I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. The biggest problem to me, seems to be the 24 hour news cycle for things like wars, elections and the like.
I was visiting friends during a couple of major air accidents in the past couple of years (The MH370 and MH17 incidents in particular), and was astounded at the propensity for news stations on ALL channels to fill every minute of the day with news 'updates' on the events that eventually descended into getting quotes and theories from just about anyone they could get to talk in front of a camera.
I was only exposed to that for a few hours at a time, but I found it absolutely exhausting to be bombarded like that. Not only that, I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources.
No thanks. I would rather control my own news firehose, and be selective about the information that I want to learn more about.
>Not only that, I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources.
This is true every time there is a news story on about anything that somebody around me is an expert on. It's always "what the hell are they talking about!?"
I've seen this directly, too. I've been on the local news quite a few times, and EVERY TIME what they end up broadcasting, and what I was explaining to them are different things.
What's really really scary to me lately is all of this talk about "fake news", which originally referred to outright lies that were part of click-farms, but is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news.
Frightening. Really truly actually frightening to me.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
My favourite example of this is the Economist news magazine. The Economist reports on a much larger range of country and topics than the typical magazine or newspaper. Many of its readers like it for that exact reason: it gives them information on stories they won't normally find in their local or national news sources and they want to be informed about, say, hydroelectric developments in the Congo.
The problem is that writing about 25 different countries in a single issue doesn't mean they actually have experts on most of those places or people on the ground to do original reporting. Often, it devolves into British or American writers regurgitating inaccurate information from the Internet. But if it's the only thing you read about, say, forest exports from Myanmar, you have no reason to question it.
The easiest way to see this is to be a non-US/UK/EU person and read an article in the Economist about your own country. Then you realize that all the other articles are just as simplistic and uninformed.
My experience is the opposite. And I'm definitely not blind to the Gell-Mann Amnesia, I notice it on Wikipedia all the time.
I've noticed that in The Economist the articles about my field of technology, work, and my small home country, have been accurate to the point that I suspect they have had experts in the field involved in creating them. That gives me confidence in the articles about issues I'm not intimately familiar with.
That is why The Economist is one of the few news sources I read after cutting out following daily news completely. As a result I'm much better informed about the facts and issues than I was when reading huge amounts of daily news. It boils down to a difference between consuming mostly noise and consuming mostly signal.
Interesting. My own area of knowledge is renewable energy, a topic which appears with moderate frequency in TE. I would say 8/10 articles are merely repackaging reports published by major global consultancies like McKinsey, Navigant, etc. that I had seen two or three months earlier through my employer (a large multinational energy company). I would not say the information is not correct, but it hardly insightful and often presents an incomplete picture which looks at the industry primarily from the perspective of financiers.
Well that's why it's not called The Technologist I guess :) It's hard to expect non-specialist publication to write anything non-trite to an expert in the field, but just not botching up the basic facts is often refreshing.
perhaps not insightful to you, someone with knowledge of the area. but how about others? how about me? where should I gain my insights into all of the various industries that I don't have direct knowledge of today?
I'd like to echo this sentiment. In fact, this is the exact reason that I happily pay for The Economist. Even when reporting on topics with which I'm quite familiar, The Economist nails it in terms of accuracy.
For instance, recently there was a writeup on quantum computing in which they made a somewhat hyperbolic claim regarding D-Wave. This gave me pause; however, the point was clarified in subsequent paragraphs, thus restoring my confidence in their analysis.
Much like the parent poster, I too have dropped many of my daily news sources, but not The Economist. I've yet to find a publication which matches it in terms of coverage and accuracy--not to mention their exceptionally high-quality audio recordings of each edition (perfect for commuting!).
But the nice thing about the newspaper (The Economist refers to itself as a newspaper, not a magazine) is that they provide pure opinion journalism and as a reader you know exactly where they are coming from.
While I agree a lot with the publication (for example: they argued to liberalize drugs, or advocated gay marriage literally decades before it was chic). I encounter my share of (what I lovingly refer to as) full-of-shit opinions, with which I wholeheartedly disagree.
Overall, though, it's one of the last remaining publications, on which I put a certain amount of trust because they usually know what they're writing about and even on the subjects on which I (partially vehemently) disagree it's always an interesting read.
Because they argue their position intelligently and competently. It won't make me a believer, but it's useful and interesting to get the counterpoint from a reputable and trustworthy publication and sometimes get your dogmas slightly shaken in the process.
Additionally, I feel they present opposing opinions with proper weight and fairness (before arguing against these points), so you never quite feel totally in the dark about the full controversy.
I'll give you an example. The Economist has a few core principles that they hold very dear. Two of these are social liberalism and trade liberalism. They are strong believers in the free market. Applying these principles to issues in the recent past, the Economist took positions in favour of both legalisation of drugs and enacting the Trans Pacific Partnership. Most people (but not all) disagree with one of these stances but not the other. A Reagan Republican would favour trade and "just say no" whereas an Obama Democrat would demonise the TPP and demand the end of a failed, pointless war. It's easy to see how such people would find some stances taken by the Economist as "full-of-shit".
I'm a long time subscriber to the Economist, ever since I was in high school. I appreciate their breadth of reporting and their commitment to provide opinionated takes on news while also giving a balanced take on news. Very few times have I felt the "Murray Gell-Mann effect" while reading it. I can recall just one instance they have been wrong about a topic I'm knowledgeable about. That's a better record than any other publication I read.
Reading the above quote from Micheal Chrichton, I immediately thought about The Economist and how they are usually well informed. I remember a short article on some legal case in rap music. I used to be very into rap, and while I didn't learn a lot from the article it did confirm that the writers take it very seriously whatever topic they are reporting on.
I stopped reading TE because I was put off by their too steadfast belief in monetarism as the be it end all. To their credit, they are pretty upfront about that though.
Actually, the Economist has about 400 reporters for a 50 page weekly magazine, about 8 per page, so they do have enough people to include experts for all those fields.
The times I read an Economist article about my country or my line of work the coverage was actually very good, but your milage may vary.
Very true, but TE is usually way less wrong than the alternatives. The journalists there at least seem to know how to use Wikipedia. I mean, what am I supposed to read instead?
Indeed, and that is why I very rarely read it - for me, it would be too echo-chambery. I read the NYT quite deliberately and every day, enumerate why Krugman and Blow are wrong about whatever they are pontificating about...
Has The Economist shifted? I started reading it in about 2000, and at the time I really liked it because it seemed so intelligent and neutral. It seemed like such a pleasure to read something that went deep into interesting topics without an obvious axe to grind.
In the past ten years it seems to have drifted gradually leftward. Sometimes I can't reconsile The Economist of 2000 with the one of 2016. Did The Economist move gradually to the left or did I move to the right?
I think you've moved to the right, or this is another case of "reality having a leftwing bias". Or perhaps issues not reducing clearly to left/right.
The Economist were always Mill/Smith liberals, in favour of free trade, light but effective regulation, against the War on Drugs, pro-migration etc. They have a strong tendency to recommend economic liberalism regardless of what the problem is. These days the "right" have moved to "illiberal" positions - restricting free trade and migration. That may be what you're seeing.
Essentially it is, with caveats. The Economist was originally a publication set up to protest the Corn Laws and their distortion of the marketplace. The stance has shifted over the years but the tone is often inline with the founding idea that people and businesses should be left up to their own devices unless there is an excellent reason to intervene.
This quote has always bugged me a little bit. It does seem reasonable to expect that reporters and editors know more about the major world events that are the paper's bread and butter and less about other things.
The structure of a typical science section doesn't help. There are typically only a few reporters--often only one-- and they tend to cover whatever's timely (e.g., has recently been announced/opened/published), which doesn't let them build up much expertise. I think this also explains why pop-science articles tend to conflate background (here's what was known before this paper was published) and whatever actual result was: it's all new to the reporter.
That said, I was recently interviewed by CBC about my research and I thought they did a very good job. Everyone seemed prepared, asked reasonable questions, and the final product matched what I said!
I have also been interviewed by CBC (about floppy disks, oh well) and they were great. They put me in the best possible light, made me sound coherent, and got the facts correct.
It's funny to me the quote mentions Palestine. I once spent six months in Israel on study-abroad (I was a near eastern studies major). While there I saw certain things firsthand. When I came back I noticed that all the US newspapers I could find in the University library all reported falsehoods regarding the events. I actually found that the BBCs coverage was the most honest and accurate. This experience has always left me wondering, "If an event that I have personal knowledge of was not reported accurately in the newspapers, how do I know that other events that I do not have personal knowledge of are reported accurately?" It doesn't seem to be enough to use multiple sources since all of the US sources I could find were inaccurate and how would I know if the BBC was always accurate?
The main way I've found is to just read something from multiple countries. For a given article I care about or feel dubious about I always try to get at 3 or more country's take of it. While it doesn't help you find the 'truth' writers tend to misinterpret the same things different ways while things that are actually reported figures will lean more consistent.
Also for lots of things there is generally the direct source available if it is economic/legal/statistically relevant and a quick skim of that is a good get you up to speed thing. The writer made mention of something as 'interesting' so that's just a key to me to go looking for information in that direction where otherwise I would not.
One thing I should point out is that my story took place more than 2 decades ago in the pre-WWW days. It was a lot harder back then to check sources in multiple countries.
There's a bit of irony in this quote coming from Michael Crichton. When I started hanging out with the Science Online community in the early 00s, I learned that Crichton was widely regarded as spreading bad science by regularly citing discredited studies or fringe research in his books.
He was also known for getting even basic science wrong, like in "Jurassic Park," where the scientists fill-in missing dinosaur DNA by splicing it with reptile and amphibian DNA. Anyone who has studied dinosaurs knows that their closest living relatives are birds. How could someone with so many references and claims of research in his books miss such an elementary fact?
Then there was that embarrassingly awful book attacking the idea of climate change... but I think Crichton is a great example of this Gell-Mann phenomena. I know many people, even academics, who have read his books and will bring them up as having a degree of science fact.
>> How could someone with so many references and claims of research in his books miss such an elementary fact?
Because following that scientific fact would have ruined one of the major plot points of the story? Fiction authors do take some liberties to suit their fictional stories.
Jurassic Park was published 1990. I don't think that birds being the closest relatives of dinosaurs was established beyond doubt at that time as the theory of dinosaurs being ancestors of birds was revived only in the 1970s.
Funny. After reading this, I decided to comment that in my mind The Economist is a somewhat good counter example. Then I noticed that pretty much all other comments were already discussing TE. I guess I can keep on paying my subscription.
It seems rather ironic to me that this theory, which uses as it's basis that some journalists mix up cause and effect, then turns around and in essence posits that because some articles have errors it means that all articles have the same category of error.
It's not at all evident to me that every article in a more reputable news source will make errors in every thing they report on.
I have a couple of areas of interest where my knowledge is quite deep and I notice this whenever there's anything about those subjects written in the local or national press.
I see people asking why we can't have a meaningful dialog about the subject and it's because at least half of us don't understand the basics of the issue.
More people are interested in world events than in science, so it's reasonable to assume a newspaper will set a higher standard of reporting for those events. A journalist who studied political science isn't equally inept at writing on all subjects; he might have some very good insights on politics. Similar to how most HN readers have very little expertise outside of software engineering, and have said some pretty ridiculous things on other fields.
> Similar to how most HN readers have very little expertise outside of software engineering, and have said some pretty ridiculous things on other fields.
Wow, that could hardly be more wrong. HN has repeatedly demonstrated expertise in a very wide range of subjects. Sure there is a bias towards software but that's hardly the limit. Even if HN was only read by SW exports assuming that they don't know about anything else is ridiculous. Not that HN is nonsense free. Your comment for example.
> HN has repeatedly demonstrated expertise in a very wide range of subjects.
Although I agree with this, there is also a lot of nonsense and factually incorrect statements. Not everyone is an expert in every field, and many people will make bold claims about topics in which they're not well versed – even on HN. Unfortunately, this applies to me as well sometimes.
The media is shocked even after all newspapers and TV backed a single candidate, she lost. I speculate internally they blame alternative media, so now they run a campaign against 'fake news'. Of course it couldn't just have been the fact that most states and rural counties did not like Clinton much at all - the media's headquarters are all located in big cities so they were all blind. They are now blaming and accusing 'fake news' instead of taking a good look at themselves.
It probably applies more to the Republican primaries, where Trump seemed to get as much publicity as the other candidates put together (and much more in international media)
Negative publicity from news sources the typical registered Republican had a fairly low opinion of almost certainly helped him greatly in what was arguably the more difficult contest for him to win.
This is pretty much the DNC playbook from the election, elevate a fringe candidate and marginalize the moderates during the primaries, to make it easier to tear down the candidate during the election. Problem is Dr. Frankenstein wasn't able to control her monster
Operation Pied Piper, The DNCs 2016 Strategy From Wikileaks part of Podesta release
1) Force all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election;
2) Undermine any credibility/trust Republican presidential candidates have to make inroads to our coalition or independents;
3) Muddy the waters on any potential attack lodged against HRC.
It definitely is frightening at times. And frustrating at all other times too. I remember when news articles reported all the known facts up front, or they would do some research to post base facts. Talking about air accidents above, I remember when the first lines of a news article would contain the location, info on the airline as well as the aircraft type, departure and destination information etc.
But it appears that these days, the rush to post something that will get clicked on bypasses all the actual information that people might want to know.
Take the recent tragic crash in South America that wiped out a whole football team. When I heard about the scale of the accident, one of my first questions (as a former pilot, and knowing the carrying capacity and safety reputation of most aircraft) was "I wonder what aircraft model it was?".
I read through 3 articles on common news sites which didn't state this information at all. Two of them didn't even have the airline or carrier name published in their story. I ended up resorting to a pilot discussion forum, where I found out the information I wanted.
You hit the proverbial "nail on the head." Before 24/7 news channels and online access, the rush to "scoop" another newspaper still had a 16-hour cycle due to daily print runs. The infamous incorrect front page presidential election result made editors back up and double check things before rushing a story, but it didn't last long. Many years later, Dan Rather lost his job for not fact checking before reporting something he wanted to believe.
When television news first appeared in the US, some claimed the death unfiltered information, which was already filtered, while others claimed the death of newspapers. The first didn't change much and the second barely changed.
24/7 cable news was already in vogue before Dan Rather's incident, who I believe claimed the high road, which helped remove Dan Rather. All that changed when the revenue sources changed.
What I personally find hypocritical is the different standard for "breaking" news versus "regularly scheduled" news. Bryan Williams was excoriated for honoring veterans and having a normal, human memory. Breaking news and special updates are blatantly suspect and misleading, feeling line "spray and pray", with minimal or no fact or source checking, and there appears to be no consequence. I believe the Rather case was egregious and the Williams case trivial.
I have a link to a study I need to find and post relating to the amount of international news viewing by country. More international news generally means more sources, purportedly meaning more viewpoints and balance.
It feels like P. T. Barnum is running much of today's media outlets. Sensationalism combined with instant gratification gets more views = more ad revenue. "Always follow the money." as told to Bob Woodward in _All The President's Men_.
The Rather case really changed my view on the mainstream media. It isn't just that they went on-air with something without any fact checking, which even the most cursory fact-checking would show to be fabricated, because it fit the narrative that they wanted to tell. It's that not only them, but the entire rest of the mainstream media, continued to defend it, even as the evidence accumulated that it was not only fake, but a really lazy, badly-done fake. Aren't these companies supposed to be in competition? Shouldn't they call each other out for blatantly biased, shoddy journalism? I guess pushing their chosen narrative is more important than that.
Really makes you wonder how many other con jobs they've tried to sell us, before the tools existed for independent parties to get their own research out to the public. And now they're telling us to beware of "fake news", as if they haven't been publishing it themselves for decades at least.
> What's really really scary to me lately is all of this talk about "fake news", which originally referred to outright lies that were part of click-farms, but is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news.
