The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such.
Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
Instead we talk about the direction of the country and indeed, humanity itself, with the same care and thoughtfulness that goes into rooting for your favorite NFL team, or voting people off the island on Survivor.
> But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
This is how the news was for me as a 90s kid who only had over the air channels for TV. 6:00-6:30PM was local news, 6:30-7:00PM was World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Outside of that folks weren't particularly concerned with what was happening beyond their immediate bubble.
Even in the early 90s news started shifting towards our modern incarnation. CNN was considered hard news in the 80s, but that changed around the time of the Persian Gulf war and Wolf Blitzer becoming the Scud-Stud, and all the other shows like Cross-Fire becoming news-er-tainment (or whatever the proper industry term is), etc...
I blame CNN for much of the state of news today. TV news has always been poor, but before CNN proved otherwise, news was not something that was considered a profit-maker. Once CNN showed it can make money, then the profit maximalization began in earnest, and with that came the descent into news-as-entertainment.
Oh, that goes way back before CNN and cable, or even TV.
As an aside, 99% invisible had a pretty good podcast on how radio (which delivers news to more Americans -and is trusted more- than TV) content has changed over the years. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-divided-dial/
The change has been systemic, and that change shaped CNN more than the other way around.
And realistically, as a fellow 80s and 90s kid . . . what benefit is there to this always-on 24 hour news extravaganza?
There are not enough relevant things going on in the world to merit a 24-hour news cycle, so the media has to make things up to fill the gaps. But once they make things up, they're pathologically incapable of distinguishing their own made-up crap from actual relevant news items.
So we spend the day glued to our phones flooded in crap.
This is still true today, though. I am generally sick of the news too but sometimes it is nice to watch local news (WDIV channel 4 here in Detroit) from 6 to 6:30 to hear about stuff going on around town, and then NBC nightly news from 6:30 to 7 to get some more national info.
That's good to hear. I haven't watched cable or OTA TV for around 15 years at this point so I don't have a good idea of what it's like these days, except for that time ~5 years ago when I tried plugging in an antenna to see what I could pick up but immediately lost interest after being reminded how much time ads take up on OTA TV channels.
i feel like TV ads get a bad rap sometimes. you dont have to actually watch them, they provide a natural pause in the action to go get a snack, go to the bathroom, do something else, rather than sitting there for 12 hours straight "consuming content"
But when they are in the middle of a film, they often make the film twice as long, and films these days are already awfully long. They can also give you a heart attack when they are thrice as loud as the film, and often start after there was a silence in the film.
There's a weird phenomenon I've started noticing when watching streaming shows where I keep thinking a commercial break would be nice. Even on shows built for streaming.
It's not that I want the ads so much as I want a short break from consuming the content.
Yep. For a decent chunk of my early adulthood, barring really major events, my news consumption was ABC World News Tonight and maybe This Week with David Brinkley on Sunday if I was around--and Time Magazine delivered weekly to my mailbox.
I was more reflecting on newspapers not being mentioned at all as a news source. ABC World News Tonight, This Week, and Frontline are all TV sources, and Time Magazine is a pretty different beast. Back in the day newspapers and radio were pretty significant news sources for people (and radio still is).
I don't know if I'd call newspapers long form, as they certainly have lots of short articles, but I'd say they regularly have "longer form" than Frontline.
Certainly a fair number of people got daily newspapers at one point. Post-uni, I never actually lived especially near a city and never felt the need to subscribe to the (in my case) Boston Globe which wasn't especially relevant to my day-to-day life. (To this day I don't although I do subscribe digitally to the NYT and the Economist.)
While there are/were Sunday magazines, I'd generally consider magazines more broadly for deep dives into particular aspects of culture, politics, and hobbies.
> Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this.
Is it a supply issue, or a demand issue? If people didn't want want it in the first place, would the producers bother to make it?
We've had salacious media for a long time:
> Scandal sheets were the precursors to tabloid journalism. Around 1770, scandal sheets appeared in London, and in the United States as early as the 1840s.[4] Reverend Henry Bate Dudley was the editor of one of the earliest scandal sheets, The Morning Post, which specialized in printing malicious society gossip, selling positive mentions in its pages, and collecting suppression fees to keep stories unpublished.[5]: 11–14 Other Georgian era scandal sheets were Theodore Hook's John Bull, Charles Molloy Westmacott's The Age, and Barnard Gregory's The Satirist.[5]: 53 William d'Alton Mann, owner of the scandal sheet Town Topics, explained his purpose:
Definitely a demand issue. Sure, there are secondary supply-side effects, but the simple truth is what we see today is what captures available demand. There is no other domain where you find that Americans are willing, en masse, to eat their vegetables before dessert. So the pro-wrestling flavor of televised news is going to crush anything more thoughtful slash less entertaining with relentless invariance.
To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale. This is unlikely to happen for the same reasons we make every other stupid choice as a citizenry. Also: picture the quality of leaders we vote into Congress and try to imagine them doing anything as high-minded as solving the problems of the news media fellating them half the time, and flogging them the remainder. (Literal extensions of the metaphor juxtaposed with contemporary congressional scandals are left as an exercise for the reader.)
Take $10B of annual spend out of the US budget. Which will never be missed. Fund a public network that only does news. The budget is something like 2-3X FOX News' top line; it's enough to hire real talent and smart leaders. Give the public network one KPI and a new line item: they fund an arm's length fact-checking service or some other form of objective evaluator to score them every day for remaining factual and balanced (and be clear when it's news and when it's opinion). I don't know that you can do 100% facts in the real world -- but can you be balanced, non-sensational, and transparent? The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day -- apparently we can do this when it sells, so scoring truthfulness isn't impossible.
It seems stupid that we can't take a sub-rounding error of opex out of the budget and do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage, so maybe I've got it wrong. Even if I don't, we're not smart enough to make something like this reality.
This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms. The news industry literally got government to force tech companies to peddle their noxious product.
> To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale.
This has got to be the dumbest or the most naive thing I've read in a while. If you get government involved, then you'd get garbage statist propaganda. Also it would really put a dent on the false myth about journalists 'holding power to account' when they are paid by the government.
> The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day
The media that created the Trump brand, the media that gave him 24/7 free publicity, the media that got him elected, etc? That's the media you are praising?
> do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage
The problem in society is news. More news or more government funded news is not the answer.
> This has got to be the dumbest or the most naive thing I've read in a while. If you get government involved, then you'd get garbage statist propaganda. Also it would really put a dent on the false myth about journalists 'holding power to account' when they are paid by the government.
As opposed to being paid directly by the people they're supposed to hold accountable?
Government-funded media would at least have a fighting chance of being neutral, checks and balances and all. By all accounts the US justice system is corrupt as well, but it would obviously be orders of magnitude worse if you outsourced it to private corporations.
I’m not sure about this, but I think there’s a pretty good and absolutely foregone conclusion that the world is actually extremely fucked up in new ways, growing in metastatic ugliness every year, and that it really is this Bad News that people are turned off by.
To me this seems like one of those “reality has a liberal bias” or “the positive aspects of negative thinking” - mainly that education and intellect are anticorrelated with happiness, that there are very few happy and informed people.
I’m not a news guy or a liberal but I think there’s a lot of ink being spilled over a phenomenon that could be explained simply by: the world is a very fucked up place and people are getting tired of hearing about it.
I don't think this is necessarily true -- if you limit your sources to "good" ones (thoughtful, reliable, with minimal political agenda -- I'd include the economist and a handful of substack writers in this mix) then you can be informed without needing to expose yourself to the awful deluge of mainstream crap. So maybe you can be somewhat happy (if your definition of happiness depends upon you not being engaged in the culture war), but still informed and intelligent.
