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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

#201

Post by seoulmetro »

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…

This "news" site is absolutely useless as the top "news" is just a bunch of whinging about climate change and covid19. Even the genres don't get rid of it, as selecting "world" brings up climate change. "general" brings up covid19, etc.

That's a shame. How could most of the popular news be such nothingness?

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

#202

Post by hinkley »

r053bud wrote: post #90
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"

Wish it looked better on my phone. No reader mode :/

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

#204

Post by goodbyesf »

grantc wrote: post #161
throw0101b wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Definitely a demand issue.

This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms. The news industry literally got government to force tech companies to peddle their noxious product.

> 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 has got to be the dumbest or the most naive thing I've read in a while. If you get government involved, then you'd get garbage statist propaganda. Also it would really put a dent on the false myth about journalists 'holding power to account' when they are paid by the government.

> The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day

The media that created the Trump brand, the media that gave him 24/7 free publicity, the media that got him elected, etc? That's the media you are praising?

> do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage

The problem in society is news. More news or more government funded news is not the answer.

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

#206

Post by human_person »

basch wrote: post #71
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 News may have boiled it down to its essence, but the problem transcends tv. The same problem exists in writing, its just more spread out. If you synthesize all that happens in Washington in a day, it is a giant soap opera. IT keeps its power by keeping people paying attention to it. Even a "just the facts, maam" view of the news is largely rabblerousing. I wonder how much of what I see on https://www.memeorandu…

I think the amount of news we expose ourselves to should correlate more with the closeness of the events (or inversely with their distance from us). We can actually have an impact on events in our local community. And in a lot of ways what is immediately around us when we walk out the front door has a more impact than anything else on how we experience the world. News from far away is just second hand sadness.

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

#207

Post by oceanplexian »

JeremyNT wrote: post #171
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…

You might also consider the human curated alternative, the Wikipedia "Current events" portal [0]. It does not include very many topics, but it hits all of the big stories that are likely to be significant after the dust has settled. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Even on Wikipedia, notice how all the news is dominated by disasters, crime, etc (And sports, which is the only type of news allowed to be positive).

We live on a planet with 6 Billion people. We’re living in the most peaceful time in history. And there isn’t anything positive to cover? I don’t know if it’s necessarily a conspiracy, but there is definitely some kind of mind virus going on in modern society.

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

#208

Post by benjaminsky2 »

TheBlight wrote: post #36
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.

Not to mention that they all use or amplify the exact same talking points at the exact same time.

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

#209

Post by ddejohn »

oceanplexian wrote: post #207
JeremyNT wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might also consider the human curated alternative, the Wikipedia "Current events" portal [0]. It does not include very many topics, but it hits all of the big stories that are likely to be significant after the dust has settled. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Even on Wikipedia, notice how all the news is dominated by disasters, crime, etc (And sports, which is the only type of news allowed to be positive). We live on a planet with 6 Billion people. We’re living in the most peaceful time in history. And there isn’t anything positive to cover? I don’t know if it’s necessarily a conspiracy, but there is definitely some kind of mind virus going on in modern society.

> We live on a planet with 6 Billion people

Hate to be the bearer of bad news buddy, but we're at 8 billion...

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

#210

Post by [deleted] »

tracker1 wrote: post #66
tgv wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That assumes you even read the newspaper... when I was a kid, I had a paper route for a couple years. Only about 1/3 of houses got the paper, and not everyone even read it every day. Often only a couple cover articles, and maybe the 5pm or 10/11pm news. It was a relatively narrow window into only the most pressing issues of a given day. Today, you look at twitter and see a massive range of news from populist minutia…

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