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The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

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Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#21

Post by smoe »

ricardobayes wrote: post #3

I like the system in UK and Germany where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news. I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.

I stopped reading news around 2012, while working at a large newspaper in Switzerland. Or maybe better put, replaced it with slower forms of information.

Instead of doom scrolling news sites and social media for things that happen right now, you wait for some people to actually have time to investigate, synthesize, etc. There is just little to no actual information in the former way of consumption.

There is a good The Guardian article from back then.

“News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier” (2013

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#22

Post by OJFord »

graemep wrote: post #13
ricardobayes wrote: post #3

I like the system in UK and Germany where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news. I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.

> I like the system in UK and Germany where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news. In the UK it does not improve the quality of available news very much. > I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions. Bad information does not make for good decisions. Your ar…

> In the UK it does not improve the quality of available news very much.

I disagree, I don't think there's anything better than BBC news for junk food type news, an update on current affairs or the Olympics or something when you do want it.

Of course it's not hard analysis or thought-provoking opinion pieces, pay someone else directly if you want that.

But if someone mentions riots say and I just want to quickly read a couple of things for a high level understanding of what's going on, it's great.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#23

Post by hulitu »

ricardobayes wrote: post #3

I like the system in UK and Germany where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news. I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.

> where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news

They are actually funding state propaganda. There are few news on public (and private) broadcasters.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#24

Post by dailykoder »

spejson wrote: post #17
ricardobayes wrote: post #3

I like the system in UK and Germany where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news. I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.

At least in Germany publicly financed broadcasters and news tend to waste a lot of money and they keep asking for more. I’d much rather have a choice to support organizations I want than to support stuff like Y-Kollektiv or STRG F that produce low quality content and sometimes straight out lie.

>than to support stuff like Y-Kollektiv or STRG F that produce low quality content and sometimes straight out lie.

After writing my comment I thought about all the influencers and thought 'yeah maybe a good portion ain't really neutral'. It's a bit frustrating, but iirc their cut is something between 1 and 5 cents, right? Which still is too much money, but hey, could be worse than that.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#25

Post by harshitaneja »

gniv wrote: post #11

I don't read news but I read too much twitter. I curated my following base carefully so now almost everything on the timeline is interesting/insightful/funny. Problem is it's still junk food and of little long term value. I really need to step away for a while.

I curated twitter in a similar style with following in my niche interest categories of academics and others with a really good signal-to-noise ratio but post musk purchase most of the accounts I followed either got off the platform, tweet much less frequent and with paid subscribers getting priority the replies feature much less relevant tweets than before. I so desire a space similar to my little corner of twitter but not able to find one anywhere after having tried with X, Mastadon(multiple servers) Bluesky, Threads. Does it still work for you?

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#26

Post by rustybolt »

Bite-sized articles have their value. I don't know how many mobile tabs I have open, Chrome stops displaying the number when you reach 100. Most of the tabs contain a deep dive into a particular topic and it's not feasible to actually read every one of them.

However, every unread tab I close feels like a personal failure to keep up.

I can see the value of news articles and short videos like those from Fireship: It might be educational and/or entertaining, but if not, it hasn't been a serious time investment, so it doesn't matter anyway.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#27

Post by donatj »

gniv wrote: post #11

I don't read news but I read too much twitter. I curated my following base carefully so now almost everything on the timeline is interesting/insightful/funny. Problem is it's still junk food and of little long term value. I really need to step away for a while.

When I figured out that you can disable individuals retweets but keep their actual direct tweets, that saved my feed.

I know a fair number of people who post fascinating things, but also retweet a lot of news and politics I don't want.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#28

Post by graemep »

boingo wrote: post #12

All it takes to ditch the news is being on the inside of a breaking story, and realizing how much information being spewed out is just plain incorrect ... then the next few articles you read, you realize it's not just your article they warped for clicks, but all of them. When newspapers were the primary news consumption, it was a bit better - journalists had a few hours to collect facts before publishing. Now there's…

My experience of being quoted by respected news organisations (Reuters and the BBC) is that quotes will be random and out of context, or just made up (I did get an apology from the BBC for the latter and they removed it from their website).

It does not even need to be a particular story. Experts in almost every field complain about how bad coverage of their field is, and you can extrapolate to coverage being bad in general. What Michael Crichton dubbed Gell_Mann amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

I would also add knowing a country that gets covered in the news but which is not important enough to be prominent (Sri Lanka in my case) also soon shows you the media are sloppy and make huge mistakes and write with little understanding.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#29

Post by dailykoder »

sunaookami wrote: post #18
dailykoder wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a german citizen and I always wondered why people hate SO MUCH on that system. Yes, there might be some corrupt people that give themselves too much pocket money, but overall the system works really good. I didn't stop reading news, but I mostly stopped reading news that are not funded by the "Rundfunkbeitrag", because the funded news organizations are encouraged to be rather neutral and they don't use that much…

Rundfunkbeitrag is waaaay too much and they are not interested in lowering it. Compare that to the similar system in Japan which is way cheaper and they actually lowered the cost in recent years. Germany has too many public radio and tv stations where a lot of content is nearly the same. The ARD is also not as independent as they claim, just look at how many politicans are in the Rundfunkrat. OP said it's not a tax b…

>Tagesschau is all but neutral and the tone of ZDF Heute is very aggressive. At least they are consistently bad and private newspapers are even worse so you know what you get. The state of news in Germany is sad but what do you expect when journalists side with politicians and favor more censorship?

That made me think a little. You are most likely right. Probably it doesn't bother me too much because it just fits into my world view. Maybe neutral is the wrong word here and I don't know which one fits better. Maybe it just feels good, because everyone else (like everything Springer) is so much worse. At least I don't have the feeling that they spread straight up lies or false propaganda. They might be politically biased though, you are right.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#30

Post by Almondsetat »

rustybolt wrote: post #26

Bite-sized articles have their value. I don't know how many mobile tabs I have open, Chrome stops displaying the number when you reach 100. Most of the tabs contain a deep dive into a particular topic and it's not feasible to actually read every one of them. However, every unread tab I close feels like a personal failure to keep up. I can see the value of news articles and short videos like those from Fireship: It mi…

How many of them do you remember? How many of them have had an impact in your life?
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