[deleted]
Why We Should Watch Less News
51–60 of 90 posts
Re: Why We Should Watch Less News
#52This is so true. My monkey brain cannot deal with the onslaught of cortisol triggering events.
Re: Why We Should Watch Less News
#53Personally I think it is more a matter of quality than quantity with news. I stopped watching news over a decade or so ago because I could tell that it became vaucous space filling. Instead of covering events in depth they beat a topic to death with speculation and dropped it by the time it had an actual resolution. It was abundantly clear they were trying to avoid any real journalism as it would take work which costs money.
I find news worth it as read and more in depth to the point it is more history say covering the hysteria over the VCR or past moral panics. Which I suppose sort of agrees with the article's point - seeking insights instead of ephemera.
The ephemera is relevant however if one is involved with activism in some way even if it is just to donate twenty dollars to the defense of someone subject to some injustice.
Re: Why We Should Watch Less News
#54I recall reading and saving (in my Instapaper) a super relevant essay[0] written by a Swiss entrepreneur/author -- Rolf Dobelli -- that talks about how news systematically alters your 'risk-map' of the world, thus making you worry about things that'll almost never affect you while distracting you from things that actually might; as an example, the author talks about how terrorism is overrated and chronic stress is un…
Are there any good sources of daily curated news? I'd like to read a condensed version of important news without all the emotional manipulation. I would pay money for that.
[deleted]
Re: Why We Should Watch Less News
#55I haven't watched the news in several years at this point. I'll overhear a story or two occasionally when someone else in the house is watching it. The news upsets me more than anything. It's a majority violent/sad news, with the rare uplifting story. I don't want to start my morning with 4 stories on who got murdered/robbed/raped the night before. The news anymore puts so much emphasis on the negatives. Even on the negative stories, it's rarely about the journalism, it's more about splattering the accused person's name all over the screen. Frankly I don't care about the news. I don't care to about sports news, local happenings, crime stories, construction, etc. If I want to know about the weather, I'll use a weather based source, same goes for traffic.
I will say that I also know people who watch the news too much, multiple times per day. These people live their lives based around what the news told them. Their interests, their fears, it all comes from the news. They don't think for themselves, they think what the news tells them they should think. I've seen their gradual change in thinking. They used to be a bit more out going, but now some of them are petrified to even leave their neighborhood because they think death is around every corner. The news has them so scared that violence is a foot away at any time. I have a few family members who take it to the extreme. The news has them convinced that almost everyone in the world is out to get them. The only people they aren't scared of are people they already know. If you're a stranger and try to talk to them, they automatically assume you are out to scam, harm, or otherwise 'get' them. All because the news focuses so heavily on violence and negativity anymore.
Re: Why We Should Watch Less News
#56I grew up in a very conservative household in the U.S. and when Bill Clinton was elected I watched my mother descend into a pit of anger, fueled by her constant attention to Rush Limbaugh and cable news. Her fixation on the Clinton presidency and news related to it was all-consuming. The sad thing was that she felt like she was making a difference and was actively engaged in the political process, much the same way t…
> but focused on Bush (the next Hitler!!!!)
bush launched a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. sometimes, strong negative reactions are justified.
Re: Why We Should Watch Less News
#57>Novels. Non-fiction. Memoirs. Biographies. Self-Help and the Classics. Just about anything bound between two covers will teach you something more than the latest headlines — and will do far more in regards to settling your soul. This is an awfully privileged point of view and you may want to examine your own privileges to think about why that might be. Example: I'm willing to bet the author and many people reading t…
Being fully conscious of privilege issues here... your comment sounds like Outrage Addiction to me. Yes, aware of problems with vote access. But those problems are fundamentally legislative, and won't be solved by treating the symptoms. Go to a state with sensible voting laws (my beloved Minnesota), and the system is immune, thanks to same day registration and provisional ballots. Even a concerted purge effort would…
>But those problems are fundamentally legislative, and won't be solved by treating the symptoms.
Voting for new legislators isn't the way for citizens to address legislative issues?
Re: Why We Should Watch Less News
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being fully conscious of privilege issues here... your comment sounds like Outrage Addiction to me. Yes, aware of problems with vote access. But those problems are fundamentally legislative, and won't be solved by treating the symptoms. Go to a state with sensible voting laws (my beloved Minnesota), and the system is immune, thanks to same day registration and provisional ballots. Even a concerted purge effort would…
>But those problems are fundamentally legislative, and won't be solved by treating the symptoms. Voting for new legislators isn't the way for citizens to address legislative issues?
New legislators won't help if they're not focused on the issue, or don't know what to do with that focus. (As a Democrat, I'm exceedingly frustrated with my party's lack of action on voter suppression, electronic voting machines, and other hazards.)
But that ignores my other point... that nothing about this is actually a matter of privilege. Reading books for education and/or pleasure does not interfere with keeping up with current events. And to the original article's point, the constant news feed drives anger, outrage, poor decisions, and a skewed and usually incorrect view of the facts.
May I suggest a good book on this topic? Read Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. His takedown of all the ways our brains lie to us, and how the media feeds those inherent flaws in our thinking, blew my mind and significantly focused how I look at the world. As he points out, even the smartest and best educated people in the world - business and political leaders, graduate students, etc - actually perform worse than random chance on simple factual questions about our world. It's amazing. Read it!
Re: Why We Should Watch Less News
#59OMG THIS. I recently deleted social media apps from my phone, and replaced most of my social media diet with reading books again, like I did in the good olde days before the internet. I feel... healthier. Smarter, for sure. After reading a ton of philosophy and history recently, the day-to-day political debate on the internet looks like nonsense most of the time now. And when I see someone is wrong on the internet, I…
Social media is just as untrustworthy as traditional news.
Friends sharing news/propaganda from various outlets. Fake users astroturfing on reddit/twitter/HN/facebook/insta.
I dont know what the future is, but I'm positive its going to be first-hand sources. At least that way, you are going to be skeptical the entire time and that persons reputation is at stake.
Re: Why We Should Watch Less News
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find The Economist's weekly brief super useful (the author talks about this as well). Aside from that I find Reuters' coverage pretty unbiased and objective, though I don't think 'curated' would be the right term to use in Reuters' case.
> The Economist's weekly brief Where do I find this? Googling doesn't lead me to what I expect when I hear "weekly brief", so I suspect I'm looking at the wrong thing, which is http://economist.com/briefings .
Yes, the briefing is different from what I'm referring to. There are two separate sections, "Politics this week" [1] and "Business this week." [0]
Just be aware that it's updated only once per week, and you may thus miss out on any fast moving stories.
[0] https://www.economist.com/content/business-this-week [1] https://www.economist.com/content/politics-this-week