Stop Watching the News (2019)

I love this post. I rarely watch the news any more. I was surprised that during the beginning of this current era, I found myself watching news for the first time (like not just clips posted elsewhere, but explicitly seeking it out) and it's honestly degraded even more than I can imagine. Most major news networks talk to their audience like children. They provide entertainment or promote the agenda of their advertisers.

Years ago I stopped watching satire news too. I use to love Colbert and Stewart, but I also realized I was laughing at .. genocide. I thought that such a format might make people more aware and such news more palatable, but I came to believe that it just makes us numb and dumb to some of the harsher realities of the time we occupy.

If you do have to listen to something, I suggest the No Agenda Podcast (one of the oldest podcasts in existence) and the Corbet Report. Even then, take them in limited doses.

> If that’s the case, what’re you actually getting from the news? Aggravated? Wound up? Certainly not informed about anything important.

This seems like the author is explicitly arguing for the tragedy of the commons. Yes, any one individual getting 'wound up' doesn't accomplish much, but the public 'at large' getting wound up can and does effect real change sometimes.

Like, it's very easy to point to a variety of topics, about which there was sufficient public outrage from a news story to cause some change. For example, the recent killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger in Georgia. Before the public outrage that followed the release of the video, the killers had not even so much as been arrested.

If the author here had gotten his way, nobody would've seen the video, nobody would've been outraged, and nothing would've happened after Ahmed was murdered. Am I supposed to believe that this is an improvement?

My understanding is that the Arbery murder became widely known because of Twitter, not the "news." The news reported on it after it became a phenomenon, not as the original source.

And this is where the "conversation" piece may come in with a 21st century twist. Enough folks highlighted it as the "most important thing" to make it widely known via retweets and likes.

This is the way to do it. Serious kudos for this post OP.

Turn off notifications about "breaking news" on your phone, declutter your inbox by unsubscribing to newsletters from media outlets, and unfollow news co's on social media (hint: using Twitter's keyword filter is a peach for this). Completely and utterly disengage. I've done this for the past year or so and have completely mellowed out and gotten a lot more done.

The funny part? Nothing has really changed in the world, even with a pandemic tossed in. Barring opinion pieces and in-depth journalism, it's all a machine designed to keep you angry, helpless, and unthinking.

Given the angle the author is taking here, I can hardly believe that he'd be saying "yeah but spending your time on Twitter is good and productive", considering its reputation as a source of constant outrage seems even worse than for internet or TV news. So, the same reasoning applies.

You could also look at something covered more by regular news sources, like how the GOP's attempted repeal of Obamacare was blocked by public response once it became clear how many people would lose health insurance coverage. Suddenly, the repeal that was reasonably popular overall (and very popular on the right) was much less so. Would the repeal having quietly passed through Congress because nobody was paying attention to national news have been an improvement?

The author's argument is one in favor of selfishness: being a well-informed citizen of your state or country does not benefit you personally, so why bother? I actually think that the logic does hold, it's just that the implication of everyone listening to his advice is that the country becomes less informed as a whole, which sounds really, REALLY bad to me. People's average level of political and current event knowledge already seems dreadfully low, someone pushing to make it lower yet...why?