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

The problem with consuming most sources of “news” is that it’s not actually factual news.

It’s heavily filtered and spun stories from a small group of heavily biased and like-minded individuals.

This is true of mainstream media, social media*, and even small circles of friends.

It’s hard to find single sources of unbiased news where there isn’t bias or an agenda.

*Yes, this includes HN, but I believe (hopefully) to a lesser extent, or I wouldn’t be here either.

The ads are undoubtedly the worst part. During local news it’s terrible/obnoxious furniture companies and national news is 100% drug commercials.

> it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world

I strongly disagree with that. I wasn't exactly a teenager back then (past 30 already), but in the 80s and 90s, news papers over here informed you about happenings in the entire world, and social developments in my own country, and neighboring countries (what you exactly got depended on the news paper, as they ranged from populist-conservative to communist; news could be rather biased). I sometimes read the NY Times in that period as well, and it had a huge coverage of world events. Their Saturday edition was no joke, so it wasn't just a European thing.

However, what you didn't read was: American boy assaults someone, twitter is outraged. American celebrity did/said something stupid 10 years ago, twitter explodes! American police officer hurts poor person, twitter has a stroke!! And that 10 times per day. All that online clickbait was missing, and rightly so. I don't care what some idiot does 6000km far from my home. If they start forming a threatening political movement, then I'd like to be informed.

The quality of journalism has degraded considerably since then. There is too much attention to personal stories, either sobbing or ecstatic, never in between, and almost always with an implicit political agenda. Some of that is good, because it makes the abstract policies and distant wars relatable, but it has overtaken the hard news. Even national politics has largely disappeared from the news paper. Only when some politician is accused of intimidating behavior it gets back in the limelight.

And that's why I am ignoring the news more and more. Not because it informs you too much about the bad in the world, but because it informs you about trivia, and lacks the things that really matter. Journalism has made itself irrelevant.

Let's call it for what it is.

News media has had completely dissolved all sense of morality in reporting. They've killed the goose looking for golden eggs.

I am of two minds on this subject.

I was very politically aware from ~12ish to probably 25 or so, and I had very strongly held beliefs and I was more than happy to evangelize. At some point I realized that most people really didn't care to live or be inconvenienced in furtherance of their beliefs (if they even got far enough to have articulable beliefs/standards) I just resigned myself to the reality that my sphere of influence is extremely small unless I dedicated more time than I was willing to activism/evangelism/whateverism and my time would be better spent improving myself educationally and professionally so that I didn't end up looking back on my lonely life, having not changed anything.

At the same time, if collectively "we" want something to change, "we" need to be informed from primary sources that haven't been focused through some self-serving lens, which takes time and effort away from immediate needs. And then further effort needs to be expended to turn "we" into "us" but there is a(n) (to some extent) artificial standard of living that a person (believes or has been indoctrinated to believe that they) need(s) to uphold that precludes effectively anyone from gathering enough of a common cause to effect change.

The people that make the real decisions have absolutely unfathomable amounts of resources/power/influence. The power comes from influence, and the influence comes from having the resources (money/destructive power) to create a situation of the carrot and the stick (blackmail or "bribes") for anyone with ambitions of upsetting the status quo. Hence the hubbub about epstein/soros or BigCorp, depending on your side.

"The News" is just another top-down adverstisement for one side or the other of the same effective outcome. Sometimes I hate feeling like I "gave up" but the^Wmy reality is that I realized I have zero control or influence over the broader situation, so for a good long time I have been focusing my energy on improving my own situation, living my beliefs and hopefully passively inspiring others to do the same.

I think Carlin (PBUH) said it best - "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"

teal deer: news is bullshit, everything that you haven't explicitly searched out and verified from first principles is an attempt at hypnotic suggestion and the only thing over which you have power is within driving distance.

thank you for coming to my ted talk.