I am surprised by that too. This whole "fake news" thing appeared out of thin air around the US election and is reportedly a new phenomenon - as if most of the "regular" news coverage wasn't already of various degrees of fakeness.
The fake news being talked about is actually fake, as in nearly 100% made up with the intention to misinform. It's definitely not new but I saw it way more during the election and it's very different from shittt reporting.
Maybe I am misreading you and other posters here, but I am getting the idea that people don't think this is a real thing or that it's no worse then actual news. This shit is real, harmful, and really not hard to find. I have a pretty trimmed down Facebook account but I would see multiple fake news posts shared by people every other week or so this past year. The way people talk about manipulative ads here could be applied to these articles. The worst part is they are incredibly easy to debunk, but no one gives a shit about checking what they read.
> Maybe I am misreading you and other posters here, but I am getting the idea that people don't think this is a real thing or that it's no worse then actual news.
Can't say for others, but personally, I do believe the phenomenon is real. But I don't see it as something significantly different than "regular" reporting. It's a difference in degree, but not in kind. Regular news already only pays lip service to factual accuracy.
It was an undefined talking point that has spread farther and faster than it was likely intended. I suspect it will disappear soon as the stupidity of it starts to affect the major news agencies and social media.
It referred to a real and serious phenomena, but now the phrase has been muddied by political rhetoric. It's still a problem, and it's different enough from the old clickbait sensationalism and conspiracy theory chain emails that it deserves its own name.
Nah, for the most part what some are calling "fake news" is still the old-fashioned clickbait.
I can remember several scandals over the years from the big news agencies that would be considered "fake news" by today's standards. They range from just being wrong to outright fraud. This is nothing new, this crap existed before there were websites. It's just that people simply choose not to remember to continue their desire to have something whine about.
It is also an old tactic by people wishing to discredit those that disagree with their agenda, whether it is political or economic.
> is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news.
I believe that was the intent all along.
Blocking the bad ones and blessing the good ones are two sides of the same coin. We seem to think as long as government isn't doing it, it's not "censorship" and no problem. But we learn that time and time again, various governments major tech firms are actively working together.
Even more fun.. where did you hear the term "fake news" or where do you hear it regularly? Is it the same people who claim they're the "real news"?
Whether you agree or not, if you ask any suspect if they're guilty, the answer is "No!"
The first two were both NYT journalists - one a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1932 - and the third covers the 1890s, so let's stop acting like it's new, unique, or exists exclusively on one side or the other. This is how much of the modern press started.
Do I understand correctly that you would like to take back your earlier claim:
>Whether you agree or not, if you ask any suspect if they're guilty, the answer is "No!"
That started this era of nonsensical analysis and up to the second coverage of random car chases, progressed to constant updates about other random things, and then the 9/11 ticker sent it to the moon.
> What's really really scary to me lately is all of this talk about "fake news", which originally referred to outright lies that were part of click-farms, but is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news.
I'm genuinely curious to know where it's talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are the pinnacle of reporting?
Honestly I never hear/read anything but hate for them?
>What's really really scary to me lately is all of this talk about "fake news", which originally referred to outright lies that were part of click-farms, but is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news.
this is an intentional ploy designed to conflate the issues of tabloid-trash and dissent.
we don't even need a ban for the tabloid trash... but once we link it to dissenting from the mainline and call it the deciding factor of the election (a huge leap...), we put the mainstream media who have proven to be incompetent and dishonest back at the wheel.
Maybe you were responding to "form herds, gang up, pile on". My explanation for why they do that: For a newsie, if some of the bigger guns in the MSM are saying that some candidate is a dirty rat, then it is both safe and easy for all the other newsies in the MSM to do the same. Just one newsie calling dirty rat likely won't have enough credibility to get much traction, but, if all the MSM newsies are saying dirty rat, then they all get credibility, not just for a claim of dirty rat but maybe also even for little green men from Mars. More generally, gangs offer to their members some safety of numbers, and people in gangs are more willing to throw stones.
A friend of mine who remembers NYC some decades ago explains that the NYT wrote the stories and the rest of the MSM, especially the TV evening news, just went along -- easy, "no real work about it".
Yes, no doubt much the same applied to tribes. If everyone joins in, then can bring down an elephant, mastodon, bison, reindeer or some such, no one member of the tribe is at much risk of injury, and everyone in the tribe eats that day. If some guy in the tribe just wants to sleep through the effort, then maybe the rest of the tribe won't let him eat!
> Frightening. Really truly actually frightening to me.
Don't worry, Congress is going to fix that for you if the "Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 ", H.R. 5181 passes. We'll have trusty folks over at the "Center for Information Analysis and Response" [1] to help us by "disseminating fact-based narratives" (!) to aide in determining whats true and whats false. How handy!
>"I've seen this directly, too. I've been on the local news quite a few times, and EVERY TIME what they end up broadcasting, and what I was explaining to them are different things."
Completely agreed from personal experience. Not new but always worth re-iterating.
The news can't even get the basic facts right without twisting through addition or omission.
How are we supposed to rely on them when factual sources are suspect/false in the age of fake/lie-news?
I have seen this happen to a friend. He was active in a political party, and was interviewed by a local station which was doing a piece on politically active millenials.
They sent a reporter with a camera crew and he spoke to them for over one hour about his political views and ambitions. In the end, only a single soundbite ended up in the piece. It was a metaphor he used somewhere inbetween, so forgettable that I can't even recall it.
In an extension to what I wrote above, I used to follow my local newspaper on Facebook a couple of years ago, just in order to keep in touch with local events seeing as I don't have a TV.
I noticed their feed back then starting to change from a simple and useful dissemination of their newspaper articles, into a conduit for posting tabloid style or inflammatory/unverified web links and popular memes.
I questioned them a couple of times on this in the comments area, but was told on both occasions by the page admins that their Facebook page was a 'fun and social' outlet for their paper, and if I wanted 'real news', I should just buy a copy of their actual paper.
Shortly after, I noticed that their print paper started to echo their Facebook feed, in terms of unresearched articles simple copied and pasted from other sources. I stopped following them on Facebook and stopped buying their paper shortly after.
When clicks, eyeballs and stickiness trumps good journalism, then that pretty much closes the door for me.
My theory is that profit destroys many news channels from the inside out.
The channel start with the best intentions of conveying legitimate unbiased news to inquisitive educated audiences... but eventually the supply of news seekers gets depleted, while investors and advertisers demand more. The channel is "forced" to keep expanding so they start catering to people that don't seek out news... steadily devolving into click-bait infotainment articles.
Low-brow content alienates the original news seekers, and they leave for cleaner sources of information... but by now the channel's legitimate reputation is lost. They must double down on the infotainment market to keep turning a profit.
Eventually that gets saturated too, so the channel abandons their original (expensive) legitimate news reporting and continue chasing low-brow audiences, competing against all the other devolved spam-news sites. If their name held enough trust, they might chase profitable corporate/political puff-pieces ("fake news" aka lies).
I'm sure this is what is happening. Income from readership of physical paper goes down, pressure mounts and even reputable news papers feel thsy have little choice... ask any journalist. It is brutal, earning a decent living is hard, earning it from actual quality reporting is impossible because the vast majority of customers can't separate anote article written in 10 minutes without any research or fact checking from the results of a 1 year research has undercover project...
So yeah, no surprise they deliver more of the 10 minute pieces and quality goes down. If we don't pay we get what we pay for - nothing. Hot air..
I'm not disagreeing with any of your post but one bombardment which I can't stand now that someone "helpfully" pointed it out to me, is when I was a kid and still watched news, "breaking news" complete with animation and breathless commentary and interruption to regular programming, this meant that a pope had died, or Reagan was shot, or a new Russian leader, another war or coup started, or at minimum a major airliner crash, Challenger explosion, that level of significance.
In the 2010s, "breaking news" apparently means early news cycle filler as opposed to late cycle filler that's already been reported 47 times in the last 24 hours, so after the attention grabbing fanfare, the breaking news is the national christmas tree lighting ceremony in DC, or surprisingly it snowed in the winter in the midwest yesterday, or congress is boringly making sausage as usual, while I'm sitting there waiting, come on, whats the breaking news part, did the ISS re-enter, has a political leader died, has a new war begun? And then they go to yet another old person pharmaceutical commercial, because those are the only people who still watch news channels, and I'm all question marks. Where's my important news?
At my place (me, my wife, 6yo and 1yo daughters) we have done the same (got rid of our TV about 5 years ago).
We watch the occasional TV show via on demand streaming (guilty pleasure="The Voice", food for thought="several long form journalistic features, tv documentaries etc")
The improvement to our quality of life at home as been significant. In the little free time our daily chores still leave us, we simply play with our daughters (lego, board games, silly play) or read a book with them.
The only concern I have is with the kids growing up. Is the lack of exposure to daily news going to make them less aware of the "world out there"?
After all we could make the choice to live without TV/News after growing up with it. All that news noise is part of our accumulated view of the world. How will this affect someone growing up?
Good move. How I counter this news awareness in our house is to actually have discussions with my kids about news that I know they are interested in.
For instance, my younger son is super interested in space and space exploration. Whenever I see a news article or announcement on the web (or even right here on HN), I read up a little about it and then seek him out with a "Hey, did you hear about ...". This often leads to a great discussion, and ends up with us sitting in front of the computer to visit the NASA or ESA websites to get more information, photos or videos direct from the source, without much editorial slant on it.
It's all about piquing their interests, without overloading them with a lot of garbage. They've got enough on their plates with school and social activities etc., so curating their news for them like this is I think useful, plus also leads to some good father/son bonding time where we talk about big ideas like adults.
With 1 daughter in university and 2 in high school, I do something similar, adding in listening to their viewpoints, and asking them critical thinking questions about their views without necessarily disagreeing with them. It doesn't matter whether I agree or disagree, I simply ask them to think for themselves and question the reason they feel the way they do. It's often quite interesting to go into a direction which I had not considered. I've also found flaws in my own views from the exercise.
As may be expected, they also get tired of this sometimes, and they know it's coming, so I try to pick and choose items at random and just let others go. I believe--well hope really, that this encourages them to think and ask questions themselves and not dread another dinner with dad :)
My advice to you would be to get a subscription to a quality newspaper, even if it's only on a weekly basis. Newspapers have come to terms with their position, as last in the news race, so they tend to make up for it with articles pondering the why's of news, rather than the what's. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for, and they will absolutely read a newspaper while eating breakfast, if you leave one out for them.
Yeah I thought about subscribing to a weekly newspaper. The problem is that over here (Portugal) all the weekly news papers are of a particular political "lean". To get a balanced view I would need to subscribe to at least 2 of them.
But I guess as the kids grow older they will inevitably come into contact with the mother of all noise machines... the internet. Then the problem will be to teach them how to filter...
With respect to the kids, its worth looking at the demographics of actual viewers leading to interesting commercial choices where the ads are mostly old people pills and old people cars. Meanwhile the content is aimed, narrowcasting style, right back at the old people to steal old people from other news channels rather than to try and appeal generally, so there's lots of coverage of the 2010s antics (or deaths) of 1970s child TV stars, 60s musicians, and so forth that mean nothing culturally to a 2010s kid.
No 2010s kid is going to get "street cred" socially by walking into school talking about how sick Buicks are and Crestor is awesome and its almost but not quite the 15th anniversary of John Ritter's death.
In general, I agree with everything you said. However,
> No thanks. I would rather control my own news firehose, and be selective about the information that I want to learn more about.
My worry is: Isn't this what caused the fake news / misinformation silos? By being selective about our information sources, aren't we distancing ourselves from how a majority of the world lives and thinks? And as product developers (as majority HNers are), isn't it in our benefit to understand as much of the world as possible?
You are correct. My viewpoint was mainly about being fed a constant stream of nonsense and/or distractions along with the general feed.
For instance, I absolutely loathe 'celebrity news', but most main news sites here that I go to have at least one or two articles on rubbish like that as their lead, and I have to dig to find the stuff that is relevant to me.
To use the example of air accidents above - I rarely find out anything useful that I want to know from popular news sources. Of course, I hear about the incidents on them, but when I want to dive deep, I go to specialist forums or sites where people in the know are talking about it.
Similarly for mundane things like sport. If I want to find out more about, say, Formula 1 races, I will visit certain sites that I know have motor heads discussing things. That way I can learn about future car developments, driver contracts etc. Mainstream sports news seems to want to talk about dirt and gossip for just a handful of drivers.
They are using the technique of formula fiction, that is, what the ancient Greeks discovered as a sure-fire way to get and hold the attention of an audience.
So, in that formula, there is a protagonist the audience comes to
identify with, that is, care about. Then
the protagonist has a problem.
Through various highly in doubt and
improbable victories, from skill,
guts, determination, smarts, luck, whatever, the protagonist
wins and at the end gets the girl.
Can see a version of this formula
fiction just as orchestral music
with no words at all in the Richard
Strauss Ein Heldenleben as at
So, to use some words, there is a man, the hero, aka, protagonist, nice
guy, cruising along in life. Then he
encounters his adversary, nasty,
menacing, bad dude (flute, etc.). Then
starting at about 10:00 in the
performance above, he
sees HER, the girl (solo violin --
IMHO one of the best
solo violin parts in orchestral
music)!
She's a dream!
But, soon, she's also darned hard to get
and gives him a really tough time, a
worse time than
even Isolde gave Tristan in
http://www.exoticitaly.com/images/Tristan-and-Isolde.jpg
where he wouldn't take his
eyes off of her and she
flatly refused even to look
at him.
Near 14:00 she really
chews him out!
Soon she starts to be nice.
About 15:00 they
really start to smile at each other!
Around 16:00 they are
together.
He keeps trying and eventually
hear the music of the climax
when he kisses her or
whatever.
Teenage boys,
your life is so much easier now:
Have that climax music
queued up ready to
go at a single button click
at just the right time
with her on the living room
sofa. Trust me: Richard Strauss
understood her much better
than you do!
Just about the time the
hero is to settle down
to a wonderful life of
love, home, marriage, children,
the adversary returns.
The hero goes off to
battle, maybe as in the
Edmund Blair Leighton God Speedhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Speed_(painting)
There is a big battle with the bad dude.
Tough battle. Comes and goes.
Finally the hero wins the battle.
Then there is victory music.
Terrific victory music.
As in art, the "communication,
interpretation of human experience,
emotion", the victory music communicates
well what a really big victory
must feel like,
bigger than getting
10 KLOC of code to run,
a Series A, a big M&A offer,
an IPO, anything in business.
Really great victory music.
If want to do a foil deck with a mash up of
some media content
for a presentation
to investors, maybe in
the last slide in the foil
deck use the Ein Heldenleben
victory music as background.
No words, but it would be
tough to miss the message!
Of course, not even a big IPO
could come up to the Richard
Strauss music, but, well,
there were no words for
lawyers to use to sue for breach
of promise!
In the performance at the link
above, the victory music
is before 30:00 with the
climax in the next minute or so.
At the end, after the hero
has hung up his sword and
is fading away, the girl
is really nice to him.
If going to play with formula
fiction, then might as well
play with some of the best of
it! Right, at one point the
treble line suddenly goes
up and the bass line, down.
So, it feels, say, expansive,
grand.
Ah, Richard Strauss, expert
in applied psychology of
human emotions!
Good thing that human
emotions haven't changed
much since he wrote his
music!
So, the race car drivers are made into protagonists people identify with.
Similarly for what the tabloids do
with celebrities. Similar to
what a lot of TV news show producers
try to do with their anchors.
Put all of it into various buckets, e.g.,
manipulation, light entertainment.
But it's not information.
Mad props for the _ Ein Heldenleben_ reference. Richard Strauss was a genius, following in the footsteps and improving on Wagner.
