
The people who seem the most upset by the state of news today are the people who consume only from a few national sources, but never think to pick up their local newspaper where there are actual stories about the actual places they live that affect them in ways they don't even know because they can't be bothered with dead tree editions.
They use a lot of lame echo-chamber excuses about "portability this" and "digital future that" to explain away their laziness. Plus 20- and 30-somethings these days are unwilling to pay 50¢ for some factual information to accompany their $8.00 coffee and their $1,000 phones.
It may be hard for some people to grip, but 99.99999% of the news stories published in an average day have nothing to do with Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi. But you'd never know it if the internet is the only way you consume information.
What happens in the White House or Congress or the United Nations or North Korea affects people infinitely less than the new water main going in down the street, or how a local politician is spending their money, or whether it was their neighbor's kid who got killed in that bad rollover crash you saw on your way home from work.
For the record, I subscribe to five newspapers and one magazine. Three of the newspapers are in printed form. Of those, one newspaper is local, the others come by mail from other cities where I have interests. The magazine is also in print form, and comes weekly. The remaining two newspapers are digital. My wife subscribes to an industry journal which arrives in printed form DAILY as a broadsheet, six days a week, and has a supplemental app for breaking news.
The printed articles she pulls from her newspaper and leaves on my desk for me to read are generally a week to 10 days ahead of the internet.
When my newspapers arrive, the first thing I do is pull out the Opinion sections and toss them in the blue bin. America would be better off if newspapers didn't have opinion sections to reinforce all of society's divisiveness. It was OK back when cities had six or seven daily newspapers. But today, it's a disservice to the public.
I also pull out the comics section/page and read that first. If I don't manage to get past that much of a particular paper, it's still time well spent.