The problem, however, is the impact this change in political reporting has on actual politics. That, I'm not sure how to solve.
It used to be that pre-election debates were for nerds and policy wonks. Now everyone watches them, but all substance has been removed. Debates themselves may even cease to exist.
The world isn't without problems, but certain things (life expectancy, income, education, literacy, etc.) got a lot better after the industrial revolution.
> This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms.
The product was already being produced pre-Internet, pre-television, pre-radio:
Both, really. As technology has created new and broader reaching mediums, the people operating those mediums have changed their target audience to support their existence.
There is more and better quality news available now than ever in history and people flock to the crappiest options because they can't get enough. It's demand.
“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”
Wasn't there more to this? I can't find the source for the quote, but I believe Jobs also said something like "and I didn't understand why that was until I realized that after a hard day of work (etc.) you really want to relax and turn your brain off, and TV is perfect for that - in fact you burn fewer calories watching TV than you do sleeping."
He also said "We don’t think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."
Though maybe he was kind of wrong about televisions and PCs not merging - see youtube, netflix, Apple TV (both device and service), "smart" TVs, etc. I also imagine Jobs might put social media in the "turn your brain off" category.
Mainstream media is not blameless in the least. Pushing psychological buttons to create addiction to what is very little else than entertainment and biased opinion. Rarely if ever are there references to sources. Instead there are interpretations and nth hand accounts that you are expected to accept as is. It's there plain for everyone to see, yet rarely is it taken seriously for what it is, propaganda.
Ironic considering Jobs conspired to fix prices with media partners including News Corp. Either way, network TV isn't the only news. There's plenty of non-profit news and non-predatory news in the world besides network TV.
Right and people gravitate heavily towards the bad. The most watched cable news by far is FOX which has been caught dead to rights conspiring with government, with campaigns and telling intentional lies in furtherance of propaganda goals. And they don't suffer any loss in loyalty. That is 100% the faults of the viewers who elect to be deceived in ways they enjoy.
Reinstating the Fairness Doctrine would be the one switch to flip to undo a lot of this very destructive mess. Of course all of the media giants would throw all the lawyers at it. Now that they know how incredibly lucrative news-as-entertainment is. But it's what must be done to turn this problem around and get a handle on it.
Would it? Remember TV competes with online news. Fox biggest competitor isn't NBC, it is Breitbart, The Dodge Report or Real truth network.
And you are never going to get the fairness doctrine to apply to those that are online.
You could have Facebook set rules for posts on their network, but then Facebook competes with Twitter and Tiktok and whatever, so if the posts on Facebook are less engaging than those on Twitter, people may go there.
What is it you think this would even accomplish? There’s no shortage of contrasting and opposing viewpoints, but people watch and read what they want to, and most often on non-broadcast mediums.
Literally illegal for certain with anything non-broadcast about with about 90% certainty for broadcast. It’s such a blatant violation of the first amendment it’s never going to happen.
America's notion of freedom of speech was designed at time when we thought humans would prefer truth over "truthiness". Turns out none of that was true, or only true for a small subset of the population. No other country runs with our rules of "freedom of speech == freedom of consequences" (particularly for the rich). But then, most of the West is running into similar problems with the news.
Not sure there is an easy answer. None of us want to be censored, but for sure the market has failed (both the demand side and the supply side, and there is lots of money to be made from all the fake controversy and scandal)
Not designed: emerged. Our notions of free speech emerged in a world where publishing was under British law a licensed industry, and the operation of an illegal printing press was a crime which could be punished, where there were parts of the New World where the only legal printing the press could be used for was for the Bible and where there were other parts of the New World where the British Crown retained the rights to the King James Edition of the Bible and it was illegal to print in America.
With the First Amendment we revoked Congress’ power as a lawmaking body to govern publishing. The market hasn’t failed, but other people are reading and believing things that you or I don’t agree with, but the difference is that you basically want to make them stop doing that, which I guess includes me as I am disagreeing with you here.
Don’t forget that all elected positions are Offices of Power and to seek an election is to seek to acquire power. I am more than happy to keep the flow of information outside the grasp of the types of people who seek to acquire an elected Office and the power vested in it, even at the risk that other people are wrong and take wrong actions with wrong information.
I am not sure we disagree, as I proposed no solution.
I certainly wouldn't trust or give politicians the ability to censor what they don't like.
As I said, this is a hard problem. No individual should be censored. But, as with most things, scale is a problem in of itself. There is a significant scale difference when I, as an individual, say whatever I want, vs when CNN or FOX (or pick whatever large scaled publisher you want) broadcasts falsehoods to everyone for their profit. There is significant profit in anger, fear, sowing divisions, artificial controversy; but this comes at a large detriment to us as a society.
> I am not sure we disagree, as I proposed no solution.
That’s embarrassing. I actually did overstate the disagreement upon re-reading your prior comment. My apologies.
> There is a significant scale difference when I, as an individual, say whatever I want, vs when CNN or FOX (or pick whatever large scaled publisher you want) broadcasts falsehoods to everyone for their profit.
Even CNN and Fox can be held in check for literally lying, but by the people they’re lying about, and in turn they operate in a space where they report on a more powerful entity than themselves when they lie or subvert the truth. The American government is also a player in the information space, and its chief officials are not always telling the truth, or disclosing the full truth. So what we have is a wash in which information competes with information, and we don’t always have good, accurate or useful information where we need it or desire it. I still wouldn’t call this a market failure, people profit and lose off of good or bad information all the time; it’s when we allow ourselves to become tools for moneyed or empowered interests who use those programs and writings to induce action that we experience a very real human or political failure.
The purpose of the news industry is to inform, but it has always and will forever be at the behest of people with an interest in informing in a manner they prioritize in competition with other people with differing interests, and it is itself for-profit industry whether or not the profits are expressed on the P&L of a given corporation.
I have to agree, and some have even said the quiet parts out loud... and that there wasn't broad-spread outcry is somewhat terrifying to me. I don't care what side you're on, I disagree with many on most things. This is frankly a terrifying, and somewhat delusional, precedent.
Cable News may have boiled it down to its essence, but the problem transcends tv. The same problem exists in writing, its just more spread out.
If you synthesize all that happens in Washington in a day, it is a giant soap opera. IT keeps its power by keeping people paying attention to it. Even a "just the facts, maam" view of the news is largely rabblerousing.
I wonder how much of what I see on https://www.memeorandum.com/river today will matter in 10 years. How much of it belongs in a history book. How much of it is needed to make an informed decision in an election. How much of it is needed to understand the world around me.
I think the amount of news we expose ourselves to should correlate more with the closeness of the events (or inversely with their distance from us). We can actually have an impact on events in our local community. And in a lot of ways what is immediately around us when we walk out the front door has a more impact than anything else on how we experience the world.
News from far away is just second hand sadness.
Cable TV and Internet are tools. They are technologies. They are not people.
News companies, specifically news company executives looking to sell as much ad revenue as possible, and are willing to produce any content that gets viewership, are to blame.
Where I was the US, 7pm - 9pm was prime entertainment time, and the news would start at 9pm or 10pm depending on the channel (which I think was partially so TV would become boring to kids right around when they should go to bed). Don't remember how long it ran, though my guess would be an hour before the late-night shows would begin.
In Chicago, there was only a single news broadcast that _wasn't_ at 10pm and that was Channel 9. It was part of their marketing to have the news at 9 (channel 9, news at 9). In the mid-late 80's when Fox came online, they copied the 9 o'clock news.
As I recall in the US, there was typically a post-primetime local news broadcast. The network news was pre-primetime (and it may have been accompanied with a local news slot beforehand).