Side note: I'm continuously amazed at the breadth of knowledge and reference on HN. Is it perfect? No. It is, however, frequently a breath of fresh air. It reminds me that polymaths still abound, and fondly reminiscent of the old /.
with the scene of the presentation of the rose from his opera Der Rosenkavalier (rose carrier) where the two women are Anne Sophie von Otter (Octavian) and Barbara Bonney (Sophie). So, in the story Octavian is dressed as a man and is delivering the rose to Sophie, the one dressed as a woman. Super nice singing by the female voices with a super nice duet. Bonney is cute as a kitten.
>"Teenage boys, your life is so much easier now: Have that climax music queued up ready to go at a single button click at just the right time with her on the living room sofa. Trust me: Richard Strauss understood her much better than you do!"
While I appreciate your commentary on the music of Strauss, I disliked this particular comment. Is encouraging emotional manipulation really what we want for the younger generations?
If mood-setting music is unacceptable emotional manipulation, we'd better all stop interacting with one another to avoid the great crimes we're all (apparently) constantly committing, because that's about as benign as it gets.
There's nothing wrong with sharing music with others, what matters is the intent. Sharing music to enjoy together, great. Sharing music you may not enjoy just to get your rocks off, not exactly the best thing in the world.
I don't know what social interaction generally, and especially relations between the sexes, would look like absent anything that's at least as "manipulative" as mood music, of all things. It'd be some extreme sci-fi material, probably considered highly dystopic by most exposed to it.
> Is encouraging emotional manipulation really what we want for the younger generations?
You are fully correct. We don't want that.
But, then, is there an alternative? My first girlfriend, she was 12 and I, 14, I
regarded as an angel. She was and
remains the prettiest human female
I ever saw, in person or otherwise.
She was burned into my brain: For the rest of my life I will no more be able to
forget her than I will be able to forget
my own name.
My goal with her was for us to be early teen boyfriend-girlfriend, with some
protection against being lonely, some
additional affection and compassion, one
more person who really cared about us,
some romance, security of knowing
that our relationship was going to
continue, hold hands, hug, and kiss,
with nothing wrong and nothing
dangerous.
I never tried to manipulate her
emotionally, but there were a few
times when she got emotional
anyway; those times, I declined
to take advantage of her; i
guessed that a day later she or
her mother would be angry. No way
did I want her hurt, in any way, from
any source, for any reason, at any
time, and I was ready to risk my
life to protect her from being hurt.
So, in reality, what I actually did
was what you want teen boys to do.
My remark, the one you didn't like,
was partly a joke, but there is
a germ of inconvenient truth
there -- it can appear that too
often there is such manipulation,
taking advantage, or overpowering
emotions or nothing at all. Or, maybe
it's as in the Strauss music or
too often just doesn't happen.
Maybe the larger lesson to teen boys
is, really love the girl, no way hurt
her, seek to protect and care for her, but realize what an expert
once told me, "Of COURSE, women
are MUCH more emotional than
men. That is the cause of all the
problems." So, net, maybe,
the boy should try
to let her be as emotional as she
wants but stay rational and prudent
himself and do his best
to let her have, help her have
her emotions
with full safety.
Usually it appears that
not many people in our society
are quite as sensitive to
protecting girls,
emotionally or even physically,
as you are, or
I was with that girl I loved,
but I can partly agree with
your point.
But I will say, there is evidence
that some girls very much
seek some of various possible
forms of emotional experiences
and will resent a boy who
does not so contribute and
respect a boy who does.
Ah, someday I'll write a book, Girls 101 for Dummies -- Boys.
The Strauss music was about all of
life, and I was just mentioning
the part where the two
fell in love! I was mentioning the
Strauss music as a grand example
of formula fiction, and that is
one of the pillars of the news business which the OP was talking about.
After being married over 20 years, which I still find shocking that anyone has put up with me for so long, I find that "to let her be as emotional as she wants but stay rational and prudent" frequently backfires because she wants emotional _involvement_ and support. Being rational doesn't meet her needs, even though as a man, a geek HFA man at that, I'd rather stay in the safe, predictable, rational realm. Staying married and supporting my wife is more important to me than my comfort zone, just like apologizing means you value the other person more than your own ego.
I'm not sure it's possible to invent a method of letting users select their information sources that doesn't immediately let them create their own misinformation silos.
>aren't we distancing ourselves from how a majority of the world lives and thinks
If I wanted to know how majority world lives and thinks I would go and sample this information in real world by traveling and talking to different people, and not getting this info from people who have their own agendas to push onto me and who call themselves journalists.
> I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all.
I hear a lot of people say this these days but it doesn't really count for much if you regularly watch Netflix or other ondemand Internet based TV instead.
Well, full disclosure, we DO watch the odd NetFlix shows etc., but I think the biggest difference is (a) no ads at all (b) no news blasted at us and (c) we can choose exactly what we watch, and when we watch it. We can happily go weeks without turning the thing on, and we do the occasional weekend binge of a TV series.
The difference is that it is totally under our control, and we can select the content (and reject it) at will. The pure lifestyle changes around this (i.e. we as a family would far rather be caught up on other creative endeavours rather than watching TV) have been significant.
In Germany we have the term "Zeitsouveränität" which means time sovereignty.
That term originally appeared to describe workplace conditions and biography.
However, nowadays it is mostly used to describe media consumption. You decide when to listen to news or watch a certain show, the same way you decide when you read the next chapter of a novel.
One particularily popular example are German podcasts of radio stations, which are advertised by "... zum zeitsouveränen Nachhöhren", which roughly translates to: ... for time souvereign listening.
I'm not really criticizing. I've not had a TV in the house for 20 years but I watch plenty of TV via the Internet. It's better for all the reasons you mentioned. I just don't feel right saying I don't watch TV.
ha yes! I don't have a TV but waste hours on the internet instead. Streaming shows, skimming think pieces and their comment sections (that's a form of masochism), clicking through listicles with funny pictures (that's a form of retardation). It's bad in different way. The only advantage I think is that the internet is not "loud", fewer pundits yelling, or bit narrators yapping in that childish cadence. It's a huge time-suck nonetheless.
>I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all.
You enjoy watching movies, sitcoms, documentaries, etc, on a 27" computer monitor? Just buy a TV and external hard drive, it's so much better watching stuff on 55" TV on a couch...
> I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources.
This is what I hear from real experts every single time their subject is dealt with by the news. I've experienced it first hand myself with certain technology-related news where I've been heavily involved in the real thing. So when they report on economics, health or anything else I'm not an expert in, I assume that the real experts are shaking their heads just like I shook mine.
You can learn Arabic or Russian and go to Ukraine or Syria or Iraq and inform yourself talking to the people there, both sides of the story, or you can let the TV media tell you what is happening.
I have done it(I don't know much Arabic and a little Russian but I have traveled there) and it is quite an astonishment that what TV shows you has nothing to do with reality. I remember talking with a Syrian showing me a CNN video from US News of a Syrian manifestation(from natives that were being flood by foreigners with bad intentions), they reduced the audio volume and told everybody the manifestation was from the other side(the side that US was supporting).
The fact is that people that understood Arabic could listen what the protesters were saying and they(CNN) DID NOT CARE.
They did not care because it is a numbers thing, most Americans don't know Arabic, and millions of them will watch the channel and make themselves an idea from the eyes and ears that people in power have chosen for them.
The city where the protesters went into war and was bombarded for years and nobody displayed it on the news. Now it is displayed every single day because the people the US is supporting is losing there. Now it is so important civilians in this city, when for years they simply did not exist.
If you control the perception, you control the emotions that people will feel, and you could make them do exactly what you want. They will even believe they are "free", because they are to behave as they wish, but they are not because emotions are quite automatic.
Look at recent events if you need further evidence of this. The term "fake news" has exploded in just under a month in the mainstream media.
If my memory serves me, tabloids like The Enquirer have been sitting on news stands for as long as I can remember. So how did this fervor over "fake news" coalesce so quickly and uniformly?
Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate death throes of an outdated and superfluous institution. Don't expect they'll go down without a fight though.
The whole FUD campaign regarding "Fake News" is comically hypocritical in my opinion. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent article calling them out for it:
Greenwald's "excellent" piece is itself fake news. It deliberately misrepresents the reporting done by Kurt Eichenwald about the leaked emails. We know it's deliberate because he's distorted the story the same way in the past and it's been pointed out to him. Eichenwald did not claim that the leaked information was false, but showed, to a high degree of certainty, that Trump campaign staffers were working with Russian disinformation operatives. It was an amazing story.
Eichenwald did not claim that the leaked information was false
When I follow a link from Greenwald's piece I see this tweet that was sent by Eichenwald: "Russian gov manipulates email to @johnpodesta. Publishes disinformation. Takes it down. Trump recites false info." https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/785676641880027136
I interpret "manipulates" as claiming that the emails to Podesta were changed by the Russian government before they were passed to Wikileaks. Referring to them as "disinformation" also claims that the contents of the emails have been modified. And I take "recites false info" to be reiterating once again that the emails are not genuine.
From the outside, it certainly seems that Greenwald is justified in saying that Eichenwald claimed that the emails were fake. But apart from reading this quote, I'm not familiar with the details here. Could you be more specific, and specify a exact quote from Greenwald that you feel is deliberately distorted, and a corresponding quote from Eichenwald that shows the undistorted truth?
Greenwald is claiming that Eichenwald is reporting that the emails leaked by Wikileaks are fake. In repititions of this claim he either refers to Eichenwald's article directly[0] or indirectly by linking to a tweet that
mentions it. Greenwald's claim is a lie. Eichenwald never says that the emails are fake. Read the article. Greenwald certainly did. If you actually read the article in Newsweek you will learn that "manipulates" means that the Russians distorted the meaning and content of the documents in their propaganda, and Trump repeated the identical distortions nearly simultaneously. In fact, Eichenwald's story only makes sense if the Wikileaks version is unaltered, and this is implicit in his reporting.
Thanks for the very reasonable and persuasive response. Based on Eichenwald's original version of the article (as linked by 'nostrademons' https://web.archive.org/web/20161010235349/http://www.newswe...), it does look like Greenwald was wrong, and that Eichenwald was instead claiming that the leaked documents were unaltered but intentionally being used in a misleading manner by taking quotes out of context.
This isn't in itself proof that Greenwald was lying, since this requires additional knowledge of his internal mental processes, but it leaves open the possibility. I still think the phrasing in Eichenwald's tweet implies alteration, but with knowledge of the specifics of the article I agree that it can be interpreted differently.
This version starts with a photo caption that includes the words "faked document". It's been changed to include the words "altered documents" multiple times. While couched in a hypothetical, it explicitly says "the Russian effort to quote an altered email". I feel certain that that the new version has been written in a manner that encourages the reader to conclude that leaked emails may have been altered and should not be considered authentic.
I don't know if these changes were made by Eichenwald or by someone else at Newsweek, but I think the post-publication changes strengthen rather than weaken Greenwald's overall claim that there as a strong media narrative to discredit the authenticity of the leaked Podesta emails. While the original article seems accurate, I find the changes that were made to it to be substantial, disingenuous, and worrisome. I'd be very interested to know how these changes came about.
I had the same question as you and skimmed Eichenwald's article. He claims that his own words were attributed to someone else (Blumenthal) in these manipulated leaks, and subsequently parroted by trump. He had written a long article about Benghazi, and the email leak takes Blumenthal's quotation of that out of context, misattributing it.
It checks out, and at least on that point Eichenwald seems to be closer to the truth than Greenwald is (Greenwald hardly has anything to say in his own article about the details of the Eichenwald situation, only name-drops and sneers). It looks like this is Greenwald raising his hackles because he perceives his work with wikileaks to be under attack from Eichenwaldl.
It's not "significantly rewritten". Some details were added and clarified. Most relevant is the fact that the most recent version, and all other versions (I read them all) make it completely clear that Eichenwald has no reason to think, and does not say, that the emails as leaked by Wikileaks are fake. So Greenwald is still lying, no matter which version you are looking at.
"showed, to a high degree of certainty, that Trump campaign staffers were working with Russian disinformation operatives."
Can you show me what warrants a high degree of certainty for that claim? Because as far as I know there is no evidence for this beyond the tenuous circumstantial nature of Clinton's dirty laundry helping Trump, and a Trump presidency is less likely to start a war with Russia.
Not the piece above, but here it is. This article has a lot of links/sources on how Trump's campaign statements and Russian propaganda are almost word-for-word identical, and in general complementary. This is from back in August.
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/underst...
Eichenwald claims on live TV the email in question was "manipulated" by Russia. Just watch the video that Eichenwald himself embedded in his article (at 01:49).
> There are two possibilities: One is that both the Russians and Donald Trump were tricked into believing of a manipulated email or the Russians manipulated it and Donald Trump fell for it
Greenwald counters emails were not doctored/manipulated and that saying they are is "Fake News" itself.
Greenwald is actually right: The emails were not manipulated as far as we know, and there is strong circumstantial evidence that there was no manipulation (e.g. thanks to gmail DKIM signatures).
The quote taken from the email that Trump and RT/Sputnik attributed to Blumenthal was indeed misattributed and actually a quote from an Eichenwald piece that Blumenthal merely copied in full into his email. That criticism is very valid, but that misrepresentation by Trump and/or RT/Sputnik does not make the email itself "manipulated".
The gmail DKIM signatures are not a reliable verification that the contents of an email have not been modified. The algorithm and key length of the signatures used by gmail (sufficient for anti-spam) are cracked with an honestly trivial amount of hardware according to RSA in 2003 [1]. Since the premise here is that a state-backed adversary is involved, we can reasonably expect that the keys are compromised.
Gmail DKIM uses rsa-2048 keys (their key has a selector named "20120113" suggesting this key was in use since 2012, but I didn't do DNS historical digging to confirm). 2048 bit is still believed to be secure enough, even against a state actor, and even the article you linked says it. Either way 2048 bit does not just require a "trivial amount of hardware" (even from a state actors perspective)
The leaked Podesta content goes back quite some time, so yes, there are old emails in there that still had DKIM signatures from a 1024 key.
The email in question is not one of those, and uses the 2048 bit key (emailid/2038).
Also, your assertion that hillaryclinton.com was compromised ... where did you get that? Those emails were released by the govt because of FOIA requests. The DNC was hacked and therefore "compromised" by persons unknown (but some people did a lousy job of attributing it to Russia). The DNC is not hillaryclinton.com, tho.
Yeah, you're correct a lot of the emails use 2048-bit RSA for the DKIM signature. I trust those more than the 1024-bit signatures. I have a pretty heavy distrust of all of this, because from the sidelines I can't tell who is manipulating what. I don't blindly trust the cryptography because I don't know the capabilities of the adversary or what side channel attacks were present. That probably sounds stupid, but I'm feeling a whole lot of distrust of everyone involved.
Following that, my assertion that hillaryclinton.com was compromised was completely evidence-free. That's a personal assumption due to the significant lack of security expertise by the maintainer of the server. There are plenty of emails sent between clintonemail.com and the DNC gmail accounts that CC Podesta and were included in the Wikileaks dumps.
The DNC was hacked by two Russian actors according to CrowdStrike. I trust CrowdStrike in this assessment.
When you have a "nuh uh, YOU'RE the one that's fake" situation between two apparently reputable news sources, on a topic with which you have no personal experience or expertise, how are you supposed to figure out which ones are fake?
The instances of so-called "fake news" that I have seen are quite easy for me to "verify" as fake with relative confidence: it's generally an explicitly partisan source with a shady-looking website making an outlandish claim that is not corroborated by any traditional news outlet. The situation you've just described sounds much more difficult for me to verify.
Did you actually read the two articles in question, or did you just look to see whether the sources were "reputable"? In this case, there is a clear discrepancy of facts between the two, and it's not hard to come to an informed opinion. Just read.
