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

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

#81

Post by lotsofpulp »

clsec wrote: post #73
Jeema101 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of it isn't actually news at all: it's news entertainment. It's very similar to how professional wrestling isn't real wrestling, but actually 'wrestling entertainment'. I call this the 'WWE-ification' of the news and politics.

I can't even count the number of times Taylor Swift and her concert tour have been on the news in the past two weeks.

I assume Taylor Swift’s marketing machine is in full gear to distract from her getting into a relationship with a racist.

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

#82

Post by ashton314 »

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…

Neil Postman articulates this point in Amusing Ourselves to Death, and cites Marshal McLuhan’s adage, “the medium is the message”: TV is entertaining and context-free. News over TV will adopt the shape of the medium.

I did a little write-up after reading AOtD for a TL;DR of the book: https://lambdaland.org/posts/personal/2020-06-07-amusing-our...

(Though you really should read the book and not my dumb little write-up.)

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

#83

Post by ghaff »

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…

Yep. For a decent chunk of my early adulthood, barring really major events, my news consumption was ABC World News Tonight and maybe This Week with David Brinkley on Sunday if I was around--and Time Magazine delivered weekly to my mailbox.

And that was pretty much it.

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

#84

Post by koube »

tekla wrote: post #21
starttoaster wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then. It's incredibly hard to have a conversation on a complex legal document if you do not read the legal document.

Lawmakers don't even read the bills the vote on, they have legal experts explain the implications to them. Would you have a better understanding of a system if you skimmed the source code or if you watched a presentation from the author?

237 pages of legalese is way beyond what most people can handle, this is why lawyers exist. If you're saying people shouldn't have an opinion unless they read complex legal documents you're just saying you don't think people should have opinions.

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

#85

Post by jvm___ »

whalesalad wrote: post #54
jwells89 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good to hear. I haven't watched cable or OTA TV for around 15 years at this point so I don't have a good idea of what it's like these days, except for that time ~5 years ago when I tried plugging in an antenna to see what I could pick up but immediately lost interest after being reminded how much time ads take up on OTA TV channels.

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

"...in rare cases, may cause gangrene of the perineum."

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

#86

Post by flyinghamster »

tivert wrote: post #33
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 wat…

Social media and its manipulation have amplified the problem vastly, and what makes it even worse is the consolidation of ownership. Nothing like turning on an ABC (owned by Disney) news program and getting ten minutes of self-referential Disney news.

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

#87

Post by yieldcrv »

rickstanley wrote: post #78

I tend to avoid most of the United States related news, to me it is like a reality show or something. I'd rather read about the US from another source, in tagesschau ( https://www.tagesschau.de/ ), for instance.

Any time there’s been an Israel Palestine flair-up in the past 20 years I’ve had to VPN to another country and read about it from publications in countries with less skin in the game

The US news was so unreliable on that topic, no room to learn anything or have any perspective aside from what was presented verbatim

and then that expanded to more topics and politics, and then “everything is political” so its just useless

I just read macroeconomic news and trade sometimes. I feel like richer people have been doing that and immune to any geo/political outcome for hundreds of years

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

#88

Post by davidw »

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 started following Jay Rosen on Twitter and that's something he often talks about. Coverage is like a horse race, that talks about the odds, not the consequences of someone getting elected.

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

#89

Post by bcoates »

digging wrote: post #47
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…

Isn't it remarkable how healthy and wise our society was before 24-hour news. Nowadays we have newfangled problems like "populism", "anger", "Nazis" - say, where does that name even come from?

No, we have a problem with the news selling those fictional things as real. Turn off CNN or OAN wherever you get your firehose of algorithmically generated nonsense from and they magically go away.

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

#90

Post by r053bud »

alberth wrote: post #75

I've completely cut out watching/reading news, with 1 exception. https://www.newsminimalist.com I stumbled across it on HN sometime back. Someone created an AI model to consume daily, thousands of news sources, scores the articles and lists what it's highest scored for the day. --- Ironically, APNews use to work this way. They provide a "relevance score" for every news article they published/reported so that other ou…

Nice recommendation. I also really like http://68k.news which claims to be: "Basic HTML Google News for vintage computers"
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