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The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
41–50 of 205 posts
Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
#42The blending of comedy/entertainment with news, going back to the GWB era with the Daily Show is a good example of this problem. People consuming junk food thinking they are getting their vegetables. Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
Multiple studies over those years showed that The Daily Show watchers were significantly better informed on issues than cable news viewers. Cable news is the junk food, and TDS showed it to be so bad that even a parody news show could do a better job of informing people, a point made very often by the host. Using it as an example of junk news is missing the point by a rather wide margin. > Better to simply turn off y…
> 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.
Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
#43Bite-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…
> However, every unread tab I close feels like a personal failure to keep up.
I used to think so about books... but after some thought... why?
If you still read enough articles/books/whatever (so it's not your attention span failing), and if the article/book wasn't "good enough" to keep you reading it, why does it matter if you didn't finish it? There are many more articles and books than you are able to read, keep with the 'good ones' and forget about the rest.
Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
#44I 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 this industry. Also maybe I just wouldn't have been a good journalist.
An interesting book on this subject is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, it's where the term "Churnalism" was coined.
Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
#45"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's." -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Bed of Procrustes"
I had this moment during the prelude to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
First the experts were confindent that the troop movements in Russia were just posturing and saber rattling, there's no way they'll do anything.
Next, once they'd entered Ukraine, it would be over in a few weeks. The Russians would win. When the Russians were getting their asses kicked and it looked really bad, the Ukrainians would win by the end of the summer. Next it would be over by the winter. Next the russians would run out of materiel soon. Next the russians would run out of men soon.
They confidently made every prediction except the multi-year trench war that actually ensued.
Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
#46The blending of comedy/entertainment with news, going back to the GWB era with the Daily Show is a good example of this problem. People consuming junk food thinking they are getting their vegetables. Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
What do you think about political cartoons in newspapers and elsewhere? https://firstamendmentmuseum.org/exhibits/virtual-exhibits/a...
I'd prefer people still had the attention span to read the news, including the cartoons.
Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
#47The 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 public to find conflicts of interest.
If a news site wants to sell it's soul to make ad money, that's fine, but I want to see some sort of "F" rating on that site. There's no incentive for news sites to make good news right now.
Edit: Or, linking to this article: a sort of "nutrition facts" label for news
Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
#48Similar to this post, which I believe I saw here a decade ago: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
#49The blending of comedy/entertainment with news, going back to the GWB era with the Daily Show is a good example of this problem. People consuming junk food thinking they are getting their vegetables. Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
Multiple studies over those years showed that The Daily Show watchers were significantly better informed on issues than cable news viewers. Cable news is the junk food, and TDS showed it to be so bad that even a parody news show could do a better job of informing people, a point made very often by the host. Using it as an example of junk news is missing the point by a rather wide margin. > Better to simply turn off y…
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?
Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
#50The blending of comedy/entertainment with news, going back to the GWB era with the Daily Show is a good example of this problem. People consuming junk food thinking they are getting their vegetables. Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
Frankly the Daily Show/Last Week Tonight are the best news, because the news isn't vegetables to begin with, it's alluring toxic slop that makes us feel like shit when we consume it. At least TDS/LWT make us feel good while getting mildly (and mostly unnecessarily) informed.