Count me as one of them. I touch an overview of what's new once a day and the rest of the time I'm listening to sports radio. It's entertaining and means nothing ultimately.
Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company
151–160 of 252 posts
Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company
#152As per usual the news people writing news articles blaming their own failure on phones and the internet. At some point can we just get one honest article where the writers and news people that work at these organizations own up to their hyper sensationalization of content and overdoing these constant news alerts and “breaking” headlines.
Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company
#153I'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…
The links are all to biased, bad, sources and the headlines already have the bias baked in as well. I don't really see how this solves the problem. If this went a step further and summarized the articles while stripping out the bias, then I think it would be a lot more useful. Very interesting concept though.
Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company
#154The 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 don't think you can really say anything is to blame for this: people follow incentives and the incentives are to yell higher and higher to be heard over all the noise of everybody else and to create the most insane headlines to be hear over all the other insane headlines. The solution to this tradegi of the commons is to ignore it all and read up on the various candidates a few weeks before the election.
I totally agree with this. Except when it comes to new platforms and media of the likes of tech we are collectively much more willing to examine and be critical of our own industry even on HN. However IMHO the thing that makes the news industry so scummy is that these are the people that still control most of the narratives people read about and they seem to almost never be self critical at all and if they were then Jon Stewart wouldn’t still have a show getting laughs off of this truth.
Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Add Apple News and any bundled phone news app to that list.
Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company
#156The 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-u…
Postman is the sort of public intellectual no longer exist. Classically educated and proud of it, conservative in spirit, tolerant in action. He also made digestible a lot of the work from 60s70s academia on these topics.
Mcluhan, his French counterparts, Deborah, ELlul, all understood something 60 years ago. Mass manufacturing and mass media are the key determinants of our society. The first has commoditized the physical things we surround ourselves with. The second commoditizes our dispositions. Political or economical arrangements matter so much less.
Taking that view, and the internet is not nearly as much of a transformational technology as we think it is. Just another means for media saturazition, washing out individual thought.
A salient effect, when everything is essentially the same, the only mechanism to differentiate is branding. Hence, everything is captured by marketing. Products are differentiated by their commercials, people differentiate themselves by the identity they assume, everything/everybody is thrown in a marketplace where comparison is based on image, not substance. Really nothing can be evaluated intrinsically anymore, our evaluation of everything gets mediated by a story, a narrative, an image. The matrix is real, not the living in the computer part, but the unease that everything is fake, everything is a projection.
If true, and it also explains why the classic California easy-going personality is now the dominant one. It is not even cool anymore to be 90s abrasive or cynical, that just elicits eye rolls (the rebellion in fight club looks quaint now, almost adorable). Better to just bland in.
The logical end point of this evolution is that we all become widgets. Essentially the same, responding to inputs, participants in algorithm, the only difference maybe the skinning, the look&feel. All undifferentiated tough.
May be true, may be not. But it certainly explains a lot of the last 150 years, and it makes our current era less special. which is comforting, we're not messing up in ways grandpa wasn't already doing so.
Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company
#157The news is no longer a singular source of information and when it was, it really wasn't that great anyway. Sure, the information sent out was reliably reliable, the problem lied in the stories that weren't reported and the inconvenient facts that were left in the dust bin.
Today, the news is a battlefield for information warfare. Treat it like the adversarial environment that it is. Understand the leanings, biases, and agendas of the publications you read (these can change over time). One of the most important parts to consider is what is left out? Which questions aren't asked? Which stories are ignored by one publication but not another?
Only once you understand all that, can you get an idea of what is going on in the news landscape. After all that still take with a grain of salt.
Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company
#158Me too. And I think it’s entirely rational. The newsroom budgets at all news organizations have been slashed to the bone. There’s nearly no well researched journalism being produced today. This news content is nearly information free and contains either the most basic facts, someone’s agenda or blatant misinformation. And on top of that, it’s emotional nuclear warfare out there, just constant rage bait or fear bait.
So yeah, I dropped out. What of it?
Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And Frontline for long form.
Not newspapers?
Re: Do you avoid the news? You’re in growing company
#160It's interesting to me that many threads here seem to imply that lower news consumption by Americans is bad and that the fault lies with the news industry. Ignoring whether it's bad or not, if Americans want mostly unbiased news, they have easy access to it on the web: https://www.reuters.com/ https://apnews.com/ Americans choose other sources for news... they're not forced to consume it. The "blame" lies with the pe…
The only actual unbiased news is CSPAN and it’s boring so no one watches it!
They are funded by the US Cable TV industry, so there is some room for bias. C-SPAN radio gets a good mix of callers, though you wonder if lobbyists have found a way to astro-turf that.