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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

#181

Post by ImaCake »

If you have a decent income you should consider getting your news from magazines and history books. I subscribe to Australian Geographic which covers issues I actually care about. Another good source for global news is Delayed Gratification [0]. Aside from the coronavirus pandemic, if you live in a stable developed country (not the USA) there is pretty much no piece of news you can't wait a while to become informed about.

I have found I know much more about politics now that I read history books and biographies rather than Sydney Morning Herald headlines.

0. https://www.slow-journalism.com/

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

#182

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

gaze wrote: post #146
MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 assure you most people outside this abhorant miniscule group abhors this abhorant miniscule group. Trump voters should indeed feel ashamed and lose their friends.

See, you don't even know why they're voting for Trump. You just assume the worst and that they're all incoherent morons. Did you know that the moral high ground doesn't mean you're superior to these people. It affects your life in a minuscule way.

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

#183

Post by kazagistar »

Not being informed enough to be politically involved is often the worst possible thing for your wellbeing in the long term. If you don't fight for your wellbeing, someone who is fighting for theirs might do so at your expense.

But of course, news is a pretty questionable source for this goal, because its always filtered through an ideology that might not really have your wellbeing in mind.

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

#184

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #162
MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What purpose does it serve for you to be well informed about the democrats and republicans, what they vote on, who they elect, etc, when you have no control over their actions afterward? Same goes for voting. None of the research you do and the research others don't do will alter the outcome of the election.

It's not widely appreciated that the point of being well-informed is to influence what happens between elections. That's when the politics gets done - the lobbying efforts, candidate selections, control of local political groups, agenda and policy design, and so on. Elections are just a process to rubber-stamp decisions that have already been made by groups of people who understand this.

^^This point exactly. The entities that want legislation to help them make money do not change. Which is why elections hardly mean much. Trump does a little bit though just because he's lone wolfing it/looking for his own self interests. So it's "different" in a way, but it's still the same game.

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

#186

Post by throwawaygh »

dtech wrote: post #155
pattusk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Research has found that media that is upsetting is more addictive? Do you have any source for tjat research? (Not doubting you, just curious.)

Anger is the emotion that most activates you and spurs you to action [1] [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1528077

Being spurred to action != addiction.

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

#187

Post by throwawaygh »

notankies wrote: post #53
deadalus wrote: post #39

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.

> Sites from local TV news groups seem to be the most dispassionate reporting these days.

Really? Our local TV news websites are:

1) absolutely terrible user experiences -- like, so many ads that the scrolling lags on my 16 inch MBP.

2) clearly just reposting whatever their parent networks feed them for everything except local news (so, Fox and NBC, the two mentioned in this article, are literally feeding lines to these "local" channels that are ostensibly totally different from their parent networks)

IMO: the death of local newspapers is a problem but the death of local TV news can't happen fast enough.

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

#188

Post by throwawaygh »

Medicalidiot wrote: post #56
notankies wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PBS News Hour. I've never watched more boring and informative news in my entire life.

NewsHour is great. Litigation of the petty partisan crap is restricted to a 10-15 minute segment on Friday evening.

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

#189

Post by loughnane »

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…

Not that one counter example refutes your whole point, but I found the analysis of his record (this week’s edition) to be rather clear-eyed.

I do agree that I’ve noticed a tinge of bias that didn’t seem there before, but to represent it as more than slight is incorrect based on my experience (been subscribijg for ~12 years)

>>> The bulk of the analysis covers the period from 2017, when Mr Trump took office, to the end of 2019. We stop in 2019 in part because some data are released only annually, and in part because the pandemic has turned economies across the world upside down. Our conclusion is that, in 2017-19, the American economy performed marginally better than expected. (That conclusion remains if we follow the practice of some political economists, who argue that the influence of presidents on the economy can be discerned only after a year in office, and limit our analysis to 2018-19.)

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

#190

Post by andrewmcwatters »

watwut wrote: post #139
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #112

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.

Why are those two garbage? I am not American and here local religious conservatives adopted Trump. Reading American radical evangelical writings, they are pro Trump too. Open support of Biden is superrare. And whether the Republicans become more radical is interesting question

It's not "news." Call it whatever you want, but it's definitely not that. No matter what your political stance.
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