Greenwald's fake news is his false description of Eichenwald's reporting. If you read Eichenwald's article, then you have all the "personal experience" you need to see that Greenwald is misrepresenting what he reported. And when you look up Greenwald's past, identical lies, you see that this misinformation campaign is deliberate. It's not a matter of opinion or of trying to judge competing claims. It's laid out right there in front of you if you want to look.
I can't fathom why an article calling the fake news phenomenon an FUD campaign would fail to critizice Trump's side...
Seriously though, the article is comically bad. It oozes bile and anger and it's so comically and blatantly one-sided it's almost funny in a so-bad-that-it's-good way.
Because this is the first election where "spirit cooking" and "pizzagate" conspiracies were put on equal footing with foreign policy and economic positions.
>The supporters of Andrew Jackson began spreading a rumor that Adams, while serving as American ambassador to Russia, had procured an American girl for the sexual services of the Russian czar. The attack was no doubt baseless, but the Jacksonians delighted in it, even calling Adams a “pimp” and claiming that procuring women explained his great success as a diplomat.
When MSM pushes false/sponsored narratives to start wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and Libya as part of "foreign policy", I can see why "pizzagate" gets equal validity.
Don't play the false equivalence game: it's part of the problem.
Pizzagate had nothing other than fever dreams.
In contrast, all of the wars you talked about were based on real things. The Iraq war was started on falsehoods but the media was reporting what government officials were saying and attributed those claims to them. They should have been more skeptical, yes, but that's a completely different level of discussion compared to a bunch of trolls and gullible people free-associating completely unfettered by reality.
I recommend the following Planet Money episode if you want to know a bit of the economic background of fake news. They even got a fake news publisher to speak.
I thought this episode was rather funny, because they found that a right wing fake news site was actually run by a liberal who wanted to prove there was right wing fake news (and that it would be shared on social media, which they ensured by spreading it themselves).
The part I found hilarious is that there was one particular quote from the NPR coverage which spread like wildfire on social media - the one about how he tried to write fake news for liberals, but it just didn't catch on. Except that when I went looking for more information, one of the first successes I found reference to - via the Denver Post's article[1] about the FBI agent suicide fake - was "ATLANTA OFFICER KILLS BLACK WOMAN, INJURES CHILD, FOLLOWING BREASTFEEDING ARGUMENT"[2]. The site used was even stuffed full of the kind of conservative-targeted fake news that liberals mock conservatives for believing, and it still worked.
A self-confessed fake news creator made a dubious yet flattering claim about liberals not believing fake news because they were too smart, which fell apart upon a brief check, and liberals everywhere believed it. Brilliant.
I don't think the claim falls apart on inspection - the fake FBI suicide story was shared 2.5 times more on Facebook than the fake Atlanta shooting story. Do you have any examples of liberal fake news that were as popular as conservative fake news?
This reminds me of a joke where an oilman goes to heaven and is warned by St Peter that because there are so many oilmen already in heaven, space for him will be rather limited. The oilman, undeterred, ventures to the oilmen district and proudly proclaims: "OIL DISCOVERED IN HELL!"
Everybody leaves in a mad rush, and soon the oilman is alone with a surprised St Peter who says that he may do as he pleases in this now-empty oilman district of heaven.
The oilman turns to St Peter and says: "You know, there might actually be some truth to that rumor..."
Yeah, I got the feeling that they fake news author was feeding his agenda with that narrative. It was really strange to see so many people taking the statements of a confessed liar at face value.
It coalesced when the "MSM" managed to get the election outcome in the US so comically wrong. The only possible reason for the mistake was "fake news". It turns out "fake news" has been a driving force since roughly the time twitter arrived. I can only hope the (in theory) REAL media will eventually give up on "first is best" and instead focus on ACTUAL REPORTING. Relaying what twitter has to say about a world event is borderline useless. Put someone on the ground and tell me what's REALLY going on instead of "twitter reports say..."
It erupted across every news channel precisely as Pizzagate did. If you searched on Google News for "Pizzagate", what you would get was "FAKE NEWS!" "FAKE NEWS!" "FAKE NEWS!"
The MSM hasn't been this desperate since it was shrieking to high heaven there was no chance in any universe in which Donald Trump could possibly win the US election. Whether this is because the MSM is desperate to cover up this issue - like the Pizzagate investigators allege - or there is some other coordinated motive at play (like not losing control of the narrative), its obvious the campaign is coordinated and aimed at some specific desired outcome, one way or the other.
Pizzagate itself is just a mountain of circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence is not necessarily evidence of a crime, and often leads people looking at it to jump to incorrect conclusions. But trying to sweep it under the rug with frantic cries of "FAKE NEWS!!1!" does nothing but make conspiracy theories grow.
There are some extremely strangely-worded emails that came out of John Podesta's Wikileaks. All kinds of bizarre pictures on Comet Ping Pong's Instagram. They use code words identified by the FBI as pedophile code words - but it could be coincidence. One of the neighboring pizza restaurants to Comet Ping Pong had an FBI-identified pedophile symbol in its logo (since removed) - but it could be coincidence.
What a real journalist would do is say, "Huh. There's a lot of odd circumstantial evidence here. Let's get to the bottom of this and either rule it out or see what questions are still on the table."
What the MSM is doing instead is taking down articles on high level pedophile rings, like this one that no longer exists on NY Times:
Then trying to tar and feather anyone who asks questions as a "Fake News" personality.
I don't know if there's any merit to the claims around Comet Ping Pong and the Podestas. It could just be some people are REALLY into pizza and when they talk about having small children in pools as entertainment those kids are there to sing Christmas carols or something. But the MSM's frantic efforts to drown it out by screaming about "fake news" is the Streisand Effect in action. They're giving anyone who wants to believe in a conspiracy even more reason to think there is some deep cover up that extends to the highest levels, and giving this thing legs it wouldn't have if John Podesta broke his tweet silence and just said, "This is all ridiculous and none of it is true," or the MSM did an investigative piece that conclusively explained away the things the Internet sleuths pursuing Pizzagate are hoisting up as evidence of a conspiracy.
This has nothing to do with how mainstream media actually act and everything to do with the thought processes of people that want [others] to believe the Democrat party elite is running a paedophile conspiracy act and the MSM is trying to hide it
So a mainstream media source - the AP is as mainstream and widely syndicated as it gets - running a story on an unrelated and probably actually real paedophile conspiracy in Norway after the Pizzagate 'revelations' becomes "MSM is taking down articles on high level pedophile rings" because the NYT removes news agency articles after a fixed period
(even ones about fake news - e.g
http://archive.is/760xPhttp://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/11/15/technology/ap-us-...)
And the many reports into the story aren't proper investigative journalism because - shock horror - the journalists don't agree with 4chan that "cheese pizza" is a term identified by the FBI as a pedophile codeword that nobody in their right mind would ever use in a pizza store.
That disappearing NY Times article is from Associated Press. It's not unusual for AP articles to disappear from sites, because I think news organisations often only have a license to publish them from a limited time. Obnoxious, but not uncommon.
Yeah, fake news is a narrative being pushed by the mainstream media to try and discredit alternative news sources (like say, popular YouTube channels, independent blogs and social media profiles) as well as to solidify their role as 'gatekeepers'.
Heck, it's basically the non gaming equivalent of the 'gamers are dead' stories that become suspiciously widespread after GamerGate took off.
>Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate death throes of an outdated and superfluous institution.
So far, non-mainstream outlets have proven a whole lot worse. Call me a small-c conservative, but I'm going to keep supporting civil society over the conspiracy theorists.
> The term "fake news" has exploded in just under a month
That's a rather normal phenomenon, sometimes when someone coins a new term, everybody else jumps on the bandwagon.Sometimes the term makes it into the fixed inventory of the language, sometimes the fad goes away. That's as true for "fake news" as it is for "abso-fucking-lutely" or "glashole".
> Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate death throes of an outdated and superfluous institution.
What an utter nonsense! You must have been brainwashed by social media and shitty blogs that sell opinions as news.
There is a fairly good reason why mainstream outlets "move in lockstep with each other": They let one and the same reality dictate their news rather than making it up like the online trolls from St. Petersburg. I'd be rather worried if they didn't "move in lockstep" and each of them was reporting something else as news...
Supermarket tabloids can't go viral, so their impact and and lucrative adsense payout isn't there.
The president elect is a birther and anti-vaxxer. Bannon had a leadership role in Trumps campaign. His cabinet is a clown-car of conspiracy peddlers. Google and Facebook are taking action to squelch fake news. Fake news is a subject of interest to many influential individuals and organizations. If it weren't covered by mainstream news it would be irresponsible.
>So how did this fervor over "fake news" coalesce so quickly and uniformly?
Do you honestly not see the difference between creating fake stories about celebrities and then creating fake stories about people in the government, stories that end up having far reaching real world effects?
>of an outdated and superfluous institution.
Oh brother. If anything this last year has proven exactly why the publication and editing model should flourish for quite some time. Because as of this year, I guess whatever makes you feel better is clearly more valued over what is actually true (see all the reports from Breitbart and company, especially in regards to the Clinton emails, or even global warming), especially with people who believe that "fake news" is just some kind of conspiracy theory accessory for the "MSM" to keep their grip on the industry.
"Fake news" is just yellow journalism by another name, and "fake news" is "uniformly" being talked about because it became readily apparent over the course of this last year that people believe and act on the information presented from yellow journalism. And _apparently_ for some people any action taken to correct yellow journalism is decried as censorship. Truth is not oppression.
> And _apparently_ for some people any action taken to correct yellow journalism is decried as censorship.
No, but automatic removal of fake news is censorship, since all of us in here should know that determining truth by algorithms is really an unsolvable problem in _very many important cases_.
It could/would probably be reduced to a source credibility score, but credibility is subjective.
Using facebook as an example, Facebook had editors and then got slammed with the completely useless "bias" label because they sought stories from actual, reasonably credible sources. Their algorithm was not responsible for removing content, their editors were. Until they got rid of those editors because of "bias" and "censorship." Then fake stories/yellow journalism flourished on Facebook's trending news feed for quite some time during the election.
That there is part of the problem. That is a very western phrase that reflects an ingrained system at the root of the problem. Binary is for silicon. There are multiple sides, or there is one. There is almost never exactly two. But we are trained to expect equal time for "both sides". It makes people think they are well-informed, when in reality if you are hearing exactly two stories you are almost certainly being hoodwinked.
This isn't Hotelling. Hotelling occurs where the proponents choose their sides, their stances in a debate. When a news organization wants to inform people that a meteor is heading to earth, picking a pro and con pundit isn't hotelling. That's just manufacturing a controversy where none exists. Note that weather forecasts rarely give "both sides" ... until one wants estimates beyond next month. Then they have to bring in the pro/con people in that manufactured controversy.
A careful citizen should dismiss two-sided debates, or at least realize that "both sides" is a marketing trick. Read the research. Read, and understand, the statistics.
Related - the truth doesn't have any obligation to fall exactly in the middle between two extremes, or in a geometrical center between many points of view. It can really be, that one side is mostly wrong, and the other mostly right.
I think even more that most issues are multi-dimensional, and you can't even explain it as a spectrum between two extremes -- you can reasonably be in one of a half-dozen different takes on the issue, depending on how you feel about particular aspects or sub-issues.
"Both sides" is just a shorthand expression for principles otherwise better understandable as "due process", but this is hard to summarize in just some words or a couple sentences.
It basically means there are two sides (at least) to everything, that can't just be disregarded. Exceptions prove the rule, of course.
On another point, Hotelling's law is a really poor example when it comes to debates or questions of politics, in my opinion.
Funnily enough, trying to convince people that mainstream news are not trustworthy, that it's impossible to know who's telling the truth, those are well known tactics of the Russian propaganda machine.
Then you get people who lack critical thinking reading crap published by anonymously owned (read: Russian or Russian sympathizers) "news" websites, and they believe it because, "you need to decide for yourself what you believe" and "everyone lies anyway".
Maybe it's less noticeable in different countries, because Russia is not investing as much into distorting the public opinion there, but in Central and Eastern Europe you can see it quite easily.
>The city where the protesters went into war and was bombarded for years and nobody displayed it on the news. Now it is displayed every single day because the people the US is supporting is losing there. Now it is so important civilians in this city, when for years they simply did not exist.
Reusing old/different footage and claiming it's something else. What else is new?
>The city where the protesters went into war and was bombarded for years and nobody displayed it on the news. Now it is displayed every single day because the people the US is supporting is losing there. Now it is so important civilians in this city, when for years they simply did not exist.
You don't mention any specifics, so it's impossible to disagree.. "Now", what is now? Since when? Bombarded for years? Starting when?
What is this manifestation you speak of, where did it happen?
>nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. the real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time: whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. general facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will &c &c. but no details can be relied on. I will add that 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. he who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
-From Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 11 June 1807
To be fair, in Jefferson's time newspapers were overt instruments of a political faction. You started a newspaper to spread your point of view.
We have at least a veneer of nonpartisan purpose to the major newspapers of today, although you can argue they still have a bias. Online news/blogs/etc. are more analogous to the newspapers of the early Republic.
There is no such thing as no-bias reporting. For every topic reported on by any given publication, several others are ignored, simply because there is not enough time in the day nor is there advertising revenue to report absolutely everything, and we haven't even started on article lengths or story placement.
I quit watching the news right around 1999. My family once challenged me how I knew about important events, and I told them that people in my life would let me know if anything occurred that I needed to know. They challenged me by quizzing me on major recent events. When they did find one that I had no idea about, they asked, "See? Nobody told you about that!" I replied, "You just did." And they have not argued about it again. They do continue to inform me, though, and it all works out.
The downside of this approach is that if we all did it then the world would be a much worse place.
Paying attention to current events and bearing witness to some of the darkest aspects of human history is important at a societal level and if you don't think it is important to you personally then consider yourself lucky to live a life where the real world doesn't creep in often. Understanding topics such as why refugees are fleeing conflict, the societal changes due to automation etc, and the consequences of climate change are critical to a healthy and functional nation.
Personally I can't stand the breathless hysteria/sensationalism of most mainstream American media organizations (particularly television) and prefer organizations that favour accuracy and historical context over clickbait.
> Paying attention to current events and bearing witness to some of the darkest aspects of human history is important at a societal level and if you don't think it is important to you personally then consider yourself lucky to live a life where the real world doesn't creep in often.
But, how do you even know what really happens? Mainstream news is ridiculous in its intent because it literally is "if it thinks it stinks, if it bleeds it leads". There is nothing good to get from mainstream news. Nothing. Sliced and diced to the most emotional snippets you could conceive of.
I feel bad for people that just get trampled on from all over the world, but that's as far as I let it go. During the 2nd Bush election I went all out, I was into trying to 'make a difference'. I protested, traveled, got involved with local and national groups, was surveilled, and literally was putting my safety on the line to try to make the world a better place.
In the end, he still got re-elected and some of the most corrupt people in U.S. history continued their rampage. It was bad enough the first time, but the second time completely just blew away my foundation of what I thought was just in the world. I never trusted the news or politicians after that. They are not here for 'us'. They ALL have an agenda whether you like it or not. There is such a disconnect between 'content' and real people - it's pathetic and there's no where that that comes out more than from tv.
After all of this, I've decided to just act locally and contribute to causes that want to fight the good fight but, in my mind, are in for a lot of suffering and struggle (eff, aclu, center for human rights, amnesty, etc). It takes a toll on one when you are struggling and it's nonstop uphill.
My wife and friends are always coming up to me with the latest tragedy that has surfaced on facebook. family members, the latest shooting or crash, or death or whatever. I choose to remove myself from all of this because it does _no good_ to me and for me.
Unless I actually go to those places and involve myself with those struggles (see point 5 in op), then I'm just fooling myself by being 'concerned'.
Tv and news is a waste of precious time and there are much better ways to affect and change the world than being sedentary and 'informed' yet doing nothing.
> But, how do you even know what really happens? Mainstream news is ridiculous in its intent because it literally is "if it thinks it stinks, if it bleeds it leads". There is nothing good to get from mainstream news. Nothing. Sliced and diced to the most emotional snippets you could conceive of.
