No news is good news

The only actionable section is the weather report, you can decide shorts or umbrella.

The piece is utterly right. News in the constantly-coming format is junk food. Almost no context is given, even thought nothing at all makes sense if you just watched the news. What is NATO, what is a central bank? Why are the same teams at the top of the league? All of these things need some basic explanation that is never in the news, but always in any basic long-form piece.

There’s an adage, “there’s nothing as worthless as yesterday’s news”. Which led me to wonder, “was it even worth knowing yesterday?”

I realized the solution was a low pass filter.

I first switched to a seven-page newspaper (CSM) delivered through the mail. I realised the editors had to figure out whether it would still be interesting by the time it arrived and important enough to take up space in the paper.

I soon switched to a weekly newspaper (The Economist) and monthlies. I haven’t looked back. The nice thing about a paper like the economist is remained relatively small (few pages) so had to make the same class of decision as the CSM, rather than expand the paper.

I also have an RSS list of trade journals and such that I skim once a week, reading the odd title that looks interesting. Most of the time it’s only a handful of articles.

As for the high frequency stuff and stuff outside my bubble: I still talk to people and so I hear about stray stories. I do find it interesting that I have yet to have anyone bring up the Ukraine situation. At all.

…don’t you see how nihilist this sounds? And also unrealistic. You will have opinions, everyone has opinions and beliefs and feelings or else they wouldn’t be able to function on a day to day basis. There is a scale to beliefs and opinions, based on how informed those beliefs and opinions are, and how well they mesh with conditions in your everyday life. It’s important to inform your opinions and beliefs; the news, however flawed in its current state, forms at least one source of that information.

I think that taking all of this as one absolute or another is unnecessarily polarizing this debate. It is very easy to argue that them news media economy is quite poisonous, but that doesn’t mean that all of the information is useless. For example: I need to prepare for a storm that is approaching the area, I need to know if a COVID wave is nearing so I know to be more careful, I need to know if parking rules change or trash day is being moved. These immediate events affect my actions directly and so I must pay attention, sifting through the other crap as necessary.

But even beyond that, this resignation to political nihilism is societally destructive. Like it or not, we are all connected in a society. Our actions affect others. We have shared infrastructure and services we all contribute to and benefit from. Part of that responsibility is a participation in politics. Is it currently toxic and despairing? Certainly. But sticking your head in the sand isn’t an option, as we depend on cooperation in order to preserve a society on any level and that requires coordination.

Should we reduce our news consumption? Of course. But we also shouldn’t eschew all outside information and live in a self-imposed bubble. Maybe skip the entertainment section and focus on stuff that impacts you directly. If there is something that is shallowly followed by the news that sounds important, of course dig into longer-form articles until you understand it in full or discard it if it is important. Discretion matters.

But IMO there are two blind spots in that philosophy:

- If everybody did that, even the big things would not propagate. You’d only know there is a war going on if you heard the bombs.

- Voting becomes a problem. Since everything you hear is from people around you, it is most likely an opinion, which you will then echo. Also you might miss stuff which would affect your opinion, but which your friends didn’t care for.