As far as I'm aware the 20:15 thing here in germany is because nobody want's to compete with the "Tagesschau". In other countrys where I lived all the channels would start their movies whenever they want(7pm, 9pm or such strange times), as a german I found that pretty irritating, who could live like that? It's pure anarchy. :)
My grandparents managed to maintain this way of watching news. The TV was off the entire day. They would turn it on at 8pm after dinner for the local/national news report, and turn it off when it finished. It's possible to do but it takes discipline and intention.
Neil Postman articulates this point in Amusing Ourselves to Death, and cites Marshal McLuhan’s adage, “the medium is the message”: TV is entertaining and context-free. News over TV will adopt the shape of the medium.
Postman is the sort of public intellectual no longer exist. Classically educated and proud of it, conservative in spirit, tolerant in action. He also made digestible a lot of the work from 60s70s academia on these topics.
Mcluhan, his French counterparts, Deborah, ELlul, all understood something 60 years ago. Mass manufacturing and mass media are the key determinants of our society. The first has commoditized the physical things we surround ourselves with. The second commoditizes our dispositions. Political or economical arrangements matter so much less.
Taking that view, and the internet is not nearly as much of a transformational technology as we think it is. Just another means for media saturazition, washing out individual thought.
A salient effect, when everything is essentially the same, the only mechanism to differentiate is branding. Hence, everything is captured by marketing. Products are differentiated by their commercials, people differentiate themselves by the identity they assume, everything/everybody is thrown in a marketplace where comparison is based on image, not substance. Really nothing can be evaluated intrinsically anymore, our evaluation of everything gets mediated by a story, a narrative, an image. The matrix is real, not the living in the computer part, but the unease that everything is fake, everything is a projection.
If true, and it also explains why the classic California easy-going personality is now the dominant one. It is not even cool anymore to be 90s abrasive or cynical, that just elicits eye rolls (the rebellion in fight club looks quaint now, almost adorable). Better to just bland in.
The logical end point of this evolution is that we all become widgets. Essentially the same, responding to inputs, participants in algorithm, the only difference maybe the skinning, the look&feel. All undifferentiated tough.
May be true, may be not. But it certainly explains a lot of the last 150 years, and it makes our current era less special. which is comforting, we're not messing up in ways grandpa wasn't already doing so.
Viewers are to blame. Cable and the internet are just better than ever monetizing the garbage people gravitate towards. There's more high quality journalism on offer than ever and it's audience just keep dwindling in favor of social media and purely fraudulent news like FOX.
People talk about media or corporations or government like they're from some alternate dimension or alien species. They're run by the exact same human beings that exist in your daily life. Most people act out of self-interest and are subject to bias. Media didn't invent it, it's an extension of human nature.
And when entertainment isn't recharging our souls, giving us time off, isn't wholesome (which all apply to current news) we don't get what our souls need, and we become worse people individually and collectively.
Watching the 24 hour news cycle as entertainment is just like any kind of constant trauma, constant onslaught, constant conflict and it fundamentally is rewiring our brains individually and collectively
The problem is speed of information eroding our sense-making coupled with the dominant linguistic framework of economics which reduces communication to zero-sum competition.
To pine for any kind of quaint return is missing the point entirely. The only way through is forward and out.
> But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
Essentially this is arguing for limited distribution & gatekeepers for the news. That would almost certainly be better for society, but there's the problem with disenfranchisement & how you select/entrust gatekeepers. I don't think the "old" solutions to those problems were particularly good.
> The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment.
That's a very bold claim but I can't say it's wild. The news is supposed to be a critical source of information but I think the effect is a net negative. By a large margin. It's a pretty perverse situation.
I don't think the government should ban news or anything. That's obviously bad. But society would probably be better off without it (as-is), as extreme as that would be.
I don't think you can really say anything is to blame for this: people follow incentives and the incentives are to yell higher and higher to be heard over all the noise of everybody else and to create the most insane headlines to be hear over all the other insane headlines.
The solution to this tradegi of the commons is to ignore it all and read up on the various candidates a few weeks before the election.
I totally agree with this. Except when it comes to new platforms and media of the likes of tech we are collectively much more willing to examine and be critical of our own industry even on HN. However IMHO the thing that makes the news industry so scummy is that these are the people that still control most of the narratives people read about and they seem to almost never be self critical at all and if they were then Jon Stewart wouldn’t still have a show getting laughs off of this truth.
"with the same care and thoughtfulness that goes into rooting for your favorite NFL team"
While true, I can't help but think everyone who says that is talking about "other people" (mostly people on the other side but maybe a few from my side) or "other news sources" (mostly ones from the other side that I don't watch and maybe a few isolated examples on my side).
I think most of us realise that "our side" is just as likely as the other side... We all recognize the problem, it's just that we differ on what we believe are ideal solutions. In the end, the breakdown of actual compromise on most issues is the result and it's bad for anyone without the pocketbook to overcome the issue, politically speaking.
Some of us are mostly adjacent. I'm a right-leaning libertarian. I actually dislike when people refer to modern progressives as "liberal" as it's pretty insulting to classic liberals who also aren't into where progressives have gone. I never voted for Trump, don't really like him. I have to admit, I did/do enjoy how worked up those with TDS get about him though. But it's completely hyperbolic on both ends, and there's more dishonesty about the man than from the man.
Many people want the establishment out... the problem is, as above, that there are several camps of what people believe should prevail in terms of direction... so no traction gains and the establishment wins. I'm thinking more people on either side should start voting for more anti-establishment candidates all around. They may be a bit cooky, but in the end, if they're willing to negotiate we could see better outcomes overall that at least try to serve the people and not the establishment insiders.
i agree 100%, i feel like in the venn diagram of politics there is a lot of overlap but its just more fun/engaging/dopamine to focus on the outside crescents i guess... which serves the divide/conquer goals of the establishment.
True that the US seems to have its own "quality" of news, but most western countries don't fare better. On the contrary, the less sensationell style often makes you believe the news to be more reliable, but in essence it never truly is.
How about reinstating the fairness doctrine that changed (along with so much else) in the 1980s as a start? And creating some rules to prevent news sources from being used as propaganda machines by billionaires?
I started following Jay Rosen on Twitter and that's something he often talks about. Coverage is like a horse race, that talks about the odds, not the consequences of someone getting elected.
Isn't it remarkable how healthy and wise our society was before 24-hour news. Nowadays we have newfangled problems like "populism", "anger", "Nazis" - say, where does that name even come from?
No, we have a problem with the news selling those fictional things as real. Turn off CNN or OAN wherever you get your firehose of algorithmically generated nonsense from and they magically go away.
> The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such.
> Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
No, it's television in general. People were famously making that exact same point in the 1980s, before the widespread adoption of cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death. tl;dr: the medium is the message, and the message of television is entertainment, even when the news was only a half-hour a day.
"... the human race is divided into two distinct and irreconcilable groups:
those that walk into rooms and automatically turn television sets on,
and those that walk into rooms and automatically turn them off.
The trouble is that they end up marrying each other."
Social media and its manipulation have amplified the problem vastly, and what makes it even worse is the consolidation of ownership. Nothing like turning on an ABC (owned by Disney) news program and getting ten minutes of self-referential Disney news.
I think the internet and social media's effects have been different than television. Like television, it encourages even shorter attention spans and even more superficial engagement with things. Unlike television, it tends towards anger and outrage (not entertainment) and encourages more fragmentation and tribalism.
I was recently listening to a podcast recapping a television show set in the early 2000s, where a current college aged student basically said "I wish I had the experience of being a teenager in that time period - it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world"
And that's really the way it used to be. It was even better before 24 hour news networks, as your evening news would give you the stories of the day, and then you would buy the next morning's newspaper if you wanted to read about it more in depth. Sometimes multiple newspapers if it's a topic you really wanted to sink your teeth into. There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician.
