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The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

chuck.is

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Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#101

Post by freddie_mercury »

axpvms wrote: post #44

I think most journalists these days are not much more than poorly informed and poorly paid professional sh*tposters/provocateurs who learned how to write an inverted pyramid in j-school. I can easily find poorly informed and attention-grabbing opinions from a number of places, including even here :). Disclosure: I learnt to write an inverted pyramid in j-school but dropped out after a year, I didn't want to work in t…

I think this makes a common mistake that this has anything to do with "journalists these days" or editorial slants or anything else.

I mean, go back and read some random New York Times issues from the 1950s and you'll see the same thing.

The simple reality is that there is not enough happening every day that is relevant to our lives that people actually need to pay attention to.

If you're not actually making some change your life, your diet, your finances... SOMETHING...then the news is just entertainment same as watching a Sunday morning cartoon.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#102

Post by mandmandam »

fsagx wrote: post #81
pjc50 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't there a study which showed that UK tabloid readers were worse informed than people who simply didn't pay attention to the news at all?

It's not a new observation. More than a century ago, Mark Twain observed: "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."

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 and errors." -Thomas Jefferson, 1807

As a result of this thread I looked into the first US newspaper and discovered it was shut down after one issue because they printed something a governor didn't like, lol. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publick_Occurrences_Both_Forre...

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#103

Post by nsagent »

JR1427 wrote: post #83

I stopped reading the news, having been someone who thought it was morally "right" to be "informed". I feel much better since I quit. I still end up hearing about things, through talking to people etc, and I will still read articles on stuff that was important enough to still be written about weeks after the event. But daily news is just 99% not worth reading.

I had the same underlying reason to stay informed and also quit reading the news.

It's certainly jarring to hear major events like the assassination attempt from friends and family first, but it's very reminiscent of my experience before the rise of internet news.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#104

Post by vundercind »

steveBK123 wrote: post #52
kaashif wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Multiple studies over those years showed that The Daily Show watchers were significantly better informed on issues than cable news viewers. This comment only makes sense if you're trying to imply the Daily Show increases how informed people are. It seems plausible that causation runs the other way: more informed people are more likely to watch the Daily Show, because then they get all the jokes.

Precisely. The Daily Show was a predecessor to Twitter political culture and remains the offline version of it. Blue Flavored Fox News with more laughs. It's the same political culture of preaching to the already converted and mostly shouting about how bad the other side is. No attempts at persuasion.

It definitely doesn’t have as big a problem with manufacturing outrage “news” out of nothing at all, like Fox does (and its pal, AM radio). They’ll routinely report ordinary things without history or context in order to imply they’re both new and bad (and they may be bad, but not for the reasons they imply, which often simply aren’t real)

I sometimes wonder if people who compare things like the daily show or John Oliver to Fox News have watched Fox News at all in the last 15 years or so.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#105

Post by xpe »

gordondavidf wrote: post #82

I have struggled with the negative aspects of news as well and personally think there is a middle route over cutting it out. I built attabit.com to summarize the news for friends, family, and myself to remove as much sensationalism, bias, and 'junk food' as possible. The site has been having all kinds of problems today with the claude 3.5 sonnet outage but outside of that, its become the main news source of high leve…

Part of the premise sounds appealing. Is it only using AI summarization? If so, I wouldn't go for it.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#106

Post by forinti »

Loughla wrote: post #58
forinti wrote: post #35

A decade ago I switched from my local morning news to a French show. Instead of violence, traffic accidents, and soccer, the French show talked about recipes, books, travelling, etc. It didn't really try to be a news show, just something light to start off the day. Nowadays I prefer silence during breakfast.

We watch classic cartoons during breakfast. It's an amazing way to start your day. I cut out news (except here) about three years ago. My life has not changed, except that I'm not pissed off as much. Turns out all that the 24 hour news cycle really doesn't teach you very much.

