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News is bad for you

theguardian.com

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Re: News is bad for you

#201

Post by npsimons »

crazygringo wrote: post #132

I agree... but I think there are two important caveats. 1) Some news is important, purely for social (not informational) reasons. When you show up to the office, you want to know why everyone's talking about Miley Cyrus! And you need to know who won the Superbowl, even if you have no interest. 2) News does have explanatory power, but mostly in weekly mags like The Economist, New Yorker, etc., and occasionally in anal…

1) Some news is important, purely for social (not informational) reasons. When you show up to the office, you want to know why everyone's talking about Miley Cyrus! And you need to know who won the Superbowl, even if you have no interest.

No, just no. Maybe I'll sound like a curmudgeon, but that information is totally worthless, and for people like me, is exactly the kind of thing that makes me depressed. "Oh, hey, some random sports team recreated a pointless tribal warfare act! NSA? Who cares what they do, I've got nothing to hide." There are more important, more culturally relevant things to discuss, and one should not stoop to ignore them merely to "fit in." One should try to elevate discourse by ignoring the shallow, vapid happenings that happen to be in vogue (precisely what this article describes as being wrong with "news"!) and help to enlighten those around oneself.

Re: News is bad for you

#203

Post by lukifer »

PsychopompPoet wrote: post #77

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." Thomas Jefferson "Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists." Norman Mailer "Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation." George Bernard Shaw "In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right pl…

Information is power. A nexus point for distributing and legitimizing information arguably involves more moral hazard that just about anything else.

Re: News is bad for you

#204

Post by npsimons »

bane wrote: post #92

News is terrible for me at least. For stress related reasons I decided at the beginning of 2013 that I would try and avoid daily contact with news (outside of anything important enough to percolate up HN, reddit and FB). I'm much more relaxed and less stressed and find that in casual conversation I'm about as up-to-date on important events as most people I know. Recently I was looking for information on something and…

Huff Po links are like this for me. I'm no staunch republican, I just get sick to my stomach when I click on a link (often from HN!) that might be interesting and I am assaulted by tabloid gossip on the right side of my screen. I check the URI, and sure enough it's HuffPo, and it's always something scabbed from somewhere else (ergo, the original article should have been submitted).

Re: News is bad for you

#205

Post by eludwig »

npsimons wrote: post #201
crazygringo wrote: post #132

I agree... but I think there are two important caveats. 1) Some news is important, purely for social (not informational) reasons. When you show up to the office, you want to know why everyone's talking about Miley Cyrus! And you need to know who won the Superbowl, even if you have no interest. 2) News does have explanatory power, but mostly in weekly mags like The Economist, New Yorker, etc., and occasionally in anal…

1) Some news is important, purely for social (not informational) reasons. When you show up to the office, you want to know why everyone's talking about Miley Cyrus! And you need to know who won the Superbowl, even if you have no interest. No, just no. Maybe I'll sound like a curmudgeon, but that information is totally worthless, and for people like me, is exactly the kind of thing that makes me depressed. "Oh, hey, s…

Not picking on you in particular, but you are what you eat. Who is to say that people shouldn't eat what they want to eat, unless it is some part of you? Isn't it their responsibility to consume what they like?

Eating sweets makes people fat. You can eat what you want and live with the consequences, just the same as everyone else.

Re: News is bad for you

#206

Post by chestnut-tree »

snorkel wrote: post #157
DanBC wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News in the UK has several problems. News papers are either horrible - I cannot describe just how vile much of the UK news press industry is. The decent newspapers have tiny distribution figures. The Guardian, for example, has a circulation of under 300,000 people. Obviously, more people read it, but still, that's a tiny figure. UK news allows the agenda[1] to be set by spin doctors. We frequently has stories about h…

Not to dump on UK, but I also find the UK newspapers to be very mean spirited. US tabloids gawk at celebrities, but UK tabloids are out to get them. I would not want to be famous in the UK.

I'm from the UK and I'd go so far as to say the majority of the British press are toxic. They have an incredibly inflated view of themselves and they couldn't care less about what's in the public interest (just look at how they've responded to the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry which investigated the repulsive ethics and culture of the British press).

The UK press empahtically follow their own self-interests and agendas (and that includes broadsheets like The Guardian). There will always be individual reporters who rise above the abysmally low standard of reporting - but they are a tiny minority.

TV news is better in my opinion - they at least aspire to some measure of impartiality. These clips from Charlie Brooker (British TV presenter) give a good sense of the formulaic way news is reported (strong language in the videos).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4#t=38

Re: News is bad for you

#207

Post by cschmidt »

mongol wrote: post #196
cschmidt wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also love the Economist audio edition. I listen to it during my commute, and mostly get through it each week. It kept me sane on a horrible commute with my previous job. They have a separate digital subscription, if you just want the website and audio edition. It is included in a print subscription as well. You can buy a single week, if you want to try it out. Highly recommended if you want to ignore the advice of…

I think new subscribers must choose, print and digital are not included in each other, but there is a more expensive option for both.

Sorry, it changed since I last looked. They used to offer a regular subscription with both digital and print, or a cheaper digital only. As you say, now they offer the regular option with both, or a cheaper option with either digital or print.

Re: News is bad for you

#208

Post by vacri »

A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge.

This is an amazingly bad example. Most news sources would be leading the torch-and-pitchfork brigade to either the relevant road authority or the architect's office.

I don't know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie

There is a vast gulf between 'news junkie' and 'don't watch news'. The author may also want to broaden his social circle, because I'm aware of a few. I also find it weird that 'physician' and 'scientist' are classified as 'truly creative minds' - I've known quite a few of each, and it's a terrible assumption.

The article is an example of poor quality news - consuming it without thought is indeed bad for you. Full points for irony, I guess.

Re: News is bad for you

#209

Post by robomartin »

Perhaps because I've lived outside the US and traveled extensively what really bothers me about US news is how egocentric it is. You get a horribly skewed world view if all you watch is US news. Also, when it comes to accidents or disasters (plane crash, terrorist attack, etc.) for some reason I am really bothered when the talking heads engage in US citizen accounting. Something like this: "A plane crashed today in , 45 passengers died, 3 Americans". I get it, it's US news, but for some reason it feels really wrong to me that it is being reported that way. It's almost as if none of the other victims mattered. I'm sure that's not how it is intended, but it really bugs me for strange reason.

Also, US news bugs me even more when I am abroad. Watching CNN abroad vs. watching it at home produces different feelings. When out of the country I often feel the news is embarrassing. At home, regardless of the source, it oscillates between politically charged, moronic or down-right egocentric news. Most of the quality information I get is from non-US news programs or the Internet. Local and national TV news programs, regardless of network or political affiliation are deplorable.

I can absolutely see a constant stream of sensationalized and skewed news being bad for someone, particularly if they don't seek balance outside of their usual sources.

Re: News is bad for you

#210

Post by pavanred »

marmaduke wrote: post #27
tokenadult wrote: post #17

Whether news is bad for you or not probably depends more than a little on what the source is. I don't watch television—for years our TV was in a box in a closet, brought out mostly just for watching the Olympics. But I do look at Google News and try to train it to give me mostly long-form suggestions about science and world issues from diverse sources with professional reporting and editing. That helps. The claim tha…

> Google News and try to train it Does this work? Does it work better than looking through TrueTrueReddit and hubski?

Here is a Ted talk (2011) by Eli Pariser [1] about the "filter bubble" and its unintended consequences.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...

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