As more people turn away from the news, it seems that they rely on their own smaller, informal communities to filter and signal boost the topics they really should pay attention to. Articles that get shared in a Discord catch my attention more than anything on Drudge or even Hacker News.
> There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician.
This is really it. Who has the time or the emotional bandwidth to spare for following all of this? I was talking to somebody about the overturning of affirmative action, and their response to me was basically "if you haven't read the Supreme Court opinions on this matter, we can't have a real conversation about this." That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then.
> That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then.
It's incredibly hard to have a conversation on a complex legal document if you do not read the legal document.
Lawmakers don't even read the bills the vote on, they have legal experts explain the implications to them. Would you have a better understanding of a system if you skimmed the source code or if you watched a presentation from the author?
237 pages of legalese is way beyond what most people can handle, this is why lawyers exist. If you're saying people shouldn't have an opinion unless they read complex legal documents you're just saying you don't think people should have opinions.
It's not at all legalese. Part of the reason the whole publication is so long is that each of the justices was fully aware that it'd be read by law students, interested citizens, etc. for decades to come and wrote out in longhand what legal scholars could just assume as background knowledge.
Each section was written to persuade the reader that the author's position is correct, and nobody gets appointed to the US Supreme Court without being really damn good at putting together a clear persuasive essay. These are extremely smart people with a small staff of very smart editors trying to convince you their position is the only right one; it's not like an insurance contract or EULA designed to "baffle 'em with bullshit".
If you've got a few hours to spare and even a modest level of background knowledge about American history and the current controversy involving racial quotas it's very readable. If it leaves you more ambivalent than before you started it's probably because they're arguing over a genuine public controversy where intelligent people operating in good faith can come to very different conclusions.
I did some decision reading in college for my GEs. They were all incredibly dry, difficult to get through, and I don't remember a single thing about any of them.
Depending on how old your kids are you might have an hour per day of free time. At an average of 40 pages per hour, this could take 6 days. Or I can find a legally versed content creator on youtube that will explain this to me and be done with it on the bus.
This is a topic that everyone has already moved on about. The fact that it's totally doable to spend 6 days on it does not make it a good idea to do. I would go as far as to say that for such a niche topic, for the vast majority of people this is a bad idea to do, and they shouldn't do it.
It really depends on the decision! For example, the mass of pages the Supreme Court has spent on ERISA could possibly count as a method of state-sponsored torture.
I totally understand being over the whole deal, but if you actually care about the issue the PDF itself is more coherent and readable than almost all the pre- and post- decision commentary which is mostly predictable, information-free nonsense.
My favorite is when the same lawmaker who voted on a 300 page bill that they needed to pass RIGHT NOW will complain that they didn't have enough time to review a 10 page bill after a change of majority party.
You're absolutely right. However, we're not lawyers discussing law. We're random people that play video games discussing personal opinions in an informal setting. The point is we're getting hose fed "news stories" and I'm one mere person with a wife who I give much of my attention to, a job that I probably work more than my 40 hour share of a week at, hobbies that take more of my time, etc. Do you think it's reasonable to expect everyone with an opinion to have read a 237 page opinion piece on supremecourt.gov? Much more likely we're reading some editor's cut to speed along the process of absorbing enough information to be dangerous. I think it's fair to point out I might be missing some nuance of a judge's opinion because I didn't read their individual 45 page opinion, but in about 10 minutes I'm going to be reading a news story about China launching a real Death Star into orbit, and I need to get my brain ready to consume knowledge on that one, and then in about 25 minutes I'll be reading about covid-23.
If the topic is the correct interpetation of the constitution someone who has only read the most recent Supreme Court court opinion isn't particularly well read or knowledgable on the subject either, you need to read what the Supreme Court has historically said about the constitution, not just what the most recent group of judges is saying.
well, this is how real life works. This is how popular vote works. 99% of voters will never read any of that crap (maaaybe just the tldr from the news) but will happily opine, and popular vote is based on that. so not exactly uncommon.
"That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long."
That's not comparable to a book. The organization of an opinion is quite good and you can get a quick sense of what the arguments are even if you skip a bunch of stuff. When you find a claim that you don't agree with, dig into that a bit more and see why they say that.
Moreover, the PDF of an opinion usually includes the actual opinion, and all the concurring and dissenting opinions, in a single document, so the actual opinion is usually much smaller than the whole PDF.
(While reading the concurring and dissenting opinions may be useful, they are, in effect, other important people’s opinions on the opinion, and not necessary to have an basic informed opinion on the opinion.)
I wonder if they meant that you need a deeper understanding to have a meaningful conversation. Talking about what "the news" presents to you only scratches the surface and only covers what "the news" wants you to pay attention to. In that sense, only consuming "the news" could be considered a waste of time.
Uh, early 2000s? There was very much 24/7 news media back then. Mature internet news, immature social media, multiple 24/7 national news channels for most major countries and languages...
I daresay most teens in the early 2000s were aware of such minor news events as Sept. 11 and the subsequent decade of global war.
Your stereotypical Millennial news junkie that the Wapo is crying about moving on with their lives was minted in this era of hyper-pervasive media.
Note that the actual non-news media of the early 2000s, and the period pieces that remake it, mostly ignore this reality and are culturally set a decade or more earlier. This is a sort of 'the Simpsons' effect where creators in their 30s and 40s who don't realize how much the world has changed produce media about their childhood set in the present.
I recognize there was 24/7 news media then, but it was still better than now. And before there was 24/7 news media was even better than the early 2000s
Kindly define 'better'. News in the early 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s, ... was all just as commercialized, propagandized, and partisan as it is today. I think the difference that in the early 2000s the breadth of 'news' didn't include all of the micro niches and pointless internet celebrity drama that seems to infect everything everywhere today. Also in the early 2000s there wasn't the hyper addictive social networks demanding your attention on 'news' that is ultimately manufactured for views and clicks that we have today.
Better meaning that in the 90s or early 2000s, your news sources were mostly: newspaper, television, radio, and some Web 1.0 websites. You most likely consumed this at various distinct times of the day, then went about your business to school, work, etc. You did not receive push notifications to a device in your pocket about the latest event, or have people blasting their opinions out all over a social feed.
And before the 90s, you most likely sat down and watched the evening news at one time a day, then read the newspaper in the morning for further information. So this was an even more segmented version of the 90s and early 2000s.
Was the content of the news commercialized and partisan? Yeah, probably was. But you consumed much less of it because it wasn't shoved in your face, demanding your attention at every waking hour.
When people yearn for the yesteryear of mass market propaganda it just means they yearn for when they didn’t know it was propaganda, and didn’t realize that a world where their side does everything right is a world that only exists in the propagandist’s mind.
> it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world
I strongly disagree with that. I wasn't exactly a teenager back then (past 30 already), but in the 80s and 90s, news papers over here informed you about happenings in the entire world, and social developments in my own country, and neighboring countries (what you exactly got depended on the news paper, as they ranged from populist-conservative to communist; news could be rather biased). I sometimes read the NY Times in that period as well, and it had a huge coverage of world events. Their Saturday edition was no joke, so it wasn't just a European thing.
However, what you didn't read was: American boy assaults someone, twitter is outraged. American celebrity did/said something stupid 10 years ago, twitter explodes! American police officer hurts poor person, twitter has a stroke!! And that 10 times per day. All that online clickbait was missing, and rightly so. I don't care what some idiot does 6000km far from my home. If they start forming a threatening political movement, then I'd like to be informed.
