No news is good news

I think this is a great and useful perspective. The most salient point being that "fake news" and "bias" and "balance" is a red herring to the much bigger problem of "news" in general. The near-universal acceptance that one can and should have firm opinions about complex ongoing events, some constant stream of incomprehensible information that is most likely completely unrelated to you, is the actual problem. I think the author is basically spot on here.

Where I think it breaks down is the prescription that everyone can necessarily separate themselves from "news". I think this is increasingly infeasible. Even if you, personally, don't buy a subscription or scroll twitter, I don't think it's too outlandish to expect that people around you in your family or community might take action based on some national or international news that is admittedly basically pointless. Are you supposed to righteously shut down every news-related conversation about that you're a part of?

More broadly this also runs into the absurdity of trying to define arbitrary boundaries around "news". You're just begging your unconscious mind to label subjects you are personally uncomfortable with as "news" and therefore not worthy of considering.

So removing "news" from your life as much as possible, or at least separating if from yourself and your ego to some significant extent, can really only be part of the answer and is also by definition an endless uphill battle. I don't think there's any getting away from the need for a broader media literacy.

Also:

>And perhaps there is something to that, given that my online avatar is a pixelated rendering of Stanczyk the Court Jester. But jesters are kept around because they say what needs to be said. And they express these unpopular messages with enough wit and entertainment that the kings let them keep their heads and indeed value their council.

This faux-humility disclaimer made me cringe. I thought this was a good piece overall, but this made me almost close the tab. Don't do this. They already opened the blog post, don't desperately plead with your reader that you promise that your thoughts are worth reading.

Ah yes. Reading the news is useless in the sense that reading the mainstream news is useless. It's both deliberately (pushing a narrative) and by incompetence (Gell Mann Amnesia) wrong more often than not.

That doesn't mean cutting yourself off from the world is wrong. Large outlier events often cast shadows (Covid, Ukraine war) and if you're in the path of the outlier events, knowing early pays off.

The hard question is, how do you see the large shadows without having to twitch at every small event. The answer to this is, to some extent, mentioned in the article - expensive, subscription-based newsletters. It's still not the full answer. There are too many areas to pay attention to. Best answer I've found so far is having a group of friends & contacts with wide-ranging interests.

"Pour vivre heureux vivons cachés"

Check in once every few months. That's plenty. Done. [EDIT] Exception for local news. Maybe every week or two.

Use the extra time to read books on political science, economics, and history. Maybe some media studies. You'll be a better voter doing that instead of following the news closely. It's not as if it should have taken someone who knew nothing about either person, but a lot about the actual issues and how politics works, a ton of time to figure out if they wanted to vote for Trump or Biden. 20 minutes of googling right before going to the polls should have been enough.

    “If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”

Which is a hard problem. Personally though, I do a quick skim of the news each morning just so that I know we haven't nuked each other to death or that a new pandemic-like world event hasn't happened. I enjoy Reuters, Associated Press, and a local news feed for my area. Sumi.news[0] is great too if you want to essentially scan & skim the whole Internet in one fell swoop.

[0] https://sumi.news/