Better to develop the sophistication to filter out garbage and focus on the significant. It would take a more in-depth treatment than this to disabuse me of the belief that keeping a close on the government and other powerful entities is a fundamental civic responsibility.
Stop Watching the News (2019)
61–70 of 139 posts
Re: Stop Watching the News (2019)
#62In the past 2 decades, the trust I had in the mainstream news has completely crumbled and so while I haven't completely disconnected from current events, I've tried to as best I can in terms of where I get the information from.
I try to strike a balance in terms of being informed of what's going on, and the amount of time/energy invested into gathering that information.
Being informed is important to me, especially as I'm not a sports guy. It's something common to connect with others over and makes for decent casual conversation, and in bringing up current topics it's a good way to probe others to understand their points of view or how they think/feel about matters.
It also generally provides a jumping-off point into deeper conversations/topics that otherwise might never happen.
And so while I tune out where possible, I do keep a subscription to the Economist, read the daily espresso in the morning and try to get through as much of the weekly as possible (although, I will admit, usually skipping the US section these days - it has become fundamentally uninteresting).
So to me, unlike the author, Aaron S et al., it doesn't feel utterly pointless, but it's certainly not far from the periphery of being.
Re: Stop Watching the News (2019)
#63> 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 to…
[deleted]
Re: Stop Watching the News (2019)
#64One of my unplanned consequences of the lockdown is that I sorta burned-out of covid news about 3weeks into lockdown and I just naturally stop refreshing (or loading) news sites. I don't use traditional social media much either so I def feel the benefits of news detoxing.
Re: Stop Watching the News (2019)
#65Attention is the currency of media. Sensationalism is the fuel. American news is a business first and a service second.
Long gone are the days when there were legally binding rules for fairness and honesty in order to retain your license and maintain your business. Long gone are the days when the public owned its airwaves and the businesses that were granted their access were required to produce honest news in order to maintain their licenses. You can thank Reagan and Clinton for these changes and of course, the fleecing of American by Congress over the last 30+ years. (Insert Boomers suck comment here)
The PBS Newshour is the only televised news that is fact based and still run with integrity. If you're going to watch the news, watch PBS.
Re: Stop Watching the News (2019)
#66"It’s perfectly fine to say, “I don’t know enough about it, and I really don’t care to.”" This guy must be loads of fun at dinner parties ;)... i'd say stopping at "i don't know enough about it." would be the perfectly fine thing to say.
> This guy must be loads of fun at dinner parties ;) There's nothing wrong with saying "I have no interest in participating in the outrage circus with you". The whole point is that that cycle is not fun, dinner party or not.
Adding "...and I don't really care to" could easily come across as smug and even condescending, though it depends on the tone in which it's delivered.
Re: Stop Watching the News (2019)
#67This is incredibly irresponsible advice in an age of weaponised, persistent misinformation.
Re: Stop Watching the News (2019)
#68I've never watched the news, but I regularly read sites like HN and Reddit. I feel like from there I get the 'outrage overload' effect as well, but IDK what to do about it. I could stop going on those sites, but then I would truly feel like I'm cut off from an absolute wealth of information. It feels different from being 'cut off' from TV news channels or websites that I would only really read if I was referred from…
secret to reddit is to not go with the flow and only watch a small number of high quality subs
I only go to my homepage which contains about 20 subs I actually care about - and nothing related to news/politics etc.
Once I stopped going on r/popular or r/all my mood when using the site improved drastically
Re: Stop Watching the News (2019)
#69I think I'm sympathetic to much of this post and many of the comments here in how much the news that is consumed and the manner it is consumed is ultimately amounts to nothing more than mindless consumption and / or overblown anger. If you just define news as "whatever has caught everyone's attention on the national or global stage", I still think there is value to be derived in staying at least somewhat upto I still…
Voting as a block is both less effort and more powerful.
Asking your friends what you should vote for builds organization.
Having heated debates about how your friends are wrong after reading the news destroys organization.
Btw. I don't live like this at all. Just some thoughts I had recently.
Re: Stop Watching the News (2019)
#70It seems like a weird time to post this article to HN. Aren't we all living through an extremely good example of why paying attention to the news pays off? Generally speaking, people I know who read the news prepared for SARS-CoV-2 by mid-February, and those who were disconnected from the news were caught off guard a month later when everything shut down. One thing I will happily grant is that _watching_ the news is…
On the other hand many people (I can think of a number of them from my personal circle of acquaintances alone) learned to be terrified of the virus to a wholly unreasonable and panicked degree that doesn't even let them rationally consider risks vs. benefits in going out for a bit of exercise or to buy needed groceries.
This happened because of the news, frequently reporting tentative theories and information about worse case scenarios or extremes as if both were given and much more common things.
Just one example: A piece of recent WaPo reporting whose headline very clearly implied that a whole wave of deaths among young children was being caused by "strange symptoms" of COVID.
Then when one actually read the piece, a slow admission that they were talking about only a very small number of cases out of thousands of pediatric COVID cases.
This is just one example, and considering how many users of social media don't even bother to read news pieces, instead simply sharing them among their friends because the titles sounded scary, it's irresponsible nonsense for a major news outlet to phrase its headlines with so much hyperbole.