The quality of journalism has degraded considerably since then. There is too much attention to personal stories, either sobbing or ecstatic, never in between, and almost always with an implicit political agenda. Some of that is good, because it makes the abstract policies and distant wars relatable, but it has overtaken the hard news. Even national politics has largely disappeared from the news paper. Only when some politician is accused of intimidating behavior it gets back in the limelight.
And that's why I am ignoring the news more and more. Not because it informs you too much about the bad in the world, but because it informs you about trivia, and lacks the things that really matter. Journalism has made itself irrelevant.
That assumes you even read the newspaper... when I was a kid, I had a paper route for a couple years. Only about 1/3 of houses got the paper, and not everyone even read it every day. Often only a couple cover articles, and maybe the 5pm or 10/11pm news. It was a relatively narrow window into only the most pressing issues of a given day.
Today, you look at twitter and see a massive range of news from populist minutia of what a celebrity said/wore, or every single military engagement in Ukraine. The gulf war in Iraq was probably the first 24/7 news cycle engagement in human history for any significant number of people.
I also agree on quality degradation. There is both more editorialization and lower quality writing all around. In addition to personal narratives all around.
This is the reason I receive every morning a notification with a link to the pdf version of a newspaper: to get an abridged recap of news like in the old times.
Sometimes to keep your sanity you need help from others.
The issue is that political aspects of the news are simply too entrenched at this point. My mechanism for changing it used to be my single vote (that's useless), but the other was expressing views with people I knew to change how they think on things. But nobody listens, or it's drowned out, or I don't even get to talk to people with other views, or nobody is undecided anymore.
I'll try to avoid being political here with Trump. Trump was a deconstruction of old guard media and the illusions they put up with the political process. He reduced political campaigning to almost pure media events and games, with almost no substance for the right or the left (except outrage or adulation).
As part of that, old media like CNN that tries to keep the trappings of authoritative news delivery have been thoroughly "pantsed". Everyone knows you are stupid if you accept what newspeople tell you at face value (unless they are telling you things you already agree with emotionally).
I'd like to note, I view myself primarily as a environmentalist, and the corollary to that is I feel I have no political party. The right is outright hostile to it, the left is duplicitous and non-supportive of it.
Social media has corralled everyone into echo chambers, and then added a massive amount of cacophony to drown out any real conversation.
But practically everyone is dealing with this for whatever they care about. Social media has highlighted how little we can do, yet amped up the education about a lot of shadow stuff that used to be completely hidden.
Anyway, now I watch sports "news" and let the social stuff bleed in.
The real question is if the internet has made people smarter as a whole. I believe the internet of the last 30 years has made almost everyone smarter. What will the next 30 years look like?
But it took 30 years for non-internet corporations and governments/politicians to "figure out" the internet on a fundamental level. IMO the Trump election was the first example of that. Control and corralling of information with echo chambers has changed things.
Yes, my elderly mother can’t stop complaining about how much crime there is “these days”. Despite the fact crime per-capita has decreased, the news reports the absolute value. This in turn tricks people into believing something that is quite literally opposite from
what is really happening.
> Yes, my elderly mother can’t stop complaining about how much crime there is “these days”. Despite the fact crime per-capita has decreased, the news reports the absolute value. This in turn tricks people into believing something that is quite literally opposite from what is really happening.
This has been true consistently since the major drop in crime rates in the 1990s. (And it was true for particular kinds of crime that were declining well before that.) This isn’t a new effect of todays news that differs from decades past: “if it bleeds, it leads” and the effect that has is much older.
I haven't seen a good analysis that includes urbanization and human migration.
It can be simultaneously true that Urban crime rates have declined while average crime experienced by people has increased.
If Grandma grew up in a rural setting with a low property crime rate, and I was in a big city with a higher crime rate, the crime in their environment has gone up even if the city's crime rate is going down.
The same may be true for the average American due to the net increase in urbanization.
For specifically the 90s, its crime rate is genuinely better than the absolute horrible time of 70s and 80s. To this day when we say "crime is decreasing", in a fraud way we always compare it to those peak bad times even though compared to 90s it creeps back up (all of this is US specific). With collapse of Soviet Union and absolute victory of Gulf War, western world and especially USA is in euphoria until 9/11.
"I was recently listening to a podcast recapping a television show set in the early 2000s, where a current college aged student basically said "I wish I had the experience of being a teenager in that time period - it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world"
I'm sad that kids these days did not get to experience things like the Sopranos, otherwise known as the best TV series ever.
I not only avoid it, I've added news sites that I used to read to my hosts list, redirecting to localhost so I can't compulsively check them in the middle of the day anymore.
Personally, I think Aaron Swartz was right [1]: I feel better off, emotionally and mentally, reading a monthly magazine or an annual book than trying to absorb every tidbit of clickbait dished out by the view-driven media. Monthly content is generally more nuanced and often more actionable, and whatever social media furor accompanied each small part of it, as it developed, is omitted for being the tempest in a teapot that it was.
Beyond not watching news shows and not having a TV, this is how I filter. What action can I take? It has drawn me closer to local issues where I can do something.
Maybe I can clean up the beaches in Australia, but I'm not there. Becoming enraged about politics 1,000 miles away shows a lack of humility and lack of understanding my sphere of influence.
The moment you realize that news is just another form of entertainment, not a source of knowledge you're obligated to follow, you free to stop wasting your time on it.
Someone created an AI model to consume daily, thousands of news sources, scores the articles and lists what it's highest scored for the day.
---
Ironically, APNews use to work this way. They provide a "relevance score" for every news article they published/reported so that other outlets could use that score as a signal on what they should report on.
Problem is, all other news outlet are disparate for eyeballs, so everything becomes "breaking news" regardless of the news relevance score.
The links are all to biased, bad, sources and the headlines already have the bias baked in as well. I don't really see how this solves the problem. If this went a step further and summarized the articles while stripping out the bias, then I think it would be a lot more useful. Very interesting concept though.
You might also consider the human curated alternative, the Wikipedia "Current events" portal [0]. It does not include very many topics, but it hits all of the big stories that are likely to be significant after the dust has settled.
Even on Wikipedia, notice how all the news is dominated by disasters, crime, etc (And sports, which is the only type of news allowed to be positive).
We live on a planet with 6 Billion people. We’re living in the most peaceful time in history. And there isn’t anything positive to cover? I don’t know if it’s necessarily a conspiracy, but there is definitely some kind of mind virus going on in modern society.
Thanks for sharing newsminimalist. I've unknowingly built nearly the same thing but more visual with additions like maps and images. Similar to Yahoo News Digest from years back.
I like the "relevance score", it would be interesting to implement something similar to that.
This "news" site is absolutely useless as the top "news" is just a bunch of whinging about climate change and covid19. Even the genres don't get rid of it, as selecting "world" brings up climate change. "general" brings up covid19, etc.
That's a shame. How could most of the popular news be such nothingness?
I wish I had local news. For example if there's a crazy mom trying to get on the school board. Or my local towing company is owned by a person undergoing felony indictment. New businesses opening that could really use my dollars. My local shop had a 4 for 5$ sale for kombucha and I nearly missed out on it due to a lack of local news.
I really don't want to know what is happening to youth in a country that is very far from me as often.
I avoid the news because it’s often wrong (and I don’t necessarily blame them, because they are reporting with incomplete information as it appears).
I find that it’s much more productive to just ask “what happened 2 weeks ago?”. All the unverified trash gets filtered out at that point. All the outrage bait has simmered down.
The Jan. 6 hearings overlapped the next (Congressional) elections, they didn’t come before them.
(And, of course, the information was laid out structurally, but one might reasonably be concerned with potential insertion of bias by the people setting the structure and filtering the information–which I don’t particularly think was a problem in that case, but it certainly would be something to be reasonably concerned about—a problem that can be mitigated somewhat if one does not rely on that presentation as the sole source of information on the event.)