> except that I'm not pissed off as much

There's a radio show in the mornings in my country that I call "the hour of indignation". A "news" presenter rants on for many minutes about something that is very wrong with the nation. There's another one later in the day, so I think this radio station has a lot of success making people mad.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#107

Post by xyst »

I agree that social media is largely junk, especially getting news from social media. Personally, I have just eliminated any _real time_ source of news. I control (instead of an algorithm controlled by corporate policy) what I want to catch up on.

Want to catch up on Olympic event medal status for my home country? Sub to the email newsletter.

Want to follow politics in your state? Sub to the email newsletter at local and state orgs.

Want to follow updates in tech industry in general or a specific subfield (ie, nanotechnology, or the latest hype?). Sub to the email newsletter.

With this method, I can choose when to catch up on these topics. Sure, I might be 1-2 days out of sync compared to the news junkie. But with this method I can at least guarantee a variety of sources come out and get a much better view of the issue. Rather than the often sensationalized version presented at _real time_.

One very hilarious instance of where real time junkies got it very wrong: JD Vance, the VP choice for GOP, was allegedly sexually involved with a couch. Original author of post cited a random page in JD Vance’s autobiography in tweet. What was clearly supposed to be a joke, but turned very viral.

“Influencers”, comedians, and I think even some mainstream news outlets ran with it.

I don’t recall _when_ it was debunked, but had to have been within 24 hours of that tweet.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#108

Post by cheeseomlit »

cdrini wrote: post #78
cheeseomlit wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoever does the scoring will do so based on whether they agree with the sites bias or not instead of any of those criteria. So you're back to square one but now with a false sense of legitimacy

That's why the key is verifiability. The org doing this should have a fixed list of checks they do, and every violation will be linked. This will limit the types of checks it can do, eg "bias" is a hard check that might not be possible. _but_ something like "every statistic most be supported by direct links to data sources" is, and raised the quality level. Checks like "misleading headlines" would help curb things li…

I just don't think there's a clean systematic answer to the problem, its a trust issue. Even if links to data sources are required you can find a data source with statistics to support almost anything. Especially when it comes to non-rigorous survey statistics that can be gamed to death or interpreted in a million ways, and that type of junk data is the bread and butter of political hacks

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#109

Post by cdrini »

outime wrote: post #54
cdrini wrote: post #47

The more I think about the state of news, the more I'm convinced that we need independent rankings of news sites and journalism. Something similar to a health inspection score. With considerations like: - News needs to be verifiable. Direct links to data sources. - News need to have history of modifications to their article. - Factual errors will cause dings to their score. - Revenue sources/tax forms need to be publ…

We should start understanding that "independent" rankings won't ever work. Let's not even get started with "fact-checking" places which we can count by dozens per country now, as they all have their own interpretations (or otherwise a single one alone would be enough). For such a thing to work, it needs to be funded. At the end, it doesn't matter if it comes from public or private hands, it's going to be leaning towa…

I think it can work, but will require a very well designed set of rules.

For example, with fact checking, some fact checking is easy. Eg if an article says "the unemployment rate last year was X%". You have to do some research to determine what measure of unemployment they're using, but boom, you can say it is factually incorrect if no measure lists that number. This process is even easier if it's linked to the data source. These are likely the only types of facts that can be checked. This is limiting, but at least it creates some sort of check on what feels like a runaway industry.

Statements like "he was the best president since X" is an unverifiable statement. "best" isn't qualified. An article with a statement like this should immediately be dinged. And it's fine to have a site that makes statements like this! But just not a news site.

Things like bias or swing are not really possible to do as part of this. This is mostly trying to make it matter when news sites drop their standards.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#110

Post by xpe »

dosinga wrote: post #91
jimbokun wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe force yourself to only read the Economist in paper form?

Definitely considered that. I'm a tad nomadic, but I guess I can just change the addresses.

Do they offer an offline viewing option to subscribers?

Apple News does offline reading FWIW.

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