News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

Regardless of their intention, the outcome is the same.

I like the astrology analogy. They don't hate you, they're just making up stories you like to hear, so you'll stay and listen.

Not sure if I'm that pessimistic. Check the actual ratings. Google for it, I am glancing at "Live + Same Day Cable News Daily Ratings for Thursday, April 11, 2013" In a country of 400 million people, "1,133 thousands" aka about a million watched fox news. There is the hidden assumption that the million who watch are true believers as opposed to out for a laugh or just filling time or curious what the opposition thinks. But for the sake of argument I'll assume any TV tuned into fox news is a true believer. That means 1.1 million people cannot distinguish between the information diet equivalent of fast food and proper food, but roughly four hundred million can distinguish. Lets assume there are around 10 or so other networks pushing meaningless mind candy. Making it a problem around the two percent range.

Its a narrowcasting thing. Could you make a news station that appeals broadly to maybe 25% of the population, which would be about a hundred times as many as watch fox news? Yes, but from a narrowcasting perspective they've convinced themselves that having 1% of the fans but having them be absolutely rabid fans is "better" for advertising sales or whatever.

The same thinking is killing mass media in general. For example saturday night live appeals intensely to about 2 million hard core fans. The other 398 million in the population will not watch it for free. Does "Survivor" define the american cultural obsession with reality TV? Maybe, but it doesn't define american culture because only 9.38 million bothered to watch last week for free... the other 390 million are uninterested.

Not quite as severe as the obesity epidemic.

Even following nominally "quality" news sources -- NPR, PBS, The New York Times, the Economist -- I've been finding the points of this article increasingly true.

Mainstream commercial news -- CNN, HuffPo, my local city paper / news site, and much of what passes for news on the Web, are virtually intolerable. Banal, lowest common denominator (erm: "greatest", but nobody would understand) content, celebrity gossip, baiting headlines, "ten reasons" pageview content. Gratuitously paginated articles. Excessively overdesigned pages with floaters, social nags, and pop-up interstitial surveys and yet more "social" pleadings. Fake-viral advertising whether "flash mobs" orchestrated by banks or Hollywood movie hype engines. Intentionally infuriating political tactics. Get off of me!

Somewhere during the past Presidential campaign I think I started to snap. Whether it was talking heads blathering about things they understood poorly, incessant focus on horse-race (and ignoring the deeper historical and policy stories), everything just started grating on me.

The lack of depth and context to much news coverage has also been apparent to me for quite some time. Particularly in the case of large developing stories, or those with a long backstory, I've found that Wikipedia is often a much better source of information. I'd first realized this during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake & tsunami -- far too vast a story for any one news article to wrap its head around. TV and radio could merely repeat the basics or show the same footage repeatedly. Wikipedia could organize and contextualize the facts as they came in.

There are also the odd stories which do affect me, my life, my neighborhood, or my professional interests. They're rare, but they do happen. A benefit of today's world over, say, 20 years ago, is that when such events do occur, it's much more possible to dig in and get more than the very light spread of truth and misreporting that's inevitable in the lay press.

Not that I've stopped paying attention to the news. But I'm very conscious of when it is annoying, and there are days I'll turn it off. The day of the Newtown shootings I heard the news late in the day, and just turned it off. I knew largely how it would unfold, that it didn't affect me directly, that there was nothing I'd be able to do that day, but that listening would just sicken me.

Increasingly, rather than turn on news, I'll put on music. Often classical or jazz. And listen to that instead.

With 7 billion people in the world, it's very likely that these things will happen today:

  - someone will get killed in a horrible car accident
  - a child will be killed in a freak accident
  - someone will die from cancer, leaving much grieving behind
  - someone will molest a child
  - someone will lose all their money in a scam
  - someone will get raped
  - someone will be killed by a never-to-be-found hit-and-run drunk driver
  - someone will beat a woman
  - someone will be murdered
  - someone will die in a disaster/fire/earthquake/storm
  - an innocent bystander will be randomly shot to death
  - someone's favorite team will lose

In addition, it seems like something like this (unbelievably) happens all the time:

  - someone will murder many people
  - someone will shake a baby until it's brain dead
  - a soldier will lose vision or use of their limbs in action
  - someone will post a horrible crime on youtube
  - someone will tie a pet to railroad tracks
  - a whole family will die in an accident

I really do feel bad about all of these things, but frankly, I just don't want to be reminded 40 times every day.

Tragedy of the commons. Though that will never happen, so we're more or less free to choose the course of action that suits us best, without it having any overarching effects.