The problem is that people don't just ignore the mainstream news media. A lot of them also turn to fringe channels that peddle an alternative view of the world that's more affirmative of their own worldview - without being more truthful. It's going to be a huge challenge to every democracy because people will fundamentally disagree about basic facts.
If anything the concept of “facts” or “the truth” is up for grabs. You can find any quasi-legit looking source that supports just about any version of “the truth” you want. And your favorite content aggregator will pick up on that and suck you into the vortex. It’s echo chambers all the way down!
Considering that even “The Experts” who many claim hold “The Truth” are subject to the same echo chambers and powerful tribal allegiances that everybody else is… you cannot really trust them either. Many will be more than happy to bend things to suit their political affiliations or sometimes even lie to you face if it promotes their narrative.
The most important skill, I believe, is question everything you hear. Only you can determine what is true and isn’t. Outsourcing critical thinking to others is setting yourself up for manipulation. It’s sounds ridiculous, but based on the events over the last three years I believe that is as good as it gets in modern times. There is no such thing as “The Expert”. It’s your brain against the endless tide of information and only you get to decide what makes sense and what doesn’t.
The problem is that it’s no longer contained to Fox News and MSNBC. NPR now incredibly biased, CNN was but is trying to backtrack (?), and the various top newspapers have all gradually slid more and more to biased viewpoints.
There isn’t a major news source out there for me. I don’t want my own political beliefs confirmed and be told how bad the other side is so I can feel superior. I want facts, and not just those I agree with. That largely doesn’t exist anymore.
It’s interesting that the people so concerned with the survival of democracy or whatever, also seem deeply skeptical of actual democratic outcomes.
You guys gotta decide if you like democracy or not. Is it still acceptable when the results are tainted by voters watching watching the wrong, untruthful, bad, fringe news instead of the good, right, truthful, mainstream kind?
I feel like the news used to focus on things we didn't know, and has shifted to telling us what we enjoy hearing. A great deal of it is in the form "<person you dislike> did <exactly what you'd think they'd do>", and what the reader gains is not information but a fresh opportunity to disapprove of their outgroup.
Thomas Jefferson said "...the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors."
Disenchantment with the news is not a new thing. More people are figuring out how useless it is and are disconnecting.
I tried to explain to my kids lately the trouble with news. You want to be an informed citizen, so that you have some perspective on what's happening in the world and why. But that's rarely what 'news' is. Instead, it's a constant informational warfare environment. Rarely is a piece of news simply reporting on events – it's almost always trying to shape your opinion. The New York Times Daily podcast ends with "Here's what else you need to know today."
So I've started to teach my kids instead how to read news critically. To spot logical fallacies and the signs of manipulation. To understand when someone is sharing an opinion rather than a fact, and to be aware that a lot of the information buzzing around the world is usually directed towards convincing you of something more than it is about educating you.
There's still solid journalism out there, and I think a lot of people enter into the field with a desire to serve a public good. But sadly I think the majority of news has become like food from a vending machine. The signage might say Food™ but its got the nutritional value of a plastic toy. It's junk, filler, an extension of some corporate PR department.
I cleansed myself of social media and news about 10 years ago and I have no regrets whatsoever. I stay informed via ambient snippets of information that are unavoidable just by using the internet every day, or from conversations at work, and when I want to know more about a thing I specifically search out information from different sources on that thing.
In 2016 (for likely obvious reasons) I broke the habit of watching the evening news, and I'm much happier for it.
And I'm still well-informed. I peek at TV news occasionally, and glimpse at online news too. But I avoid editorials and sources that add a lot of spin. Give me the as-raw-as-possible news so that I can decide if/how I feel about it on my own.
Is there such a thing nowadays? There's too much incentive to post polarizing, rage-inducing content. I'd love to see what sites you're getting information from.
I mostly just eyeball the headlines of various news orgs and then try to deduce "what really happened if you strip away the clickbait, sensationalism, and fearmongering".
apnews.com is pretty good.
I'll even visit bullshit places like foxnews, not to find actualy news or facts but instead to see what is currently being planted into the smooth mushy brains of many Americans.
24 hour news stations should be banned along with on the hour news. The constant feed of content edited to poke our serotonin receptors serve no real benefit. News 3 or 4 times a day should be plenty, very very few news stories require blow by blow coverage. The news has just turned into another thing to buy/sell our limited attention for profit.
All news is bad, because human beings find happy stories to be uninteresting.
Many stories told for entertainment describe tension and release, but very few describe paradise.
The difference might be, that the news lately has been all about increasing tension, and nothing much about the release, or resolution, of that tension.
We need good news, especially about topics like Fukushima,and the war in Ukraine, for examples. Good news on other topics can't cancel that lack of good news.
I don't avoid the news, I just avoid news sites unless I am following a specific text link with interest. Every couple of days I run a perl script that loads 15 html pages from 11 sites (the first 5 pages of zerohedge) and they are all aggregation sites so there can be 1500 unique links per page. The script looks at <A HREF=...>text</A> links only and checks each URL against an already-seen database (currently 56,089 entries) to show me only unique new ones. It sorts the new links by rank as they appear across their respective sources, so if it is near the top of any page it will be near the top on my result page. The already-seen logic casts out recurring links and site navigation and I don't add sources often.
The result page is very simple html that I customize to a larger easy to read font with no visual clutter except the source abbreviations and a bold sequence number. It is presented in a single long scrolling paragraph without whitespace, and I will typically keep the tab open and skim and through it over one or two days. An example of a recent page is here ( https://ia902708.us.archive.org/2/items/news-aggregation-dem... )
Any recommendations for a good weekly or monthly magazine that covers the week/month's news well. Bonus for printed editions, and one that doesn't involving the most kafka-esque unsubscribe process.
The current state of media seems to be mired in several alarming trends that are undermining its integrity and value to the public.
First and foremost, there appears to be a conspicuous lack of innovation, with many outlets relying on reprinting or repackaging press releases, tweets, or even direct government propaganda rather than delivering original content. This absence of creativity is closely tied to a perceived decline in quality, with some journalism bordering on mere repetition rather than insightful analysis.
Furthermore, there is a troubling lack of serious investigation and critical thought by reporters, which is essential for a functioning democracy.
Lastly, some media figures seem to be increasingly out of touch with the real issues, sometimes even bordering on activism rather than unbiased reporting.
The reluctance of traditional media companies to fully embrace the opportunities provided by the internet has led to significant consequences. By failing to innovate and adapt to the digital landscape, they lost out on revenue streams such as job postings and classifieds.
More than that, their continued reliance on outdated business models has resulted in products that often resemble mere copy-paste versions of their former selves. This lack of adaptation has left a vacuum in the market, allowing platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and others to fill the gaps.
It's going to take a major shift in thinking for the news media to make up for 30 years of lost time in terms of innovation and survive as social media matures as a service.
It's interesting to me that many threads here seem to imply that lower news consumption by Americans is bad and that the fault lies with the news industry.
Ignoring whether it's bad or not, if Americans want mostly unbiased news, they have easy access to it on the web:
Americans choose other sources for news... they're not forced to consume it. The "blame" lies with the people.
Edit: Notice above that I wrote "mostly unbiased" not "totally unbiased." If you want to order all news sources by least bias, AP and Reuters are usually toward the top [0][1].
> Ignoring whether it's bad or not, if Americans want mostly unbiased news, they have easy access to it on the web:
I don't think any news is truly unbiased. There is always some form of bias and it's up to the consumer to be able to determine what that bias is and the impact of it and seek altering sources.
It's a skill on its own, but there is always bias.
Thinking that Reuters and AP are unbiased is laughable. They just happen to agree with your own biases and don't make you uncomfortable. That's not evidence of a lack of bias.
