The News Is Information Junk Food (2022) • Hacker News Board

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#81

Post by fsagx » Thu, Aug 08, 2024, 12:07 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #49

mandmandam wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's not a new observation. More than a century ago, Mark Twain observed: "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#82

Post by gordondavidf » Thu, Aug 08, 2024, 12:09 PM UTC

I have struggled with the negative aspects of news as well and personally think there is a middle route over cutting it out.

I built attabit.com to summarize the news for friends, family, and myself to remove as much sensationalism, bias, and 'junk food' as possible.

The site has been having all kinds of problems today with the claude 3.5 sonnet outage but outside of that, its become the main news source of high level news for me and a lot of my friends and family.

It lets you know what's happening without getting sucked into it. If you check it out, let me know what you think?

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#83

Post by JR1427 » Thu, Aug 08, 2024, 12:09 PM UTC

I stopped reading the news, having been someone who thought it was morally "right" to be "informed".

I feel much better since I quit. I still end up hearing about things, through talking to people etc, and I will still read articles on stuff that was important enough to still be written about weeks after the event.

But daily news is just 99% not worth reading.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#84

Post by meiraleal » Thu, Aug 08, 2024, 12:10 PM UTC

apples_oranges wrote: post #79

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.

It makes me angry to read news that are aimed at ignorant people, especially when you can see that the writer is smart and is using strategies to fit his narrative into the news.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#85

Post by _rrnv » Thu, Aug 08, 2024, 12:10 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #74

_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?

I am sure they often do. And ultimately you always end up doing your own research. But cooking yourself is the cost of reducing junk food consumption.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#86

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Aug 08, 2024, 12:11 PM UTC

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.

For voting, you can probably be reasonably informed with several hours of research right before each election.

If you trade individual stocks or other asset classes directly, finance news is pretty important.

Maybe staying on top of the field you personally work in. But that's probably best served by papers and long form articles in specialty blogs and web sites.

Other than that, how does "the news" help you make good decisions?

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#87

Post by csours » Thu, Aug 08, 2024, 12:11 PM UTC

I had a high school English/Literature teacher who used to dismiss the class by saying "Go play in the street, children!" They also said "Don't watch anything that tells you how to feel."

Anyway, I feel like the human species has arrived at a time when we have the internet, without having a great way to deal with everyone's feelings.

Some news media orgs make junk food, some news media orgs make information poison - they make it harder to understand what is going on in the world.

"It's always in the last place you look" - if you already know how you FEEL about something, you don't have to think about it in information or factual terms at all. You don't have to keep looking.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#88

Post by hylaride » Thu, Aug 08, 2024, 12:11 PM UTC

flir wrote: post #33

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.

I think you do political satire - because that's what the Daily Show is - a disservice. Spitting Image (for example) massively shaped people's perceptions of British politicians in the 80s. That Maggie puppet is still an iconic image of the woman herself.

I'm not even British (I'm Canadian), but am a geopolitical nerd. Spitting Image is one of the best examples of satire that's ever existed in the TV era.

There was a great documentary where a lot of the politicians who were satirized on it explained how much they loved and loathed their portrayals which often affected their prospects: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xiafmh

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#89

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Aug 08, 2024, 12:12 PM UTC

blangk wrote: post #10

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.

Not clear it actually works though

Just works better than the privately owned system.

Re: The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

#90

Post by globular-toast » Thu, Aug 08, 2024, 12:12 PM UTC

I haven't watched the news for my entire adult life (almost 20 years). Why would I? I have countless other things I could do with my time and I have no idea why I'd allocate some of that to daily news. I skim over headlines and read articles that look interesting but only in heavily curated places like this very website.

People I know who do consume news interestingly only bother telling me about super shocking stuff that I don't need to know, e.g. "someone got murdered", "a celebrity said so and so" etc. They rarely tell me stuff I might need to know like "income tax is changing next year".