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Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#31

Post by RestlessAPI »

avalys wrote: post #4

The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such. Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch f…

Cable TV and Internet are tools. They are technologies. They are not people.

News companies, specifically news company executives looking to sell as much ad revenue as possible, and are willing to produce any content that gets viewership, are to blame.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#33

Post by tivert »

avalys wrote: post #4

The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such. Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch f…

> The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such.

> Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.

No, it's television in general. People were famously making that exact same point in the 1980s, before the widespread adoption of cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death. tl;dr: the medium is the message, and the message of television is entertainment, even when the news was only a half-hour a day.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#34

Post by proleisuretour »

whycome wrote: post #10

The definition of what "the news" is has become blurry... Are the articles I read on HN considered 'news'? (I mean, it's right there in the title!) Is this article 'news'? The article talks about 'traditional' sources of newspapers, NPR, MSNBC -- is there a certain type of 'news' that people are starting to avoid?

Most folks can't even access the article because it a pay wall. So by design, the pay wall creates avoidance.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#36

Post by TheBlight »

avalys wrote: post #4

The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such. Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch f…

I'd argue the biggest problem is the leveraging of all forms of mass media to psychologically manipulate the public.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#37

Post by Izkata »

barbazoo wrote: post #9
avalys wrote: post #4

The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such. Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch f…

> 7 PM - 8 PM Back in my day and in Germany, "news" was from 20:00 to 20:15 with the last 5 or so minutes of that were dedicated to the Bundesliga :)

Where I was the US, 7pm - 9pm was prime entertainment time, and the news would start at 9pm or 10pm depending on the channel (which I think was partially so TV would become boring to kids right around when they should go to bed). Don't remember how long it ran, though my guess would be an hour before the late-night shows would begin.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#38

Post by whalesalad »

jwells89 wrote: post #25
avalys wrote: post #4

The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such. Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch f…

> But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it. This is how the news was for me as a 90s kid who only had over the air channels for TV. 6:00-6:30PM was local news, 6:30-7:00PM was World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Ou…

This is still true today, though. I am generally sick of the news too but sometimes it is nice to watch local news (WDIV channel 4 here in Detroit) from 6 to 6:30 to hear about stuff going on around town, and then NBC nightly news from 6:30 to 7 to get some more national info.

Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company

#39

Post by chmod600 »

starttoaster wrote: post #7
sylens wrote: post #3

I was recently listening to a podcast recapping a television show set in the early 2000s, where a current college aged student basically said "I wish I had the experience of being a teenager in that time period - it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world" And that's really the way it used to be. It was even better before 24 hour news networks, as your evening n…

> There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician. This is really it. Who has the time or the emotional bandwidth to spare for following all of this? I was talking to somebody about the overturning of affirmative action, and their response to me was basically "if you haven't read the Supreme Court opinions on this matter, we can't ha…

"That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long."

That's not comparable to a book. The organization of an opinion is quite good and you can get a quick sense of what the arguments are even if you skip a bunch of stuff. When you find a claim that you don't agree with, dig into that a bit more and see why they say that.

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