All news has a bias inherently. The news choosing to publish or
Not publish is itself a bias. There is a difference though between having a bias and intentionally pushing a specific viewpoint, which is the norm of the day. But this might be an overly pedantic point.
They are funded by the US Cable TV industry, so there is some room for bias. C-SPAN radio gets a good mix of callers, though you wonder if lobbyists have found a way to astro-turf that.
Its just the oversaturation that we have at this point. You are bombarded every minute by something “new”.
People are getting tired, and so am I.
I used to check my local and intl news sites a few times every hour but its just a waste of time to be honest.
The same news will be available at a later stage, if its important enough. I have just blocked the news sites on my work pc for good and it has really helped me.
Do I avoid the news? No, of course not. What I avoid is commentary masquerading as news. If I'm going to get an opinion from someone, it's going to be someone who's demonstrated critical thinking skills. You're not going to find that on the TV news channels or on social media. They're all simply a waste of time.
> Part of the problem, he says, is that publishers are in hot pursuit of news consumers who are willing to pay for news — subscription buyers, in other words — and shape their offerings around the perceived needs and interests of customers who are relatively affluent, educated and “politically interested.”
I wonder what the next trick might be. Manufacture the news! Someone goes out at night and spray paints some obscenities on the main street intersection, then in the morning they report on it "everyone get angry, look at what just happened". I am joking, of course...
To be serious though, they reap what the saw. And I guess found out that selecting on what to report and how is not too far from "manufacturing" the news. They found in the short term getting people enraged/engaged (there is only one letter difference!) with and divisively selected headlines was great for business. In the long term, people become disillusioned because they see through the dishonesty, hostility and bias after a while.
The news is no longer a singular source of information and when it was, it really wasn't that great anyway. Sure, the information sent out was reliably reliable, the problem lied in the stories that weren't reported and the inconvenient facts that were left in the dust bin.
Today, the news is a battlefield for information warfare. Treat it like the adversarial environment that it is. Understand the leanings, biases, and agendas of the publications you read (these can change over time). One of the most important parts to consider is what is left out? Which questions aren't asked? Which stories are ignored by one publication but not another?
Only once you understand all that, can you get an idea of what is going on in the news landscape. After all that still take with a grain of salt.
Yeah I've been trying, it has never been good for my mental health seeing all the negativity. Even sticking here to HN trying to only stay on top of tech related news, I still run into problems stumbling over news of negative things which I have no control over
Honestly I click maybe less than 10% of all articles I see on this site. Usually I like to read the ones that are about interesting new studies or computation breakthroughs, and I do like to chime in on some controversial topics from time to time when they pop up and I think my input could be beneficial to someone reading it.
This is HN right? I believe I'm justified in my pedantry /s
Jokes aside, I think it is partially disingenuous for others to claim they avoid news on this site. It might not be the front page of a major news site, but there's plenty of politics and doom here too. Perhaps it feels less like news to others since it better fits the beliefs/expectations of the in-group.
It is a remarkable phenomenon that all three cable news channels in America have dedicated themselves entirely to the individual of Donald Trump, all the way from 2016 to 2024 and beyond.
It defies a certain logic that audiences can tire of Marvel movies that come out a couple times a year, but daily coverage of such an asinine topic for nearly a decade is supported by the market?
Certainly this has to be culturally damaging, but everyone sort of pretends it's normal for the country to focus on the antics and tribulations of one person.
TV runs the country for now but I am optimistic their vapidity will drive the next generations to the internet. There appears to me a growing number of young people growing up online.
It's no better on the internet. Can I have a news aggregator not give me 20 stories a day about what Trump said? I don't care how prolific he is on whatever off-brand Twitter he's on, I still don't care about what breathless all-caps rant he's delivered this hour.
Nice to know I am not alone. No TV at home since 11 years. About 6 months ago stopped going on Twitter and google news or any internet news. In terms of my daily “diet” it is exclusively HN and Reddit/ML for up to an hour in the morning, plus a few select tech newsletters I subscribe to.
Core problem with Twitter or LinkedIn — almost everything is calculated to self-promote the authors. Granted there are many “interesting” things that pop on Twitter. However that is also a problem — things are often too interesting, and if you’re a builder you’ll never build anything if you follow every rabbit hole.
I don't avoid reading news, I just avoid reading it continuously. If there is an ongoing story I am interested in (like the war in Ukraine) I check in on it once every couple of days, via sources I have some trust in. Eventually, I read a long-form article about it, but those take a few weeks or months to be written. What I don't do is check social media every 15 minutes, or watch 24/7 cable news. I think obsession is the delivery mechanism for problems like anxiety, depression, or radicalization, not the news itself.
Not in America but yes I avoid the news. I only read headlines once a day or so, without pictures.
I found this page from the National news agency that leaves out the picture fluff and makes it a bit like HN: https://nos.nl/nieuws/archief
It's just what I wanted! There was a commercial site too that was mostly headlines (nu.nl) but those idiots now require an account to read most articles.
The problem comes from our upbringing, where we were told that the news was important.
But, news today is not the bulletin headlines and long-read newspaper investigations we knew news to be in the 1980s and 1990s. News has now morphed into an amalgamation of the worst elements of social media and reality television.
By reading a publication such as The Economist once a month, you can attain a more comprehensive understanding of global affairs than you would by watching daily news broadcasts.
> But news today isn’t what news was in the 1980s and 1990s.
Other than the fact that its not anymore from a mostly-uniform set of corporate owners with mostly-uniform biases imposed on it, yes, actually, it is (and that had actually started to break down in the 1990s, anyway.)
(There are qualitative differences by specific outlet and medium, sure, but that was true in the 1980s and 1990s, too, with studies then showing, IIRC, quantity of radio and TV news consumption – unlike newspapers and newsmagazine consumption – inversely correlated with knowledge of current events.)
I've been able to cut out the news for the most part with a small side project. It combines hundreds of sources and thousands of articles every day to make a concise digest.
In about 5 minutes I can get caught up without doom scrolling.
Yep, I can relate. I also started to avoid reading the news. In the past, I would read the news first thing in the morning. Now I do it only in the afternoon. I also unsubscribed from a newspaper and one Youtube new channel which had too many negative news. Overall I feel better, less depressed and anxious. And my productivity had improved.
As per usual the news people writing news articles blaming their own failure on phones and the internet. At some point can we just get one honest article where the writers and news people that work at these organizations own up to their hyper sensationalization of content and overdoing these constant news alerts and “breaking” headlines.
I run a cybersecurity newsletter so i find myself searching through rubbish for ages, from both a mix of mainstream media and people's personal blogs. Most of my issues lie with mainstream media which either not have enough expertise to write the story or signigicantly dumb it down so they can be applicable to a much wider audience.
Any time there’s been an Israel Palestine flair-up in the past 20 years I’ve had to VPN to another country and read about it from publications in countries with less skin in the game
The US news was so unreliable on that topic, no room to learn anything or have any perspective aside from what was presented verbatim
and then that expanded to more topics and politics, and then “everything is political” so its just useless
I just read macroeconomic news and trade sometimes. I feel like richer people have been doing that and immune to any geo/political outcome for hundreds of years
I'm about two decades removed by mainstream media news/cable tv programming.
I'm an American but I don't consume any news or television programming
I watch netflix sometimes? Reddit/HN? Whenever we cut the cord many ideas left our household with the cable TV box.
If I try to read the front page of any news website (as opposed to an aggregator like this website) I get the feeling like someone is trying to sell me a product or convince me of something. I think it is the commanding tone of headlines these days. I am probably just crazy.
As long as you understand that news agencies are about business, not about bringing facts at first, than you realise, why emotions, sensations and tabloid style is presented here.
