Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 252 posts

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

#241

Post by itsyaboi »

ddejohn wrote: post #209
oceanplexian wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Why is that bad news?

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

#242

Post by kedean »

gfdsgvbcd wrote: post #145
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.

i feel like TV ads get a bad rap sometimes. you dont have to actually watch them, they provide a natural pause in the action to go get a snack, go to the bathroom, do something else, rather than sitting there for 12 hours straight "consuming content"

There's a weird phenomenon I've started noticing when watching streaming shows where I keep thinking a commercial break would be nice. Even on shows built for streaming.

It's not that I want the ads so much as I want a short break from consuming the content.

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

#243

Post by s1artibartfast »

dragonwriter wrote: post #221
shortcake27 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cri…

I haven't seen a good analysis that includes urbanization and human migration.

It can be simultaneously true that Urban crime rates have declined while average crime experienced by people has increased.

If Grandma grew up in a rural setting with a low property crime rate, and I was in a big city with a higher crime rate, the crime in their environment has gone up even if the city's crime rate is going down.

The same may be true for the average American due to the net increase in urbanization.

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

#244

Post by yakubin »

gfdsgvbcd wrote: post #145
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.

i feel like TV ads get a bad rap sometimes. you dont have to actually watch them, they provide a natural pause in the action to go get a snack, go to the bathroom, do something else, rather than sitting there for 12 hours straight "consuming content"

But when they are in the middle of a film, they often make the film twice as long, and films these days are already awfully long. They can also give you a heart attack when they are thrice as loud as the film, and often start after there was a silence in the film.

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

#245

Post by Arrath »

ghaff wrote: post #83
jwells89 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

PBS Newshour was watched every night by my parents, no need for a 24hr drip feed of FUD.

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

#246

Post by JohnClark1337 »

psunavy03 wrote: post #195
jwells89 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

And realistically, as a fellow 80s and 90s kid . . . what benefit is there to this always-on 24 hour news extravaganza? There are not enough relevant things going on in the world to merit a 24-hour news cycle, so the media has to make things up to fill the gaps. But once they make things up, they're pathologically incapable of distinguishing their own made-up crap from actual relevant news items. So we spend the day…

[dead]

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

#247

Post by carbine »

zerbinxx wrote: post #213
goodbyesf wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I’m not sure about this, but I think there’s a pretty good and absolutely foregone conclusion that the world is actually extremely fucked up in new ways, growing in metastatic ugliness every year, and that it really is this Bad News that people are turned off by. To me this seems like one of those “reality has a liberal bias” or “the positive aspects of negative thinking” - mainly that education and intellect are ant…

I don't think this is necessarily true -- if you limit your sources to "good" ones (thoughtful, reliable, with minimal political agenda -- I'd include the economist and a handful of substack writers in this mix) then you can be informed without needing to expose yourself to the awful deluge of mainstream crap. So maybe you can be somewhat happy (if your definition of happiness depends upon you not being engaged in the culture war), but still informed and intelligent.

The problem, however, is the impact this change in political reporting has on actual politics. That, I'm not sure how to solve.

It used to be that pre-election debates were for nerds and policy wonks. Now everyone watches them, but all substance has been removed. Debates themselves may even cease to exist.

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

#249

Post by gretch »

schemescape wrote: post #190
gretch wrote: post #105

I avoid the news because it’s often wrong (and I don’t necessarily blame them, because they are reporting with incomplete information as it appears). I find that it’s much more productive to just ask “what happened 2 weeks ago?”. All the unverified trash gets filtered out at that point. All the outrage bait has simmered down.

Does such an “after the fact” news outlet exist?

2 weeks later is actually very hard to apply IRL because you're right that such resources don't really exist.

Actually I do more like quarter in review or year in review. For example, I know Obama and Bill Gates do yearly reviews on big things that happened.

For events like Jan 6, I tend to stay away from the coverage and what for the official hearing where it's laid out structurally.

As long as the info comes before the next election, it's fast enough.

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

#250

Post by dragonwriter »

gretch wrote: post #249
schemescape wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does such an “after the fact” news outlet exist?

2 weeks later is actually very hard to apply IRL because you're right that such resources don't really exist. Actually I do more like quarter in review or year in review. For example, I know Obama and Bill Gates do yearly reviews on big things that happened. For events like Jan 6, I tend to stay away from the coverage and what for the official hearing where it's laid out structurally. As long as the info comes before…

The Jan. 6 hearings overlapped the next (Congressional) elections, they didn’t come before them.

(And, of course, the information was laid out structurally, but one might reasonably be concerned with potential insertion of bias by the people setting the structure and filtering the information–which I don’t particularly think was a problem in that case, but it certainly would be something to be reasonably concerned about—a problem that can be mitigated somewhat if one does not rely on that presentation as the sole source of information on the event.)

Post reply on HN