The only ways to mitigate this is to use a healthy amount of skepticism, to educate yourself on the historical context of ongoing current events, and to be aware of the slant that even the most impartial news source may have.
I don't disagree in regards to acting rather than just being informed and that acting locally is probably the best way we can make a difference. Likewise with burning out on media!
Interestingly, I took this quote to mean both that reported news is biased, but the decision of what events to report upon is biased too. Being a skeptic solves the first issue. For the second, filtering what you read doesn't help if you aren't reading stories that are valuable to you but aren't tragic / scary / interesting enough for the rest of the news source's readers. Since news sources are biased, how can you know what you aren't seeing?
> But, how do you even know what really happens? Mainstream news is ridiculous in its intent because it literally is "if it thinks it stinks, if it bleeds it leads". There is nothing good to get from mainstream news. Nothing. Sliced and diced to the most emotional snippets you could conceive of.
Our education system was supposed to deliver critical thinkers. Either the system failed you (and possibly a generation), or you have forgotten its lessons.
> The downside of this approach is that if we all did it then the world would be a much worse place.
I can't fix the World or the dark aspects of the human soul, but hopefully made my local area a better place since I dropped-out of the news-cycle a few years ago. I use my former news 'time-budget' to become invoved in Council business, to follow the activities of my local politicians and to just go and do stuff that benefits people around the town.
I feel better informed as a result and I'm no longer surprised and enraged by 'unexpected' changes in my local environment.
I helped to fix a pothole in a local road last week. Utterly irrelevant on a global scale, but then so is a plane crash in Colombia.
> The downside of this approach is that if we all did it then the world would be a much worse place.
Or not, maybe it would be better. Imagine country where people are mindful about their immediate surrounding and don't buy into ideological bullshit sold by mass media.
Want to send young men to some war? Well tough luck, if there is no conflict at the doorstep then this move is probably to benefit someone else, not you.
Refugees overflowing streets? Common sense tells you to take a look at what kind of people they are and if they are good and acknowledge their situation and want to better it, then help them. But if they act like arrogant invaders then common sense would be to tell them to bugger off. Yet media adhering to its ideology would tell you that you are wrong to use common sense. That somehow WYSIWYG is not right here and that some abstract oppression these people are fleeting from is more important.
>and the consequences of climate change are critical to a healthy and functional nation
Lets see how in future china deals with climate change as opposed to societies with 'well informed' citizens.
Counterpoint: it's been shown again and again that continued exposure to outlets deliberately cherry-picking the worst aspects of humanity (commercial news outlets) has a pretty negative effect on worldviews.
And that in turn leads to negative outcomes.
More authoritarianism, more withdrawal into closed communities, more willingness to vote for leaders who will solve the "terrible state" of the country / world by any means necessary, more enthusiasm for punishment over empathy, more othering of whichever ethic/social group that's currently being blamed for Everything Being Bad.
If you're trying to gain an accurate understanding of the world, starting with sources with an extremely strong incentive to bias the hell out of your worldview is probably not the best way to do it.
And if you're just trying to understand and mentally experience the worst humanity has to offer, then history books have plenty of really horrible shit in them, generally far worse than the 21st century so far (thankfully).
I'd argue that mainstream news sources promote a false understanding of these topics. If you truly want to understand then you are going to need to do your own research. For example, The Sun is one of the most popular newspapers in the U.K.:
> The downside of this approach is that if we all did it then the world would be a much worse place.
I think on the way to that happening, the world would become a much better place before it gets worse. Only a very tiny percentage of us needs to try to understand events around the world and repeat to peers what they think is worth repeating, then those peers repeat to their peers what they thought was important to hear, and so on.
It's already kind of happening since journalists aren't a big percentage of the population, but instead of filtering out the important stuff, it's what we call the "media circus" and big business.
> Paying attention to current events and bearing witness to some of the darkest aspects of human history is important at a societal level
You are confusing reading/watching the news with being informed. Trusting superficial and biased news is disinformation.
Being a witness, a citizen journalist, an activist, and reading books thoroughly is another thing.
Codingdave is talking about having no information about what's happening in the world (other than what friends tell him), which would imply cutting off all news sources, not just TV.
No, I am not. I am talking about my filter being actual people, not mainstream media. Once I know of something, I go out and look for more information. And I keep very informed of local events, reading everything put out by my city -- council meetings minutes, announcements, planning committee documents, etc.
I can see where the misunderstanding may have come from -- I could have explained it better originally.
I don't get why everyone is downvoting this. Care to explain, down-voters?
> I told them that people in my life would let me know if anything occurred that I needed to know.
This is so true. I told my girlfriend the same thing after she got mad that I quit news and said "Oh, you'll need to know important local news (stabbings, crime in San Francisco, protests for traffic etc).
That 1 time where someone 4 blocks from my home got run over by some dummy doing facebook live in her car while driving, the convenient store guy in my block asked me "Hey, did you hear about that so and so got run over." I said no, but you just told me. :)
* It puts the burden of collecting and summarizing relevant news on others
* You are at the mercy of the grapevine effect, which only gets worse as more and more people take up this solution so your news takes more hops before you receive it
* And, most importantly, your sources are also not getting their news first hand; their sources the very same crappy news outlets that you yourself rejected.
How does knowing that a train derailed and 300 people died, or that someone got stabbed, change your behavior in any way, shape or form? This may seem callous, but in my country the average person watches 3h of TV every day. That's 3 hours they could spend on a side-job, on a hobby, improving professional skills, getting fit, spending more time with their kids. Who cares that someone got stabbed? Most people care to "improve the world" (however dyfunctionally and pathologically) when they can't even be bothered to take care of themselves (75% of people in US are overweight) or to be good parents (1/3 of families in UK don't eat together at the dinner table, or even have a dinner table).
Not following the news is a perfectly rational choice. You'll be less stressed, much happier, less distracted therefore have better self-knowledge and a better capacity to self-actualize, and you can spend more time with your kids (who really need it).
In life, there aren't the uninformed and the informed. There are the uninformed and the misinformed.
You are addressing a point my comment didn't address. I didn't say that someone needs to know that stuff. My point was that relying on your social network to let you know about important news doesn't increase the quality of the news you do receive.
Not really though. If it's important, you have the option to do a dive and read up on something. At least for me, it's not about not paying attention. It's about not being force fed. The world can be an awful place especially when viewed through the lens of sensationalism. It's just not healthy for my household to be constantly connected to that. So what I do is try to pay attention on a meta level and only delve for details on my term. It requires intellectual honesty but in the end is healthier and more informative.
If there's only one source of news that feeds into the grapevine effect then you only need to tune into the grapevine.
There are like five journalistic camps that feed into my grapevine, and they all report the same stories, and spin five different opinions on the same daily topics. Thus, the grapevine provides the same complete set, five times, redundantly.
All of the stories from these camps are useless. The stories are not, in fact relevant, and so I do not care how slowly they appear at my feet. I usually just step over them anyway and go about my business.
Going one step further, I think 99% of the facts are irrelevant. It's the COVERAGE of the facts that matters. The presidential debates were a perfect example. WHAT was said was of absolutely no consequence. HOW it was said was equally inconsequential. What was important was all the chatter ABOUT what was said, and how it was said. The handful of media conglomerates TELL the vast majority of the population how to feel and what to think about what happened, and THAT'S the only important part to understand.
So you're relying on others (who are watching the news that you don't want to get contaminated with) to tell you the news? How is that any better than just listening to it yourself? It sounds remarkably worse to me: telephone, but with real events.
I managed to get answer from one of such downvoters: "I don't know, but it looks contradictory to general knowledge, so I downvoted you".
I hope, it will help.
If you have high IQ but lazy at explaining of basic things for regular Joe, regular Joe will downvote you, because he cannot follow you nor discuss with you.
At work, to check is my explanation is simple enough, I play a challenging game while thinking (I use sopwith, my IQ is about 140): if I'm able to think and play at same time, then my brain has some power to spare, so it is simple enough for people with IQ about 120. If not, then they will not be able to follow me. I use that technique for almost decade. Works well at work, when I have time to explain, e.g. in comments to tickets, emails, and so on.
One of the contributors of FiveThirtyEight made an observation that, along with this article, has convinced me to start filtering out the news. They were discussing what public policy initiatives we could expect from the incoming administration, and she said that she could not speculate on the subject because Donald Trump's signal-to-noise ratio in his public statements was so low as to render forecasting initiatives impossible.
That's the problem here. The signal-to-noise ratio is too low in the news in general. I've spent the whole last year reading speculation about Clinton's emails, Trump's cabinet picks, and shocking news from "anonymous sources" that turned out to be 99% noise when the final draft of the news came out. Why did I waste so many hours reading baseless speculation masquerading as authoritative information?
I check the news roughly once a day just to get a feel for the headlines. I check the left-leaning sources and right-leaning sources and don't read any of the articles.
I don't get sucked in, and also just get an idea of what people think is important that day/week. Usually it is just noise but it can be at least helpful to know when things have happened. The headlines are enough for me.
I can't really get onboard with this. A lot of the comments here, and the commentary in the article itself, talk about how depressing the news is, how biased it is, about Gell-Mann amnesia -- and they're all right. But from my own experience, the people I know who don't follow the news (either at all, or extremely minimally) are spectacularly ill-informed; they get their news either third-hand (which suffers from all of the aforementioned problems plus being re-reported poorly), or not at all, and operate with only the sketchiest understanding of what's happening in the world. They aren't going to "read three books on a topic" (from the article), they're just going to remain oblivious. And that's far worse, in my opinion.
Some of the arguments here remind me of the puritanical strains of religions. For eg: I am against Wahhabi Islam.
They're just like other Muslims but they take percepts that are valid in Islam and run with them to the ridiculous extreme.
Same goes for cutting down on Social media or regulating your consumption of news. There is nothing to be gained by turning into a puritan. It makes you feel good about yourself for a while but you're just cutting yourself off from vast dimensions of human experience.
Its possible to read HN once a day just to keep up instead of refreshing it every few hours.
Its possible to stop visiting twitter every hour and perhaps use it a few times a week.
Its possible to restrict your reading to good long form articles in NYT or WaPo or The Economist.
If we started completely cutting out anything and everything that had a remotely negative influence the logical conclusion is that we end up turning into Puritan Wahhabis who don't drink alcohol , ruthlessly suppress sexuality and generally lead colourless lives.
EDIT:
Downvoters , I'd appreciate if you gave your reasons.
I agree to a certain extent on your point about puritans. However I know people that recognized they have a tendency to overdo news or social media as soon as they get a bit of it.
That might be partly due to the very nature of social media and news these days being made to be addictive eg. clickbait titles. Making people end up in a loop, without noticing and before they know it they've wasted hours on it or worse created a habit that is hard to control.
For which the only solution seems to be to go cold turkey in that case. As it seems much harder to reduce usage than to stop it entirely. So I guess it's a matter of what stage you identify yourself in, in this news and social media detox.
For some people, those things take over their lives in a horribly destructive way. Not everyone has the disposition to have "just a bit" of these things and no more. If you've got an addiction to something that's sucking the life out of you, avoiding it entirely makes a lot of sense to me.
I think that you are getting downvoted for implying that an extreme position is the only alternative. I don't think that is necessary at all.
Its not that you have to ignore all news sources because of the possibility of bias (or easy, emotion filled "emotional truth" nuggets that fill so much of the discourse), but that you should be aware of these issues and react accordingly. Take time to reanalyze whether the narrative being pushed really makes sense. Compare it to other sources and validate the findings.
Don't just throw out everyone and only trust "NYT" or "WaPo" or "Fox News".
From a rational, logical, and chemistry point of view, one cannot have a balanced view or understanding without positives and negatives.
The only thing that makes it work is critical thinking; or at least rational thinking, though rational thinking is easy enough to manipulate by any sophist. Recognizing the forms leads to recognizing the art of sophistry as it occurs. However, emotion is even easier to manipulate and inflame, ridding one of the possibilities of rational thought.
The people I know who are absolute news hounds end up knowing all the talking points of the talking heads, but don't actually think for themselves. I'm on the board of a small prep school and one of the most important things we do is teach critical thinking. This includes analyzing statements from a historical perspective, recognizing that the speaker probably has an agenda and memorization of the logical fallacies.
In the '80s I was a big fan of Rush Limbaugh ... he was entertaining and for the most part, did talk about current events. I felt informed. In '92 when Clinton was elected, his monologue quickly became hateful and negative. My mood was dramatically worse and I became hateful too. Funny since the Clinton years were coincident with a huge boon in my businesses. And then I found myself repeating his talking points without even thinking about it.
Finally I realized that I didn't actually believe much of it ... and when I looked at the vitriol the other side was spouting I didn't believe it either. I think it's pretty important to know the facts of what's happened in the world but you can't do that through news.
Now I completely ignore the news channels and generally skim through headlines. Some headlines are factual while others are purposely skewed to the writer's biases. It's easier to tell that someone has an agenda from the headline and I even occasionally read the first paragraph. I don't miss the period of my life where I was under the influence of the news channels, and I spend the time I've recouped in my community ... I find it easier and more useful to know the pulse of the area where I live.
You hit the nail on the head. There is real wisdom in your last sentence, and it's something I've come to know recently.
In the end, it is unlikely that all of us will have an impact that goes beyond our local community. What is the point of endlessly fretting over things far removed from us, and far out of our control? We can't all be heroes, and we can't all be a guiding light for the world, so what can we do?
We can be a force for good in our local community! I think it's the healthiest mindset to have, even if you do want to stay informed about world events.
In my experience, the people who actively don't follow any news at all are fully aware of their blindside. They just don't care (or have judged, quite reasonably, that they have more immediate personal concerns)
The worst people are those who are glued to the TV or net, closely watching things as if the future of the world depended on whether they knew politician X was fired right now or five minutes from now. They attach far too much drama and emotional involvement in matters which they have no control over. In addition, they're just as much in a bubble as the ones not engaged at all. The tragedy is that they don't realize it.
If you're in a discussion with somebody who doesn't follow the news, as long as they are reasonable, you can cover common ground fairly quickly, then get to whatever your point/question is. If you're in a discussion with somebody who is glued to the news, you can spend hours teasing out their bias and failing to reach any kind of common ground at all. That's because news promotes rhetoric instead of the dialectic. People are being taught to argue like lawyers over whatever beliefs they have because they spend hours invested in a medium that shows them lawyers arguing about events. They teach themselves how to have a closed mind.
Nope. I'll take a non-news consumer with an open mind over a msm news consumer any day of the week. Life is too short to program yourself to be so hard-headed and impervious to change.
Most of the people I know who intensely dislike the Mainstream Media (MSM, for anyone confused by the acronym) are either left-leaning or liberal-leaning.
(The two are not remotely the same.)
As a side note, I know precisely zero people who I would describe as "moderate" on the left-right spectrum who are at all enthusiastic about the state of 2016's news media. Of all political groups, I'd say that they're the most likely to be critical of the mainstream media.
I haven't intentionally ingested the "news" in any considerable manner in at least 10 years, probably more. That's by design; I just don't place a premium on it. Time, energy, and attention are all limited resources and I've decided that mine are best utilized in other ways. To the best of my knowledge, I can't say that my life has been negatively impacted at all by this decision. Sure, I'm left out of some cocktail party discussions, but those aren't very attractive to me in the first place.
A guy like me turns the "news" on and at best it feels like an advertisement wrapped in a reality show. At worst, it feels like a bunch of young children yelling at each other on a playground. There's an infinite amount of noise out there and it's my job to control the tuner and volume buttons.
All that said, I presume the real problem comes into play here when the ill-informed make decisions based on their position without acknowledging the situation.
>A guy like me turns the "news" on and at best it feels like an advertisement wrapped in a reality show. At worst, it feels like a bunch of young children yelling at each other on a playground.
