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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

#161

Post by grantc »

throw0101b wrote: post #43
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 the internet are to blame for this. Is it a supply issue, or a demand issue? If people didn't want want it in the first place, would the producers bother to make it? We've had salacious media for a long time: > Scandal sheets were the precursors to tabloid journalism. Around 1770, scandal sheets appeared in London, and in the United States as early as the 1840s.[4] Reverend Henry Bate Dudley was the ed…

Definitely a demand issue. Sure, there are secondary supply-side effects, but the simple truth is what we see today is what captures available demand. There is no other domain where you find that Americans are willing, en masse, to eat their vegetables before dessert. So the pro-wrestling flavor of televised news is going to crush anything more thoughtful slash less entertaining with relentless invariance.

To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale. This is unlikely to happen for the same reasons we make every other stupid choice as a citizenry. Also: picture the quality of leaders we vote into Congress and try to imagine them doing anything as high-minded as solving the problems of the news media fellating them half the time, and flogging them the remainder. (Literal extensions of the metaphor juxtaposed with contemporary congressional scandals are left as an exercise for the reader.)

Take $10B of annual spend out of the US budget. Which will never be missed. Fund a public network that only does news. The budget is something like 2-3X FOX News' top line; it's enough to hire real talent and smart leaders. Give the public network one KPI and a new line item: they fund an arm's length fact-checking service or some other form of objective evaluator to score them every day for remaining factual and balanced (and be clear when it's news and when it's opinion). I don't know that you can do 100% facts in the real world -- but can you be balanced, non-sensational, and transparent? The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day -- apparently we can do this when it sells, so scoring truthfulness isn't impossible.

It seems stupid that we can't take a sub-rounding error of opex out of the budget and do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage, so maybe I've got it wrong. Even if I don't, we're not smart enough to make something like this reality.

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

#162

Post by karaterobot »

I don't avoid reading news, I just avoid reading it continuously. If there is an ongoing story I am interested in (like the war in Ukraine) I check in on it once every couple of days, via sources I have some trust in. Eventually, I read a long-form article about it, but those take a few weeks or months to be written. What I don't do is check social media every 15 minutes, or watch 24/7 cable news. I think obsession is the delivery mechanism for problems like anxiety, depression, or radicalization, not the news itself.

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

#163

Post by bcoates »

koube wrote: post #84
tekla wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's not at all legalese. Part of the reason the whole publication is so long is that each of the justices was fully aware that it'd be read by law students, interested citizens, etc. for decades to come and wrote out in longhand what legal scholars could just assume as background knowledge.

Each section was written to persuade the reader that the author's position is correct, and nobody gets appointed to the US Supreme Court without being really damn good at putting together a clear persuasive essay. These are extremely smart people with a small staff of very smart editors trying to convince you their position is the only right one; it's not like an insurance contract or EULA designed to "baffle 'em with bullshit".

If you've got a few hours to spare and even a modest level of background knowledge about American history and the current controversy involving racial quotas it's very readable. If it leaves you more ambivalent than before you started it's probably because they're arguing over a genuine public controversy where intelligent people operating in good faith can come to very different conclusions.

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

#166

Post by ghaff »

vidanay wrote: post #164
cbsmith wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not newspapers?

Do you consider newspapers as long form? (I certainly never have.)

While there are/were Sunday magazines, I'd generally consider magazines more broadly for deep dives into particular aspects of culture, politics, and hobbies.

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

#167

Post by zerof1l »

Yep, I can relate. I also started to avoid reading the news. In the past, I would read the news first thing in the morning. Now I do it only in the afternoon. I also unsubscribed from a newspaper and one Youtube new channel which had too many negative news. Overall I feel better, less depressed and anxious. And my productivity had improved.

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

#168

Post by eestrada »

Thomas Jefferson said "...the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors."

Disenchantment with the news is not a new thing. More people are figuring out how useless it is and are disconnecting.

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

#169

Post by AnimalMuppet »

AmericanOP wrote: post #22

It is a remarkable phenomenon that all three cable news channels in America have dedicated themselves entirely to the individual of Donald Trump, all the way from 2016 to 2024 and beyond. It defies a certain logic that audiences can tire of Marvel movies that come out a couple times a year, but daily coverage of such an asinine topic for nearly a decade is supported by the market? Certainly this has to be culturally…

It's no better on the internet. Can I have a news aggregator not give me 20 stories a day about what Trump said? I don't care how prolific he is on whatever off-brand Twitter he's on, I still don't care about what breathless all-caps rant he's delivered this hour.

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

#170

Post by SllX »

jgeada wrote: post #122
DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally illegal for certain with anything non-broadcast about with about 90% certainty for broadcast. It’s such a blatant violation of the first amendment it’s never going to happen.

America's notion of freedom of speech was designed at time when we thought humans would prefer truth over "truthiness". Turns out none of that was true, or only true for a small subset of the population. No other country runs with our rules of "freedom of speech == freedom of consequences" (particularly for the rich). But then, most of the West is running into similar problems with the news. Not sure there is an easy…

Not designed: emerged. Our notions of free speech emerged in a world where publishing was under British law a licensed industry, and the operation of an illegal printing press was a crime which could be punished, where there were parts of the New World where the only legal printing the press could be used for was for the Bible and where there were other parts of the New World where the British Crown retained the rights to the King James Edition of the Bible and it was illegal to print in America.

With the First Amendment we revoked Congress’ power as a lawmaking body to govern publishing. The market hasn’t failed, but other people are reading and believing things that you or I don’t agree with, but the difference is that you basically want to make them stop doing that, which I guess includes me as I am disagreeing with you here.

Don’t forget that all elected positions are Offices of Power and to seek an election is to seek to acquire power. I am more than happy to keep the flow of information outside the grasp of the types of people who seek to acquire an elected Office and the power vested in it, even at the risk that other people are wrong and take wrong actions with wrong information.

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