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The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

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Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#71

Post by jamil7 »

smoe wrote: post #21
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 Th…

Yeah I've done something similar, I just buy and read the go-to books on the topic I want to know about now. Although I somtimes slip and end up scrolling through some news sites, I've churned through a lot of actual books related to current geopolitics.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#72

Post by jimbokun »

dosinga wrote: post #59

To me it always seemed that reading a good, weekly news paper would help. The lack of real time news would make it focus on broader trends and I would not be distracted with the breaking news that is not important. For a while it seemed the Economist was close. But they have breaking news, what happened today and they publish articles that appear in the weekly edition already during the week. Is there something bette…

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

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#73

Post by gnz11 »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #34

I stopped reading the news because of this. When 90% of the articles on the BBC are irrelevant to me and have titles like "Taylor Swift Vienna concerts cancelled after attack threat", "The 'absurd' real-life sting operation that inspired a movie", or "Behave yourselves, China tells its Olympic fans", I lose all interest. The news has become like intellectual sugar, written more for page views than for merely informin…

The BBC targets a general audience so it will naturally have a wide swath of topics reported on. The alternative is "Personalization" but then critics complain this keeps people in their own bubbles.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#74

Post by jimbokun »

_rrnv wrote: post #57

It always has been. It always will be. But you have a choice to stop eating this junk food and turn to fine dining (non-profit info sources) or home cooking (books and own research). https://offstream.news/longread/2017/04/4/the-post-truth-and...

Are we sure the non-profit sources don't also have an agenda?

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#75

Post by pjc50 »

dosinga wrote: post #59

To me it always seemed that reading a good, weekly news paper would help. The lack of real time news would make it focus on broader trends and I would not be distracted with the breaking news that is not important. For a while it seemed the Economist was close. But they have breaking news, what happened today and they publish articles that appear in the weekly edition already during the week. Is there something bette…

Financial Times is still pretty good. The ultimate in sound, realtime news is of course the Bloomberg terminal, but that's very expensive.

What do those and the Economist have in common? They're oriented at business users who are using the news to make decisions on, not to maintain their sense of identity, stoke their rage, or share on Facebook.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#76

Post by _rrnv »

OJFord wrote: post #22
graemep wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The problem with this approach is that you think you are getting a high level understanding but in fact you are not getting the understanding at all. You just get an opinion view based on what facts are reported and what facts are not.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#77

Post by concordDance »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #50
steveBK123 wrote: post #19

The 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.

As long as you remember that it's quite possible for a series of true facts to give you a less accurate model of the world.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#78

Post by cdrini »

cheeseomlit wrote: post #61
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…

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 like clickbait as well.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#79

Post by apples_oranges »

Compared to all the garbage on social media, professional articles by actual journalists don’t make us dumber I think, even if they serve a narrative. Something about reading an actual article makes us think and reason in a way that a tweet or, worse, a thread of tweets just doesn’t.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#80

Post by xpe »

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…

I also want news organizations to be more transparent and honest. The incentives are complicated. Perhaps some sort of ratings system could help.

I think I’d be willing to go further. Purely from an economic perspective, there are negative externalities that result from poor quality news organizations. Current market mechanisms seem to reward polarization.

So what do we do?

A common response is: let’s educate people to pay more attention to their critical thinking and media diet. This can work if people change habits to align with higher level thinking. With more high-quality aggregation options, the easier this gets for individuals.

An uncommon response (that would attract the ire of many) would be to impose economic penalties on the organizations that correspond to their negative externalities. Perhaps tax them like cigarettes. It is hard to think of targeted policy interventions that don’t have all sorts of loopholes.

In broad strokes, perhaps the best solutions I know about at present are carrots. Spend generously on high-quality news organizations.

(This is just a first draft and could stand a lot of improvement.)

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