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

washingtonpost.com

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

#221

Post by dragonwriter »

shortcake27 wrote: post #77
linster wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In summary: life was better in the 90s because you were unaware. Cue oddly specific example of “The Ukraine” and “rocket volley”. Next, the highlight that informal communities that make their own echo chambers are more popular as distrust in established media is sown. Finally, a personal anecdote that echo chambers curate more attention-getting articles. Nothing in this post is especially truthy or falsey, yet it ser…

Yes, my elderly mother can’t stop complaining about how much crime there is “these days”. Despite the fact crime per-capita has decreased, the news reports the absolute value. This in turn tricks people into believing something that is quite literally opposite from what is really happening.

> Yes, my elderly mother can’t stop complaining about how much crime there is “these days”. Despite the fact crime per-capita has decreased, the news reports the absolute value. This in turn tricks people into believing something that is quite literally opposite from what is really happening.

This has been true consistently since the major drop in crime rates in the 1990s. (And it was true for particular kinds of crime that were declining well before that.) This isn’t a new effect of todays news that differs from decades past: “if it bleeds, it leads” and the effect that has is much older.

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

#223

Post by wkat4242 »

Not in America but yes I avoid the news. I only read headlines once a day or so, without pictures.

I found this page from the National news agency that leaves out the picture fluff and makes it a bit like HN: https://nos.nl/nieuws/archief

It's just what I wanted! There was a commercial site too that was mostly headlines (nu.nl) but those idiots now require an account to read most articles.

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

#224

Post by tacker2000 »

Dig1t wrote: post #153
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…

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.

True, there is an overwhelming amount of the guardian links, covid (?) and climate related news, if you stay at between 7-10 or 8-10

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

#225

Post by wildrhythms »

sylens wrote: post #149
bcoates wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, early 2000s? There was very much 24/7 news media back then. Mature internet news, immature social media, multiple 24/7 national news channels for most major countries and languages... I daresay most teens in the early 2000s were aware of such minor news events as Sept. 11 and the subsequent decade of global war. Your stereotypical Millennial news junkie that the Wapo is crying about moving on with their lives was…

I recognize there was 24/7 news media then, but it was still better than now. And before there was 24/7 news media was even better than the early 2000s

Kindly define 'better'. News in the early 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s, ... was all just as commercialized, propagandized, and partisan as it is today. I think the difference that in the early 2000s the breadth of 'news' didn't include all of the micro niches and pointless internet celebrity drama that seems to infect everything everywhere today. Also in the early 2000s there wasn't the hyper addictive social networks demanding your attention on 'news' that is ultimately manufactured for views and clicks that we have today.

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

#226

Post by bombcar »

bcoates wrote: post #107
sylens wrote: post #3

I was recently listening to a podcast recapping a television show set in the early 2000s, where a current college aged student basically said "I wish I had the experience of being a teenager in that time period - it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world" And that's really the way it used to be. It was even better before 24 hour news networks, as your evening n…

Uh, early 2000s? There was very much 24/7 news media back then. Mature internet news, immature social media, multiple 24/7 national news channels for most major countries and languages... I daresay most teens in the early 2000s were aware of such minor news events as Sept. 11 and the subsequent decade of global war. Your stereotypical Millennial news junkie that the Wapo is crying about moving on with their lives was…

In the early 2000: you weren’t a “bad person” if you ignored the news. Nobody cared.

Now if you ignore the news you’re assumed to be some form of social pariah.

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

#227

Post by bombcar »

wildrhythms wrote: post #225
sylens wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recognize there was 24/7 news media then, but it was still better than now. And before there was 24/7 news media was even better than the early 2000s

Kindly define 'better'. News in the early 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s, ... was all just as commercialized, propagandized, and partisan as it is today. I think the difference that in the early 2000s the breadth of 'news' didn't include all of the micro niches and pointless internet celebrity drama that seems to infect everything everywhere today. Also in the early 2000s there wasn't the hyper addictive social networks…

When people yearn for the yesteryear of mass market propaganda it just means they yearn for when they didn’t know it was propaganda, and didn’t realize that a world where their side does everything right is a world that only exists in the propagandist’s mind.

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

#228

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

Nice to know I am not alone. No TV at home since 11 years. About 6 months ago stopped going on Twitter and google news or any internet news. In terms of my daily “diet” it is exclusively HN and Reddit/ML for up to an hour in the morning, plus a few select tech newsletters I subscribe to.

Core problem with Twitter or LinkedIn — almost everything is calculated to self-promote the authors. Granted there are many “interesting” things that pop on Twitter. However that is also a problem — things are often too interesting, and if you’re a builder you’ll never build anything if you follow every rabbit hole.

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

#229

Post by incomingpain »

I avoid the 'news' from disreputable papers because it's obvious they are regularly lying intentionally to boost a specific political group.

OP is washington post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/04...

or

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/...

These are not possible to reconcile, obviously Bernie Sanders was not the liar. The swamp beat Bernie.

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

#230

Post by dns_snek »

goodbyesf wrote: post #204
grantc wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 it…

> 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.

As opposed to being paid directly by the people they're supposed to hold accountable?

Government-funded media would at least have a fighting chance of being neutral, checks and balances and all. By all accounts the US justice system is corrupt as well, but it would obviously be orders of magnitude worse if you outsourced it to private corporations.

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