TV news is the "at worst", but your description of "at best" sums up how I feel about all news better than I could have.
There is something distinctly off-putting about the sheer volume of advertising in news publications. It gives me this subtle sense that to be a "proper citizen" I must: read news; buy things.
I read on Quora from a senior editor at the Economist that the reason they charge the same rate for digital and print subscriptions is that because it's harder to ignore or block the full-page advertisements in the print, they are worth more to the advertiser, and therefore offset the cost of printing and delivering weekly subscriptions.
Isn't it a little weird that we place so much trust in our sources of information which, in turn, (almost) entirely rely on advertising revenue?
I agree. Ignoring bad news for the sake of feeling a bit better surely isn't a sign of being adult and mature.
However, I also believe that TV news and constant news checking are unnecessary and can make you depressed. You can easily get a wrong perception of mankind in general and the stupidity of other people by consuming too much news. This happened to me recently with news about Trump and the composition of his new government, for example. I genuinely got depressed from this. So I've limited my exposure a bit. It's not as if I won't find out who's in the new government anyway, and I don't need to hear about obviously stupid tweets, deliberate ignorance of facts and involuntary attempts to lead the world to WW3 every day. (What makes me depressed is ignorance, especially deliberate ignorance, not other other political views, and I'm sure I speak for many people in saying so.)
I've also found out that newspapers and their websites are much better than TV channels and their websites, so I'm now surfing to the Washington Post from time to time to keep me informed. Since I'm not living in an English-speaking country, subscribing to a good English international newspaper in paper form is a bit too expensive for me, but I've also found out that the International New York Tribune (formerly International Herald Tribune) is a great printed source for the weekend, and it's available at every international newsstand in the world. It's informative but not so long that you spend a whole afternoon on it. My girlfriend loves it and buys it all the time.
As for a bias of news, sorry I can't confirm that at all. Every news source is and always has been politically biased in one way or another, but in my experience the only people who complain about this are those who are unable to distinguish news from opinion and are heavily biased themselves.
News companies all have owners and management. I think it is important to be informed about who the owners of newspapers are, and what their political views are, because ultimately the owner will hire and fire the Chief Editor who sets the tone for the paper. It is also important to know what the Chief Editor's political views are too.
Its important to ask yourself why you trust a certain news outlet.
I disagree with you (a lot, actually). You can never trust just one news outlet alone, but only ever several news outlets+reputed press agencies. That doesn't mean that you need to compulsively check all of them constantly, though, and that was my whole point. If there is some real news to share, all newspapers will quickly jump on it anyway, which a quick comparison will easily confirm.
You can read any reputable well-established newspaper in the world whose language you understand and be well-informed enough for anything except for making particular business decisions. It doesn't matter at all whether the newspaper is right wing and conservative or liberal and progressive. That's because they report the same daily news which is based on the same reality, and any newspaper worth reading clearly distinguishes between opinion and news. I've compared many newspapers during my lifetime, and the only differences between them in the news sections is in the selection (what goes to front, what's on page 3) and some bias in the presentation, and neither small differences in the selection nor any bias in the presentation is of much relevance to any adult with a brain of his own.
The tone of the paper is vastly irrelevant for its news contents, it only influences whether you personally like editorials and invited opinions or not, and these are not news, of course.
That may or may not be true in the US. It's very much not true in the UK.
The far-right crazy papers, specifically the Mail and the Express, are notorious for leading with spurious non-stories and for making up post-factual "journalism" when it suits them.
You'll get a very distorted view of the world if you rely on them for accurate news reporting.
Non-political stories - major accidents, earthquakes, and so on - are more likely to be reported in a consistent way across all the outlets. But anything with even the faintest hint of a political angle - which includes a lot of news - will be mangled by each outlet's political slant.
That's interesting, I didn't know that. I didn't have yellow press (aka "boulevard journalism) in mind, though, to which I would definitely count Dailymail, Express or the German Bild. They tick differently and I wouldn't recommend any of them as a source of any information.
Try TheHill.com and AllSides.com. I find AllSides.com useful for presenting the same story from multiple sides and biases. The Hill aims to be apolitical and center biased, and does a fair job.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with either site, and I do not endorse either site. My opinions are my own.
There are a limited amount of things in the wide-world you should be informed about. I care about climate change because that is something that will affect me and my lifestyle in the long run. So I prepare for that and plan ahead. Knowing the state of Italy's economy, whether it is flood, drought of earthquakes killing people in Asia, and if California is still becoming a desert spotted by game-of-life like wildfires, does not benefit me at all.
What does benefit me is what is going on in my local (as in town/municipality) government and community. Living in a European capital, even that is too much. I just don't follow those news either. I do follow cultural events, bird rescue fundraisers, local IT meetups, farmers' markets.
You see, you may be saying I am spectacularly ill-informed by some third-party information that is even less trustworthy than the so called "official channels", however, you probably live in the same sort of informational bubble. You argue with people on Facebook, you read your left or right wing media outlets, you are getting biased google search result and go with those. Maybe you are aware that others are affected by these cultural glass-walls, but not you, since you are aware of these issues. Well, you are probably just another brick in the wall. Sorry, no ad hominem here whatsoever. I simply wish to raise your awareness that
1. On average, you are not better than the average,
2. What you think really matters is probably not what really matters to me.
3. What do you care if some people are oblivious? Chances are, you know nothing about nutrition and go with the usual recommendations, just to end up being fat, diabetic or a cancer patient. What do _I_ care about that, though?
I'll be here, reading books on programming, organic farming, evolutionary biology and micro-brewing fruit wines. Oh yes, and dinosaurs, because dinosaurs and paleontology are real fucking entertaining and interesting to me. You do your thing. But don't force your "informed" standards on other people.
>operate with only the sketchiest understanding of what's happening in the world.
What sort of practical utility do you gain from being "informed" by "the news"? Could you give an example or two of how being informed by the news made you operate differently in your day to day life?
I run a software consultancy based in the UK. I work with a variety of subcontractors, most of whom are based in Europe. The outcome of Brexit might potentially have a significant impact on my way of working with Europeans; I don't think it will, but keeping abreast of that (developing) situation is fairly important to me.
I'm going to Venice on Wednesday. If there had been riots following the outcome of the constitutional referendum, I wouldn't be going to Venice on Wednesday.
Weren't the newspaper polls misinforming regarding the Brexit result? Perhaps their interest in Brexit is contrary to yours.
And haven't news organizations been known to exaggerate/mischaracterize small peaceful protests as large scale riots? I would think simply looking up "Venice riots" on YouTube and filtering for the last week or month would provide you the information you'd need rather than watching a talking head read a teleprompter while the same short video clip plays on repeat.
Well, I suppose if you believe that the news is all inherently false, biased, and generally uninformative, then it probably isn't going to be a good choice for you.
(Incidentally, the Brexit polls were somewhat wrong, but they were not conducted by the newspapers.)
I'm a fan of extremely selective news following - having tested, it makes me much happier and has very little negative effect - but it comes with an important corollary: if you're going to avoid a topic, it's very important to also understand that means you don't know much about it.
I make rather a point of saying "I don't know much about that" when the topic of current affairs that I'm not following come up.
Then again, that's partially because when I do want to know about something, I tend to deep-dive on it (https://medium.com/im-trying-to-fact-check-brexit). And it's largely because many of my friends are spectacularly highly informed on anything they're likely to comment on, and so any time I do slip and attempt to sound informed on something I'm not, I have about a 50% chance of sounding like a complete idiot.
So this may be much easier to do in my social circle.
Peer review feedback loops do tend to make one carefully consider what one says, however if the peers are too homogeneous, you may not get challenged on many things outside the bubble of their collective belief system. Heterogeneous peer systems, that is diversity, are more likely to keep you honest.
Has being well-informed about the news ever helped you in any way? Beyond, say, traffic and weather? National/international news, especially, since that's usually what people seem to care about for some reason? If it has, has it helped you enough to be worth the time and mental effort expended on it over the years?
I guess I can see how being unusually well informed in news relevant to a very specific economic sector might help one make a good investment choice or something, especially if you get that information before most others do, somehow. But general news? I think it's very unusual for that to improve one's life in any real way, especially compared to the time it takes. Knowing in detail the daily developments of e.g. the war in Syria or Trump's cabinet picks is of little more personal use than knowing who's backstabbing whom on Days of Our Lives. It's entertainment or a fairly low-value hobby, even when the reporting's well-done.
Do you want to know about awful stuff people are doing to each other across the planet or spend an extra half hour on your pet woodwork project?
Choose the project most of the time and you'll likely be happier, though less informed. Why is it so important to be constantly reminded how awful humanity is every few minutes?
I'm going to disagree with you. I live in a country where the local politics always floods the news. There is always a corruption charge against the president or some other politician. I find it very repetitive. Nothing is new.
I'm a technology enthusiast, so I would rather read articles on that.
I also feel much happier when not informed about the politics about my country.
I think this is inevitable. Even the effect of mass media going against so-called "fake news" won't have the effect they desire: In my estimation people will stop trusting and hence following all of it. It pays off, for as you and I have both gathered from the comments it is obvious that people do feel their lives improve once they "tune out". Since 2010 or so, this applies to me as well.
Besides, I don't know for how long mass media has existed in its entirety, but TV only existed for maybe 60 years. Before that we managed just fine without it and I think we'll manage just fine in the future as well. We'll find other ways to connect with matters we care about, which is the basis of news anyway.
When things such as what we need to spend our time on become obligatory, and enforced by social pressure, people will feel entrapped sooner or later. That's what's happening now. The media keeps dividing us into so many categories, and then passes judgment on all of us. To them, no one can escape, no one is free, no one is good - it's the only thing that sells. We're all stampeded on by editorials and pounded on by inducing guilt and forcing ads. Conflict is a cash cow.
Personally I think that the importance of news is terribly overrated - I've yet to hear of any reason for why it should be important that resonates with me. As I've said, I've tuned out for many years.
One thing to add: the only source I loyally follow is the No Agenda Show (http://www.noagendashow.com - a podcast which I help out technically, fully pro bono) because they are the only source of media that has no advertisers to keep happy, they get 100% of their income via donations, and they don't even digest the news as much as analyse where the news comes from, and what the interests and hidden agendas are of those that bring it. The show is interesting, fun, informative and thought provoking, so worth mentioning in its own right.
That being said — as it, despite my intentions, might be considered a plug because I am a volunteer with them (i.e. I am not benefitting from more listeners, though do get a kick out of seeing the numbers increase), it feels more appropriate to detach this bit from my parent response.
It took me all of a few minutes of listening to that podcast to realize that they're peddling conspiracy theories and consider themselves to occupy a similar space as Alex Jones' Infowars.
We didn't manage just fine before TV. We had two incredibly destructive World Wars, both following a much longer but even more violent history of colonial imperialism and domestic revolution.
In the UK we didn't get voting rights for all males until 1918, and voting rights for women until 1928. The US didn't get votes for women until 1920.
Before then, news had very limited popular political influence.
With the internet, we're increasingly seeing automated and industrialised fake "news" generation used for political leverage at the expense of impartial reporting of objective fact.
Yeah...this is how you have an even less-informed electorate. I follow the news because seeing what goes on helps shape my political views and decide how to vote. Not just for the president either. And not just to vote, I want to know if my congressman is doing something shady or damaging so I can make my voice heard with a phone call or email. Just saying "all news is bullshit" is horribly lazy.
> with only the sketchiest understanding of what's happening in the world.
For most of the things we do, we don't need to weigh in the geopolitical consequences in the other side of the world. Common sense works most of the time. The news media are in continuous war with common sense.
This is modulated by the fact that most people don't arrive at their opinions through critical thinking (I think it's overwhelmingly clear that humans are fundamentally irrational and not fundamentally rational).
So based on that, you could make a strong case that following the news will in the vast majority of cases turn an uninformed, dogmatic Democrat into an informed, eloquent Democrat, and same for Republicans, and therefore won't affect their vote. (Again, in the overwhelming majority of cases, not in all cases).
Then there's the issue of media quality. Is CNN high quality journalism? How much time did they devote to Yemen, then? (on the TV channel, that is) Is Trump eating KFC with a fork more important? The media blames Trump for this, but their ratings-obsession is their own responsibility.
The issue of Trump's phone call to Taiwan is a great example.
On CNN, you get pundit hysterics about Trump's "incompetence".
On Stratfor, you get an insanely good article[0] that goes in-depth on the historical context behind the US-Taiwan "non-relationship", the reasons why Trump "highly" likely planned the phone call carefully, why the Taiwan issue is a red-line issue for China, and why this play on Trump's part could signal a shift to put China back in their place. As Stratfor says: "In the Track II talks between U.S. and Chinese figures, it isn't uncommon for the [Chinese] to berate their American counterparts while the former offer declarations of cooperation and critiques of their own government's policies", so this Trump move may bring much-needed leverage back to the US.
This is just an example of very high-quality vs trash media coverage. Avoiding the mainstream press and seeking specialized press seems like a basic requirement if you want to be informed.
There are 2 "problems":
- People that stay in their bubble and only follow biased news (which includes mainstream news, which has a mediocrity bias. Most people are in this category)
- People that choose to follow almost no news, because there's no person al benefit (after all, if following the news doesn't directly earn you more money, you're wasting your time. This category includes probably quite a few people on HN, but few nationally)
The former cannot be "solved" without censorship. The latter is what very few people talk about, and it does not want to be solved.
We all want to live in a society where most people are informed, except the personal ROI of it is substantially negative. The smart choice is to be underinformed, if you value your time. The people claiming "we all have a societal duty to stay informed" never bring this up, and never offer a resolution to this dilemma. Kantian ethics (what I do is moral if and only if the world would still be fine if everyone did the same as me) disregards the fact that nobody wants to be the sucker.
I stopped watching TV news about 15 years ago. But I was an avid consummer of news on the Web until about 2 years ago and severely curbed it to preserve time and mental bandwidth.
But I realized that I would still read articles based on whatever was in my social media feed, and that tended to gravitate towards the affect-driven news that I fled when I stopped watching TV news.
So recently I subscribed to a good old-fashioned newspaper (NYTimes). It kills trees, it's not real-time, it gets wet outside. But I get to read news in a different mind-set:
- I found I'm now reading news to understand, not to prepare a witty reply/comment.
- I enjoy the dryness of the paper medium as it further decreases the emotional appeal.
- Op-Eds/columns are clearly marked as such; I find the distinction more obvious than online where the context of "today's paper" doesn't really exist. I still read them but I'm placing their contents in a better context.
- Reading the news has become more efficient. Instead of using news as a time-filler between holes in my day (and invariably getting distracted), it's a one-time review that takes just a few minutes depending on how much I want to read. It's counter-intuitive but the by-product is that now I'm happy to ignore news articles when they come across my feed online (unless it's some specialty topic). That ends up being a time-saver.
In Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem, there are different groups of intellectuals that have been cloistered from society,
and they may only re-enter it for a short time every year, decade, century, or millennium, depending on what group they're in.
Because of this, they only get summaries of the most important things that have happened, and they are left with plenty of time for scientific pursuits.
Chang told him that there were other books published up to about the middle of 1930 which would doubtless be added to the shelves eventually; they had already arrived at the lamasery. "We keep ourselves fairly up-to-date, you see," he commented.
"There are people who would hardly agree with you," replied Conway with a smile. "Quite a lot of things have happened in the world since last year, you know."
"Nothing of importance, my dear sir, that could not have been foreseen in 1920, or that will not be better understood in 1940."
"You're not interested, then, in the latest developments of the world crisis?"
"I shall be very deeply interested—in due course."
TV is one of worst forms of media out there. It is practically the definition of mind control and although there are multiple channels, there is a strange sense of groupthink.