News, without making money, are boring. Consumers are trained to obtain news in entertainment.
I want news as an RSS/atom feed with properly consistent tags to filter by. That way I can opt in to just what I want to know, get it when it happens, and ignore everything else by default. But there isn't business value in news outlets providing this.
I like news but avoid the mainstream party A says party B is rubbish and visa versa and some mucked up crime happened some place you've never heard of which will be shown repeatedly for ages.
Some is interesting though - it's good to be selective.
Consumption is elective whether it’s “news”, electricity or potato chips. Exercise discipline about what news you consume the same way you walk down the chips aisle with blinders on. You do, don’t you?!
The time I take reading the news each day (BBC news and The Guardian) is the time it takes me to use the toilet each morning. I scan headlines, and only read articles of interest. I spend way more time each week on this site, than I do reading traditional mainstream news, and usually skip articles with paywalls and just come to the comments section to get a synopsis.
I used to be an avid receiver of traditional news media. I listened to BBC Radio 4 for about three hours a day, particularly Today on my commute into work and PM on my commute home. Then Any Questions on Saturday, and often The World at One at lunch.
I'm done with it all TBH. This site tends to surface most things that I find important or have an effect on my life. I honestly don't need to know what is happening on day X of the invasion of Ukraine. I much prefer reading about what's the latest going on with reproducibility studies of LK-99 than the political machinations of random ministers in parliment.
Count me as one of them. I touch an overview of what's new once a day and the rest of the time I'm listening to sports radio. It's entertaining and means nothing ultimately.
This head-in-sand attitude is not a good thing either. It just furthers the rampant individualism that plagues all levels of society as everyone focuses on themselves only. They are "the main character" and why should they care what's going on with anyone else near or far? The effects of that selfishness are detrimental whenever anything collective is required from the pandemic to just helping each other out in a local community.
I was very politically aware from ~12ish to probably 25 or so, and I had very strongly held beliefs and I was more than happy to evangelize. At some point I realized that most people really didn't care to live or be inconvenienced in furtherance of their beliefs (if they even got far enough to have articulable beliefs/standards) I just resigned myself to the reality that my sphere of influence is extremely small unless I dedicated more time than I was willing to activism/evangelism/whateverism and my time would be better spent improving myself educationally and professionally so that I didn't end up looking back on my lonely life, having not changed anything.
At the same time, if collectively "we" want something to change, "we" need to be informed from primary sources that haven't been focused through some self-serving lens, which takes time and effort away from immediate needs. And then further effort needs to be expended to turn "we" into "us" but there is a(n) (to some extent) artificial standard of living that a person (believes or has been indoctrinated to believe that they) need(s) to uphold that precludes effectively anyone from gathering enough of a common cause to effect change.
The people that make the real decisions have absolutely unfathomable amounts of resources/power/influence. The power comes from influence, and the influence comes from having the resources (money/destructive power) to create a situation of the carrot and the stick (blackmail or "bribes") for anyone with ambitions of upsetting the status quo. Hence the hubbub about epstein/soros or BigCorp, depending on your side.
"The News" is just another top-down adverstisement for one side or the other of the same effective outcome. Sometimes I hate feeling like I "gave up" but the^Wmy reality is that I realized I have zero control or influence over the broader situation, so for a good long time I have been focusing my energy on improving my own situation, living my beliefs and hopefully passively inspiring others to do the same.
I think Carlin (PBUH) said it best - "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"
teal deer: news is bullshit, everything that you haven't explicitly searched out and verified from first principles is an attempt at hypnotic suggestion and the only thing over which you have power is within driving distance.
At my last job, maybe a good fifth of the company or so seemed to have emotional states which careened from one end of the spectrum to the other based upon whether some new COVID variant had just been announced, or new developments in the will-they/won't-they arrest Donald Trump theater, or whatever. They would occasionally be completely unable to do work based on these news items which, while sometimes of reasonably high importance, had effectively zero chance to change their daily lives in any meaningful way whatsoever. It was really quite something to watch.
Me too. And I think it’s entirely rational. The newsroom budgets at all news organizations have been slashed to the bone. There’s nearly no well researched journalism being produced today. This news content is nearly information free and contains either the most basic facts, someone’s agenda or blatant misinformation. And on top of that, it’s emotional nuclear warfare out there, just constant rage bait or fear bait.
I avoid the news, I don't follow any news. Not a TV channel, a publication, my preferred talking head, the dude on twitter or a guy who does commentary on YouTube. Big or small, I don't care about the news.
It's not because it's all negative. It's because it's all bullshit. Almost all of it is someone who has an interest in changing my worldview so that I behave in ways that are beneficial to them. Often enough its a thinly veiled business funnel. Sometimes it's not like that, it's just noise that is inconsequential to me. But in every single case it isn't worth actively following; if something is important enough you'll hear about it from a person in your life. And probably you'll hear about unimportant things too, everyone knows at least one person who won't shut up about Trump this Biden that.
I'd say my life is better. I see these news addicts and theyre all just bitter, anxious basket cases constantly chewing their nails to a nub about some shit that their life would not change one bit if they didn't even know about, besides the anxiety they get from knowing about it of course.
I'm a reformed news junkie. At one point, in addition to consuming local, national, and cable TV news daily, I also read three newspapers a day (I was young and hand more time on my hands back then) and listened to NPR. But my confidence in the news was shattered long ago. It started with the OJ Simpson trial. Back then I was between jobs and had time on my hands so I could watch the actual trial, which was televised on CourtTV. Day after day, the prosecution would lay out their case and then the defense would destroy it. OJ really got his money's worth with that defense team. At night I would then watch the news coverage, which only told the prosecution story. I kept say, "did we watch the same trial?" Long before the glove didn't fit, I was 100% confidence he would be acquitted. But the world was shocked when jury came back with the not guilty verdict because they only knew one side of the story.
After that I started to consume news with a more critical eye. Another story I remember was on NPR and the narrative they wanted to tell was that streaming music services were screwing the independent musicians. The example they gave was how a radio station might play an artist song and get some sum of money per play, but a much, much lower payment on a streaming service - of course they completely forgot to mention that a radio station is a broadcast where a single play could be heard by millions, but a single play on a streaming service was only heard by a single person.
At a certain point, after you catch a few of these stories, you start to wonder what other stories aren't true that you're not catching. And you lose all faith in the institution (it's super depressing) The question I like to ask folks who excuse the news is this - if a close friend of yours lied about something important to you and you caught them, how many times would you have to catch them lying to you before if you'd stop trusting them all up? It's not many 1 maybe 2 times. The news has done this to us all over and over.
What's the solution? Like it or not, we really need journalism in this country. I tell folks that the collapse of the news industry is one of the greatest problems in this country that nobody is trying to fix.
The only solution I've been able to dream up is this. Create a tax on digital advertising and cloud computing (these are arguably one of the biggest causes of the decline in journalism). Then use that money to create 3 quasi governmental news organizations (like the post office or amtrak). Make it pay journalists like software engineers, with the expectation that they waive their voting rights for life. (note that Bob Woodward once said he doesn't vote to mitigate bias). Then set up an system where each news agency is incentivized to monitor the other news agencies for accuracy. If they think they're misrepresenting the facts, they can present that to collection of ombudsman* to judge. If it's deemed that they misrepresented the facts, they lose budget. Do it enough, and they're out of business and and the money is used to form a new news agency.
*Note ombudsman, once a mainstream in the news, seem to have all but vanished.
Anyway, that's my story and my idea. What's yours?
Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
Instead we talk about the direction of the country and indeed, humanity itself, with the same care and thoughtfulness that goes into rooting for your favorite NFL team, or voting people off the island on Survivor.