141–150 of 333 posts
I get very frustrated, sad and emotional when I read CNN or any of the major news sites. So I avoid it. Instead I use Wikipedia once a month : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/Septembe...
That's intentional, especially with CNN. The major news sites have essentially been tabloids since the death of print. Sites from local TV news groups seem to be the most dispassionate reporting these days.
If you don’t read the news you’re uninformed. If you do read the news you’re misinformed. — unknown
> They found that those watching the most partisan television news sources—on both the left and the right—were often less knowledgeable about world events than those who consumed no news at all. This is some very fancy footwork to leave out some key information. The study found that those watching only Fox News and MSNBC answered worse than people who watch no news programs at all. As far as I can tell, this latter g…
The difference is only about 5% to the "no news" crowd. Also, people that are better-educated tend to lean liberal and therefore might prefer to consume liberal outlets, but that doesn't mean liberal outlets are better at informing people. Looking at the frontpage of MSNBC, it's almost exclusively political opinion pieces centered around the US.
Moreover, the key question is not whether you're being informed better by consuming this media, but whether it is worth risking some of your well-being by consuming it. Research has found that media that is upsetting is the most addictive. People with addictions make up all kinds of rationalizations on how their addiction has upsides. The idea that you've been wasting time consuming ultimately useless information that irritates you - it's not very attractive.
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.
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
I think more should adopt The Economist model. Yes, they definitely have an opinion, and they push it, but they're open about it and are fair to other sides. It's much better than feigning impartiality, or doing a half-hearted "both sides"ing.
Having said that - I see many tech people complain about pay walls even though many of us make $100k+. Pay walls on websites aren't that expensive. Wait till people find out how much the Economists costs.
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.
I don't engage with politics online seeing as the psychotic leftist sentiment doesn't allow for an honest discussion of the current democrats. Also if anybody simply says they vote for trump, theyre labeled online as if some sort of abhorrent miniscule group.
I was right. It really didn't add anything of value to my life. I've never missed it.
Just over 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.
It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions.
I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.
A few years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
> They found that those watching the most partisan television news sources—on both the left and the right—were often less knowledgeable about world events than those who consumed no news at all. This is some very fancy footwork to leave out some key information. The study found that those watching only Fox News and MSNBC answered worse than people who watch no news programs at all. As far as I can tell, this latter g…
> MSNBC at least seems to be informing their viewers on domestic issues better than that baseline. The difference is only about 5% to the "no news" crowd. Also, people that are better-educated tend to lean liberal and therefore might prefer to consume liberal outlets, but that doesn't mean liberal outlets are better at informing people. Looking at the frontpage of MSNBC, it's almost exclusively political opinion piec…
Do you have any source for tjat research? (Not doubting you, just curious.)
I get very frustrated, sad and emotional when I read CNN or any of the major news sites. So I avoid it. Instead I use Wikipedia once a month : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/Septembe...
I don’t know what happened to CNN. Seems they have decided to become the left wing FoxNews.