This is similar to the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect, where famed quark discoverer Murray Gell-Mann opens the newspaper and reads a physics article. He is disgusted at the lack of research, the blatant misinformation, and random theories disguised as respectable reporting. Then he flips to another section - like politics or war - and reads it as if it was somehow more accurate than the nonsense he just read.
Social news online is even worse. At least with TV, there's a chance you'll be shown something from outside of your bubble. Polarization increased with deregulation of TV political coverage in the US. The internet has never been regulated in such a way, and has given rise to hyper-polarization.
Although the internet allows for hyper-polarization, it also makes it easier to manage group polarisation by allowing alternative views to be only 1 click away. It's just intellectually easier to select information from places that confirm your biases and polarize them rather than be challenged and consider alternatives.
Agreed there is a lot of garbage news. The trouble comes about if you aren't up to speed on current events that affect you.
Just a simple example from today: The CIA's claims regarding Russian election hacking. I'm the CEO of a cyber security company and I'd hate to think what would happen if someone asked me about that and I wasn't aware of it. It's not just CEO's that need to stay current. If you're in PR, policy, marketing, communications, law, research - all of those professionals benefit in many ways by knowing what is going on right now.
Our company heard about the Mossack Fonseca data breach earlier this year and went and figured out a likely vector they used to gain entry within 24 hours and published. I had journalists from the AP on the phone within a few hours.
Certainly there are jobs that can get away with a news blackout. But I'd consider carefully if you're one of those. And I must agree that many days I wish I could just turn it off. The signal to noise ratio, particularly on the mainstream news outlets, is atrocious.
I don't think the article is arguing to be completely disconnected, but rather to stop consuming TV and video news, and instead read quality articles on different subjects (current or otherwise). This results in being more informed about current and past events, not less.
This is incredibly relevant to me rn. I recently cut the cord and quit FB. I legitimately do feel much happier. My FB feed was just a stream of things to get pissed about and MSNBC was just filling my head with other people's opinions.
Here's my daily routine:
skim thehill.com, politico.com, reddit.com/r/news for headlines
zerohedge.com when I want to see what's going on in right-wing land
newsblok.com if I want to see what the crazies are talking about without giving them clicks
thenation.com and theatlantic.com to see what liberals are pissed about today
slate.com for mainstream opinion pieces
verysmartbrotha.com for a laugh
salon.com and rawstory.com for the lulz
truthdig.com and counterpunch.org for neoliberal bashing essays
I find realclearpolitics.com to be a broad slice of articles and videos from "both sides", as well as holding actual raw polling data when questionably sounding statistics are being bandied about. It also links to other non-political news in other areas, showing the major splash headlines.
Its front page is also very information dense, so it's a lot more efficient than hitting all those sites individually. I believe I've seen content referenced there from most those sites you've listed.
> I find realclearpolitics.com to be a broad slice of articles and videos from "both sides"
I didn't know that site and just had a look at it. I found that really disappointing! All "news" for today are about Trump and nothing else:
Sunday, December 11
- Trump Honeymoon Begins: Confidence in Economy Booming | Cohen & Thomas, NYT
- Why "Trump Boom" Is a Real Possibility | Kenneth Rogoff, Project Syndicate
- Here's How to Drain the Swamp | Sen. Cruz & Rep. DeSantis, Washington Post
- Forget Populism--Trump's Picking Orthodox Republicans | Doyle McManus, LA Times
- How the Democratic Party Lost Its Way | Thomas Mills, Politico
- Obama Preaches Empathy; Trump Projects It | Kyle Smith, New York Post
- Donald Trump and the Art of Getting It Done | Monica Crowley, Washington Times
- Why Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide | Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker
So you have a single event, the outcome of the US elections. The dust hasn't settled yet. Nobody knows anything about what the new president will do. He hasn't done anything yet. And of course he didn't, he is still in his first days. So up to now there is absolutely no information, nothing. Yet, lots of articles talking about that. Taking about, essentially, nothing.
This is "news" without information. The worst kind of news. "Information" would mean: Choose a different topic where you can actually write something informative about.
Yeah, it's a generally American politics focused news aggregator (there's also World, Science, Life, etc outside of this Politics section), and at this particular moment Trump's the story from almost everybody who's being aggregated.
But those articles importantly are a mix of left & right viewpoints in 1 place. Neither the left (panic & planning, and how the right is wrong) nor the right (touting future Trump accolades, and how the left is wrong) are shutting up about him, because it is a very volatile moment in US politics.
However, there's also the attack in Turkey, other post-election matters, Saudi Arabia, common core education, campus echo chambers, and other non-Trump topics represented in the front page list. The overall variety will return back to normal in time.
These articles don't seem to be news at all. I've seen this all the time on social media recently, many people seem to have lost the ability of distinguishing between news stories and opinion pieces/editorials. :(
Examples from the past: Western Civilization: Ancient and Medieval Europe, Pet Birds 101: Introduction to Avian Care and Medicine for the Pet Bird Enthusiast, Medical Neuroscience (huge course - >30 hours lecture videos, Coursera), A Global History of Architecture, Cellular mechanisms of brain function, Human Anatomy, Introduction to Physiology, Principles of Biochemistry, Solid State Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, Statistics and R for the Life Sciences, Networks, Crowds and Markets, Introduction to Big Data with Apache Spark, Vocal Recording Technology, Horse Nutrition, and many more.
I think this is closer to what the article advocates. You just replaced relatively shallow news sources for others.
Try taking some courses. I have the advantage to work from home, I know if I worked 9-5 in an office I would be way too exhausted to do much of the above. But you can still find pleasurable easy courses like the History of Architecture or the entire First Nights series about five pieces of classical music which don't take much mental effort. Each time I read news now it feels like eating a McDonalds meal when you are actually used to real food. It keeps your mind occupied but it feels like there are no "nutrients" (in the news), nothing of substance.
I honestly find coursera and edx are by far the best use of my time too. Structured learning with a beginning, an end and a few individuals (professors) that specialize in a field. I'm doing things that ARE actually in my field (similar to yours) but set me apart completely at work where most people don't take the time to do any sort of learning and just focus on the daily grind.
As a side note, the other more fun yet still kinda learning use of my time has been to watch a few older Japanese shows - not the crazy all-over-the-place stuff they have today. For example, Musashi (2003). It's fun to watch and at the end of every episode they talk about a site in Japan where Musashi traveled in real life. I find this type of show enriching. Another good one is a show called Change (from 2008) which is again Japanese about a young man randomly becoming prime minister of Japan. The show again discusses the intricacies of Japanese politics in a funny way but with a big dose of the real issues in Japan (e.g., the small number of young people vs the old).
Another good take is N. Taleb who contends that news contains "negative information" in that it makes you stupider. Much news is just noise on top of the signal.
He mentions: "instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?"
Can anyone recommend such a weekly or monthly review? One that isn't particularly ideological. It would save so much time.
I find the Economist suspicious because no names are given for articles, and they contradict themselves every couple of issues. Well they used to about 4yrs ago when I stopped reading it.
For immediate news on whatever happening is going on I have a 4chan app as it's surprisingly an accurate source for unfolding events (Sam Hyde memes aside) and I can quickly regex the content. I also read the Syrian /sg/ general thread to get the other side of the war there as Syrians often post to it.
I try and find a book for anything else, Princeton University Press is great for this.
+1 for the Economist. You get much more value than what you pay for an annual subscription. This week's edition has a letter to the editor from the president of Peru... It's that kind of publication.
The problem I have with the economist is they mix opinion into almost everything they report. It's a very British aristocratic opinion. I can almost hear the exaggerated accent sometimes when reading it, like it's a Monty Python skit. I find it annoyingly predictable and somewhat patronizing to the reader.
I'd also echo that The Economist is well worth a subscription. It also has the interesting quirk that doesn't use bylines and all articles are published anonymously.
The Economist is a good review, but it's laughable that so many people think it answers for "not particularly ideological". Capitalism is an ideology - albeit one basically invisible to Hacker News members - and the Economist has that one in spades.
School of Agnelli and Rotschild (proprietors), the "dulce et decorum est pro libertate mori" sort.
(This freedom stuff has to be dosed carefully: owners moving themselves or their stuff, fine and dandy. Cattle moving around unsupervised or mouthing off, not good.)
I'd love a not-more-often-than-quarterly (preferably annual) summary of important science (natural and social) papers, ideally including mathematics. I looked for something like this a while back, or for some kind of meta-journal that selected the best (or at least most important) from all sources, but couldn't find such a thing.
I haven't bought a copy for a long time now, but I used to find that the Guardian's weekly international edition was good for that kind of round up. Lots of in depth articles. I have no idea if it is still like that. Given what has happened to the online Guardian in recent years I suspect it might have similarly gone downhill.
Google News for iOS has a "week in review" option. Being an aggregation of sources, it doesn't have any particular bias (except maybe to showcase only the largest stories of the week).
"Rather" is an understatement. There is zero nuance or reasoned critique on LWT - just "look at this stupid person, make ridiculous analogy, yell at imaginary person, laugh track" over and over for 20 minutes straight.
Proponents will argue that it brings scandals into the light of popular media, or that mockery is the only reasonable critique of such idiocy displayed on the show, to which I say knowing little about a subject and mocking the target is worse than knowing nothing at all - it solves no problem and only polarizes politics more. "It's only a comedy show" is no excuse when politics is rapidly becoming vitriolic, polarizing and dehumanizing.
I found out that having no news at all is not so good, because you don't want friends and colleagues to believe you're living in a cave. But you only need the two three important headlines in the week, and I get these from Wikipedia home page.
Also, if you are concerned by a topic, say war in Syria, just get your meat from Wikipedia article, it's not perfect but it beats all other info sources by very far.
It's worth noting that Wikipedia has collectively decided to call this conflict a "civil war", which is in itself a political judgment. There is mention in the lead paragraph of the other term being used to describe the Syrian conflict, which is "proxy war". I would prefer if this page were called something more neutral, maybe just "Syrian Conflict of 2011".
Wikipedia does not provide news outside of the 'In the news' section (it does provide encyclopedic entries on current events, but that's not quite the same thing).
The 'In the news' section lists already existing articles, which must contain references. User generated websites are usually not considered reliable sources for Wikipedia, so Wikinews shouldn't normally be used as a reference in Wikipedia articles.
Most Wikipedia "In the news" articles are war or disaster related. Not very relevant for most people, and also quite depressing if you digested it day after day. If your goal is to reduce news to prevent distraction, Wikipedia probably works against this.
Better is to just exclusively use Hacker News as your news source. Important political or disaster related news shows up on the front page of HN when it happens (big earthquakes, presidential election winnings), otherwise more localized stuff is hidden. The news that does make the front page here is mostly relevant to technology, which is what most here care about.
I read Hacker News and local town news for news. Good enough and I miss nothing important.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the author that we often spend way too much time "consuming" news, I do not agree with him that following the news is totally superfluous. As a citizen, I want to know what is going on in my country and what the government is doing about it, so that I can take an informed decision come the next election. I also want to know what is going on abroad because I have friends scattered all over the world, and I want to know if there is anything major that might affect them. (Quite apart from the fact that global news often impacts national government.)
There was a time when I got my news from the BBC website (I have never really watched any TV). It was very interesting, I heard a lot that I wouldn't have otherwise heard - but in the end I used up hours of time without truly learning anything. Nowadays, I get a daily news digest via email; just one short paragraph telling what has happened and where (takes about two minutes to read). I have also subscribed to a respected national weekly newspaper that doesn't so much report news as comment on current developments (takes about four hours to read).
This combination of small daily updates plus detailed weekly analysis is working out very well for me. I stay abreast of current events while not wasting any time on half-baked articles, but also don't miss out on thought-provoking quality journalism. Not a bad situation, really.
I think the movie Nightcrawler(2014) really nailed that creepy feeling I get from TV News. There's an aura of desperation, of lowest-common-denominator, hits-you-in-the-amygdala kinds of coverage.
"
Nina: We find our viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs. What that means is a victim, or victims, preferably well off and white, injured at the hands of the poor or minority.
Lou Bloom(Jake Gyllenhaal): Just crime?
Nina: No, accidents play, cars, busses, trains, planes, fires
Lou Bloom: But bloody
Nina: Well, graphic, the best and clearest way that I can phrase it to you, Lou, to capture the spirit of what we air is think of our newscast as a screaming woman, running down the street with her throat cut.
Americans used to have an institution that gave them a steady diet of relevant news. It gave them a healthy mix of local, state, federal and international news in reasonable doses that could be read over dinner. It mainly gave its readers reason to consider whether the darn politicians in $STATE_CAPITAL were doing their damn job or whether the town council really had any reason to be raising taxes. It was called the local newspaper.
~15 years ago, we abandoned this to spend our free time sharing Buzzfeed quizzes with one another.
Well, I guess it depends on your news source. I'm from the UK and I've always thought the following about US news vs UK news (and this may be a bit stereotypical):
- US TV news: hopelessly biased and sensational, sometimes hysterical.
- US newspapers: outside of the tabloids, generally serious and reputable. Ethics and integrity are taken seriously within the profession (even if not always adhered to).
- UK national newspapers: hopelessly biased, shrieking headlines, foaming-at-the mouth hysteria, click-bait headlines galore. Self-centred, nasty, unpleasant, possibly the most racist press in Europe.
- UK TV news: far from perfect, but strives for impartiality, balance and even-handedness
- UK radio news (BBC dominates): possibly better than TV news because you don't get the emotive visuals. (But, of course, sometimes pictures can convey the magnitude or seriousness of an event more than just words.) Also, unlike TV, you can access BBC radio news wherever you are in the world for free.
Radio is definitely one of the best sources and unsung heroes of news in the UK. I feel BBC Radio 4 does this especially well, in that it provides coverage in a few different formats. The hourly bulletins allow you to stay informed without investing a lot of time, the longer news summaries cover a broad range of news, and the current affairs programmes (such as Today and PM) dig deep into the nitty-gritty of the issues.
Elsewhere on the BBC Radio network, Radio 5 live does a good job with its rolling news coverage, the BBC World Service has fantastic features (I enjoy their technology programmes Click and Tech Tent), and the local radio stations are sometimes the only place you'll find decent coverage of local news.
As you point out, the BBC does dominate, although I have a fondness for LBC and talkRADIO, too.
I don't have much to add other than I agree with all these points and suggest more Americans ignore the so called "news" we're being pushed with into hysteria. Also your Facebook feed is probably a huge drain, I'd recommend unfollowing everyone or at least aggressively curating down to people and things you truly care about.
Agree on the hysteria. Twitter especially rewards the pithy smartass that says something controversial. The thoughtful person interested in expressing complicated ideas and trying to empathize with other humans doesn't get retweeted/favd.
And be alone with my actual identity and have to deal with existential angst? I'd rather get upset about an issue I read to give my life some meaning /s
Or just dropping out of facebook and having face to face relationships with those that matter most. That's what I did and I don't feel any worse for it. My relationships are better too because they're actually real.
I stopped regularly watching the news a while ago. I read the news from a few online sources. The consequence of this is that most TV news looks like breathless hysteria and fear-mongering when I do happen to watch it.
6) Watching "the news" makes you mad because it just seems like sensationalized bullshit when it's on in the background. You wonder... "How do people watch this dribble?" or "How could anyone believe this?" If your "news" ever says that something is good or bad... it's just an opinion piece.
It's very hard to find impartial news outlets that aren't just pandering to confirmation bias, or that don't have an agenda. Sucks about all the competition for attention on the internet... people realized that they can catch more bugs with honey, and so they just tell their audiences what they want to hear.
A few summers ago I went three weeks without any news at all. No TV, no internet, and even avoiding physical newspapers.
At the end of the three weeks I was excited to go online and see what I had missed. I found that I had not missed a single thing worth knowing about in the long term. All the energy I would have spent on the news in that time would have been for nothing.
I am back to being a daily news consumer but I wonder how much time I am wasting.
