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Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

theatlantic.com

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Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#111

Post by ajoy »

spidersouris wrote: post #106
nharada wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, my new routine is I receive a daily news briefing email in the morning and read that, and then don't read/watch any other news for the rest of the day. I feel relatively informed but no longer feel as depressed as when I would check the front page of news sites every hour. The other plus side to this is that the whiplash of rapidly developing news is never an issue. Previously the news headlines would speculate…

What service do you use for daily news briefing by email?

sorry for spam, but do try us out: https://www.thefactual.com

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#112

Post by andrewmcwatters »

I stick with I stopped reading The Atlantic because they keep pushing these rag newspaper articles.

What's on the front page of The Atlantic right now? "Evangelicals Made a Bad Bargain With Trump" and "After Trump, the Republican Party May Become More Extreme."

Garbage.

I stick with Reuters, PBS NewsHour, and others because I want news and not think pieces.

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#113

Post by ajoy »

We launched https://www.thefactual.com over a year ago, to solve exactly this problem.

Get a daily email that informs you of the main events with multiple perspectives, with a sprinkling of interesting articles.

We are a paid service ($1/month, with a 2 week trial), no ads.

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#115

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

ggggtez wrote: post #16
eutropia wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very interested in policy, but I do not watch the news. Why? Because it contains no actionable information that changes my decisions: I'm still going to vote in every election, I'm still going to research the candidates when the time comes, I'm still going to volunteer at the polls... The news is trivia, generally speaking. When I have a more active life in politics I'll take the Chomskian approach to news, but…

> says person commenting on a news aggregation site This story didn't contain anything actionable that changes your decisions either, and yet you still read it and spent the time to comment. I don't see a substantive difference between reading HN and reading following political news. Nearly everything on this site (not even just this piece) will not affect your ability to accomplish your goals in anyway. It's a distr…

Disagree.

Let's suppose for a moment that we ever reach a point where the democratic process gets involved with the question of how best to manage the western forests (what's left of them) in the USA. There will be people arguing for regular understory and brush burning, and others arguing against it.

Let's suppose that you're a citizen who gets to vote in some way on this matter. What will you base your vote on? The materials circulated at the time by those for and against various policies? Perhaps. But how will you judge those materials if you have not even a basic understanding of forest ecology.

Now, if you sit down and read about forest ecology today, it will have no impact on your ability to accomplish your goals in anyway. But is is not a distraction: it's the groundwork and the preparation for you to be able to participate meaningfully in democratic decision making, perhaps tomorrow, or next year or some other time in the future.

In short: it is education. You just have to be careful that you're learning about the actual world.

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#116

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

wallacoloo wrote: post #54
aww_dang wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a hypothetical, can you imagine a scenario where nobody voted or put faith in the political class? From this perspective, participation only validates the farce.

If you’re upset about the system or the options, your other option is to vote a write-in. This sends a stronger message in my opinion: we call such votes “protest votes”, whereas not voting all all leaves the situation a bit more ambiguous to the rest of us.

Many jurisdictions will ignore "write-ins" and they will not be reported.

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#117

Post by andrewmcwatters »

xwdv wrote: post #79

I feel that most people would benefit more from reading or watching financial news rather than political news. Financial news is about numbers and events that pertain to companies relevant to people's everyday life. Financial news is immediately actionable, you could choose to invest your money based on your interpretation of what's going on in markets or various companies. Politics will occasionally creep their way…

There's a reason why FT, Bloomberg, and The Wall Street Journal are so good.

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#118

Post by pjriot »

robk wrote: post #93
loughnane wrote: post #90

The economist is great for this. Views aside, getting a single bolus of well-considered, well-written news once a week is wonderful. You “miss out” on the “did you hear what X said” water cooler talk, but the gains in understanding and attention are significant

In the past five or size years the Economist has sadly become quite partisan and unreadable..in their trump derangement they've lost a lot of the even keel view they'd previously had over the prior decades I'd been a reader. Sadly I still read but effectively skip all politics as the new Eric Schmidt led board have certainly co-opted the formerly drier view the editors formerly would have taken in exchange for a more…

The Economist does a good job of judging each case on its merits. A socially liberal, pro free-trade publication taking issue with Brexit or the actions of Donald Trump seems perfectly consistent. Fully in keeping with its heavily “partisan” coverage of the USSR in the 80s & 90s, the regime of Robert Mugabe later on or the current perspective on the CCP.

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#119

Post by cabaalis »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #76

More accurately, GIGO: those that watch garbage sources, i.e. Fox, MSNBC, are poorly informed compared to those getting news from more legitimate sources such as NPR, BBC, etc. If you want a quality education in anything, choose your sources carefully. For instance, Al Jazeera is a good source, except on the subject of Qatar.

I listen to NPR often. What they say is generally factual and true; however I often note that a bias shows through what they do not mention when covering a topic. That's why we have the concept of the truth and the WHOLE truth.

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#120

Post by zests »

gaze wrote: post #98

Sorry but what exactly is non-political news? I’m convinced that people who talk about “politics” as a thing external to them are just refusing to engage with the parts of the world that are uncomfortable to them.

If your response to "I don't like X" is "everything is at least a little bit X" then you should read "I don't like X" as something like "I don't like anything more X than necessary" or "I don't like anything unless its in the bottom 25% of X".

This feels like a version of the continuum/heap paradox.

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