Sommerville argues that news began to make us dumber when we insisted on having it daily. Now millions of column inches and airtime hours must be filled with information--every day, every hour, every minute. The news, Sommerville says, becomes the driving force for much of our public culture. News schedules turn politics into a perpetual campaign. News packaging influences the timing, content and perception of government initiatives. News frenzies make a superstition out of scientific and medical research. News polls and statistics create opinion as much as they gauge it. Lost in the tidal wave of information is our ability to discern truly significant news--and our ability to recognize and participate in true community.
>And I wonder if there’s a kind of “substitution effect” at work here. The sense of “at least I care” may actually prevent us from doing something concrete to help, because by watching sympathetically we don’t quite have to confront the reality that we’re doing absolutely nothing about it.
This is something I heard mentioned a long time ago specifically relating to creative ideas. The concept was that you shouldn't rush to tell people about a new idea because that expression of it serves as a form of release.
What seals the deal about news is that for the vast majority mainstream medias are both late and innacurate[1] compared to just reading from upstream sources (medicine, technology, economy, geopolitical events). Also now twitter and the like are taking the night spot. Anything happening then won't be covered by most medias, or in a hurry which means they'll be as crude as a twitter feed.
Lots of wasted "brain" time.
[1] In fields I know it's completely useless to listen. Makes you wonder about other fields too .. It feels like entertainment rather than information.
ps: I'll add the neurotic swing of medias. So many crysis (greece, ...) you hear about for a month constantly. Then nothing. No follow up or so rarely. It just doesn't matter what they say.
Very hard to find, because it's not a hard factual area like medicine. Take a page from anthropologists and look for a variety of primary sources, or sources that do good analysis albeit with known (or explicit) bias.
Personally, for anything international and important I like to mix BBC (known bias), Al Jazeera International (different known bias), and Economist (explicit bias, in-depth analysis). Your tastes may differ.
I'm an American living outside the US and literally the only TV station I watch is Al Jazeera English. It agrees with my tastes more, yes, but they also have documentaries about all kinds of things throughout the day.
I don't have one 'yet'; I read accounts of people living in the countries I want to know (most recently the Turkey failed coup), you get a lot more details. You also have more than one viewpoint. In the case of Turkey, Gullen movement which is depicted as repressed political opposition in the western world, is seen as scientology in Turkey. It's harder to conclude, but I prefer to have many sources of dense data to handle rather than one shallow conclusion.
Most important line in the article, in my opinion:
> Their selections exploit our negativity bias.
Which is true of a whole heck of a lot more than just mainstream news. Some people go overboard and try to get rid of all negative influences in their lives, but that's just going from one extreme to another.
A lot of social media is negative - because controversy inspires discussion, discussion means engagement, engagement means value.
There's too much focus in online engagement in the form of controversy and I'm of the opinion that it is a very bad thing. There's all kinds of room for innovation and disruption in the form of solutions that create healthier online engagement.
I really resonate with the 'read three books on a topic and you'll know 99% more than the rest of the world.'
That is a bit extreme but it is true that very few people actually try to learn about things that the news makes them concerned about. That said, I do record the news on my DVR, skip to the weather forecast and then fast through the sports highlights. That way when I go to the office if I'm asked about how the local team did or did I see that move or play I won't be completely clueless. And I don't leave without rain gear if its going to rain. Those are pieces of information I can use.
You're probably a few orders of magnitude more informed if you only read a handful of full length, investigative articles per year (compared to 1-2 hours of news every day). It's a big world, but every now and then I'll sit down and give my undivided attention to a well written piece where the journalist traveled to multiple locations to interview several or more people. Sometimes it's shocking, and most of the time I feel appalled by the end of the article, but I have to forget about my own minor struggles and learn about what real people are going through outside of my bubble.
Imagine if your demographic disproportionately heeds the author's advice while nobody else does. The first downside you might notice is when the next president gets elected on a platform of taxing your demographic into space, with zero opposition. You won't notice the coverage, obviously, but you will notice the decreased paycheck.
You have not had to do much about what's in the news because your demographic have been disproportionately media savvy.
It's quite a jump from what's in the blog article to the claim that you end up "voting wrong". Actually, it seems to me you didn't pay any attention to what the text says at all. Please actually read it. The more I think about your point the less of a connection or relevance I see with the text I just read.
The article argues that you are better off 'switching off' from the media because you won't be doing anything about any of it anyway, other than having uninformed water cooler conversations.
The truth is, for the vast majority most of the news that's been happening for the vast majority of anybody's life, it's not worth doing anything about it, including investing the time to read books on the topics. Because, honestly, most of it is of no consequence to us, either way. And that's because the politicians know that people like us read the news and and are willing to spam social media and wreck their election chances at the slightest provocation, so policies that are against our interests are pre-filtered.
But it doesn't hold that this will always be true. If you and people like you grow complacent and block out the news altogether, one day you might notice that laws have been passed that oppress your demographic and your demographic alone. Because you didn't protest and the politicians know you wouldn't protest, because you switched off and they know that too.
This requires no ill-will on their part. It's just that their optimization function for re-election requires balancing the interests of only those who are willing to do something to protect their interests. Which necessarily requires them to be at least minimally informed. And for this, partial and shallow information is a lot better than no information at all.
The danger isn't that you end up 'voting wrong'. The danger is you'll stay home the day everybody else votes for the stormtroopers to kick your door in and take all your stuff.
I've always thought that reading the news is only informing you of the very recent events, but by doing so, you lose the context of what is really important, which is the opposite of how history works.
One way to be better informed would be to read a daily digest of world history and contemporary geography. I often watch a german/french short TV show called "Le dessous des cartes" (translates to "Under the Maps"). This show is fabulous, because it explain a lot of political, economical and geographical context to explain the world and specific countries and their problems. It's backed up by scientific data, but is also able to do some geo-political analysis. I have not found any equivalent in the Anglo-saxon world.
Once you know about the basics of what countries have what regimes, their economies, their history, you realize you learn nothing by reading the news.
> I've always thought that reading the news is only informing you of the very recent events
[...]
> One way to be better informed would be to read a daily digest of world history and contemporary geography
Wow, this is really strange. It seems you are so bombarded by minutely news, that daily news appear slow and well-thought to you?
A weekly summary is more than enough for most events. Let the dust settle. Give the journalists (and Wikipedians) some time to do their research and investigation. Same for politicians, firefighter, scientists, lawyers, judges or whoever is also involved.
The first days after and important event are full of false claims, mostly by accident, simply because nobody really knows. No earler than a week later (sometimes it takes a month or more!) the facts and non-facts are mostly separated. But then, nobody cares anymore.
If you delay the "news", you get to know from the event, but also get a well-informed picture, without the useless crap of the first minutes, hours and days after the event.
>Why is it beneficial to learn about every instance of "humans behaving badly"?
Because it is your civic responsibility to care that such things are happening in your community, and to allocate your political activity, voting, and charitable giving in a way that you believe will mitigate that suffering.
Because if everyone said, "sometimes humans behave badly; why should I care?" we'd be living in a hellscape.
I couldn't care less about such problems in my community. I pay my taxes so the city/county can hire people to solve these issues. My politicians have little to no competition so voting for who's in office is largely meaningless in my case.
Why should I spend my time, mental and emotional energy on "the news" when this offers zero immediate benefit to me? Even during watercooler talk if someone says "did you hear about x?" I can reply "no, please tell me about it" without losing any face.
I've been thinking about deleting news apps from my phone lately because I realized I did not actually enjoy or benefit from reading what's going on in Us politics or international affairs. This article cinched the deal. If something is really important then I'll read about it here, on reddit's FP or hear it from my friends/colleagues. Everything else is just noise.
If there is violence in my local community, then its realistic that I could affect some level of change there. For example, I could join a neighbourhood watch, work with local police etc. Help fund a youth club.
On the contrary, if I stay informed on as much snippets of murder, deceit and corruption that happen globally, pretty soon I will feel overwhelmed and rendered powerless.
Knowing about a drug murder in Mexico or a child slavery in north Korea, is not something I can do anything about, apart from feel depressed.
I read the headlines of Google news. That way when someone invariably asks me if I heard about this or that I can say "yeah I read that in the headlines". Otherwise people sometimes tell you what they read which is worse than actually reading the article.
Hacker news is incredibly useful to daily life if you're in tech. I've learned many things here that are critical to products I've built over the last few years. This community has worked very hard to avoid wasting my time with exactly the sort of headline news this post is about. Thanks.
I unplugged my antenna almost two years ago. The only time i switch the TV on is when i wanna watch a movie on a bigger screen -- but i only connect my laptop to it. The antenna is cut right through.
There were a couple of moments when i was exposed to news. I couldn't believe it's this much manipulated and in your face sensationalist. Watching this everyday must be toxic as hell.
I spend lots of time on the internet though, so it's not like am disconnected. I just dodge the most vulgar of manipulations (i hope).
To me this is a bit like throwing out all the mirrors from your house because you don't like your new haircut. You can ignore all the news, but the world producing those news will still be out there, exactly the same (good/bad/evil) and you'll still have to live in it. Keeping your eyes shut can help your inner peace, but it will not stop outside problems from hitting you in the face just as hard as anyone else. Except that you will not see them coming...
1. News delivery requires emotional engagement by the audience to keep them consuming and coming back. That means fear or people arguing. If you can get people arguing about things people are afraid of? Even better.
2. Investigative and beat reporters are being eliminated wholesale. Political reporters are the ones left. This means news outlets tend to tell stories in political terms -- even stories that may be technical in nature. Everything becomes politics. (Which we can then slot up people to fight about!)
3. Best form of journalism? Opinion pieces. That's because opinion pieces are required to show bias up front, have a thesis and some kind of logical structure to support that thesis, and provide contextual details from news and history as part of the argument. These details provide the context completely absent from most msm news sources.
4. Anything that can be used to drive engagement _will_ be used to drive engagement. Disgusting pictures, sexual titillation, mesmerizing graphics, misleading headlines... it's all fair game. This means that "fake news" is a sliding scale. On one end we have people admitting their bias and trying to report anyway, even if what they have to say is boring. On the other end we have people who have a bias and motives that are completely unknown to us trying to create any kind of content required to get us clicking.
Quitting news is probably the easiest thing to do to get a boost in mental health, and as long as you love reading, ironically you'll actually end up much more informed than before you quit.
I think keeping up with current affairs is important. You need to understand the world in order to participate in it.
Here's some reasons why you should follow current affairs: so you can be a more informed voter; so you can held safeguard the democracy you benefit from; so you can be aware of threats to your livelihood and social environment; so you can make informed decisions about how you live your life (are there particular charitable causes that need my time or money right now?); so you understand the politics of situations when you travel; etc etc.
I think what most people mean when they say they don't like the news is that they can't stand 24 hour news, or find it too depressing, or too much of a distraction. But those things are artefacts of how you consume the news, not the concept of following world events itself.
After following current affairs avidly since being a teenager, I would recommend subscribing to the Economist and also regularly reading a left-leaning outlet (I read the Guardian, it's better than most). I'd also recommend listening to a sophisticated radio station (Radio 4 in the UK; I believe NPR is good for the US, although I'm not an expert), and less frequently watching high-quality news coverage (Ch 4 news or the Andrew Marr show in the UK). Combine that with a general scan of other sites like the BBC, NYT, Al-Jazeera, etc. etc. to ensure you're not missing any major stories. Spend some time understanding the story of the world.
Incidentally, one really nice consequence of staying informed is when you meet people from other countries. Just last night I met a bartender from Columbia and he was impressed with my understanding of the political situation, the FARC guerrillas, the referendum etc. ... it provided a good starting point, and then he gave me a more detailed insider's view.
The biggest question for me is how to track important world or national events without tracking the 24 hour news cycle. I'd like to understand trends that unfold over weeks, but not days, like a low-pass filter on the news. The best I can come up with is reading the economist, but I'm looking for better ideas.
Every morning, I start my day by loading a bunch of news sites I enjoy reading and look at the top couple of headlines. If something piques my interest, I read it.
My news sources: NYT, BBC, CBC, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star. I'm Canadian, as you might be able to tell.
Sometimes I read what Brookings puts out, but it's important to keep in mind their biases as a think tank.
I really hate the news for lots of reasons. But the one thing that always got under my skin is the false sense of being informed. If I wanted to know trivia, I'll just read the histories of Muslim scholars or the finer points of knot theory. At least those give some context for the world we live in whereas the mainstream news outlets on both wings of the political spectrum just insult me with doom and gloom (unless it's global warming then it's really not that worrying IMO). I know that's a pretty crappy way to look at the news because I like to know what happens around me but if the delivery is crap then I'm not going to bother trying to digest it. I got plenty of other things to keep my interest. Pretending to care for what I can't fix or what really isn't an existential threat to me is just dumb.
I grew up in a world where the "news" were streaming through teletypes from "agencies", themselves connected to field "reporters", to newspapers and radio or TV outlets. These were Reuters, AFP, UP, AP, Stass, etc.
These news were the kernels from which outlets would develop their own interpretations.
This kind of news still is, I contend, the only one worthy of the term, stimulates interest and does not provide any answer to the questions/problems they may raise. That's my job.
My daily ration is composed of sources that are as close as possible to such format. Mostly scientific news, HN, and France24.
Re. the OP, I think anyone could at least agree that not watching the "infoshows", as I think it is appropriate to call them, results in an improvement in one's mood.
I agree with some of the points in the article. The "news" has become a hydra-headed monster - the media has turned everything into news. And it has also merged news with entertainment.
However, I don't think refraining from the news will solve these issues.
I think you don't need to read the news every day.
I think each person needs to diversify its consumption. IMO you can rely on any single source anymore. I'm not saying you need 100 different sources. But I think you should be actively jumping around to see what other outlets are saying.
Finally, although people should have opinions about a wide range of subjects, I think people need to realize that - a lot of the time - they just shouldn't have an opinion on an issue because they're not qualified to really make an informed one. In sum, opinions are cheap; be more open-minded.
Last time I glanced over local news channel on TV, I was surprised to see some anchors look old, and some as same as I used to see them 10 plus years ago.
Sometimes when I'm in McDonald's or such places and I glance over their TV to see CNN running, I really wonder why in the world people spend their time watching these things.
Well, I have on multiple occasions gone as far as to not read the news for many days through my RSS (where I have all the sources of the world). That would make you feel even a lot better.
Aside from all the advantages listed there (all true) I'd say that the only disadvantage of not "watching" the news is, that you may miss out on the moving video scenes of some of the most iconic events in history, because TV repeats these things. But even that is not really a disadvantage.
"""Imagine if you spent that time learning a language, or reading books and essays about some of the issues they mention on the news."""
This seems like a bootstrapping problem. How do you know what issues you should study up on. As a thought experiment, let's imagine a person that is completely ignorant of the news. How would they even know that Syria is worth researching without stumbling upon it by accident or getting input from another person that consumes news?
I think the pledge here is for better news and not for no news. I strongly believe that staying informed about what's going on in the world has value. It builds empathy and curiosity about different cultures and problems other people may have.
Point #5 is spot on. "“Being concerned” makes us feel like we’re doing something when we’re not".
Just watching the news and feeling that I care so much actually makes us less likely to actually do something about it.
Honesty yes. The news can affect peoples perception of other places to detriment. For example, often my friends or family who live in a other countries ask me about how bad crime is where I live, or how people are struggling with the economy etc. I mean, of course thats all they see, from my perspective everything looks pretty balanced out, yes I'll hear about something bad from time to time, but it's really not as bad as the sensationalism and extremist statistics they get from the news. So yes, the less news the better, if its that important you'll hear about it.
As for the "concern" topic. I believe it's an evidence that you have to do something about it. But first, one must seek out the truth just as Socrates advised us millennias ago. Living comfortably is just not possible in an unexamined life because we are by nature rational beings. You can probably ignore, as they say, ignorance is bliss, but only until it hits.
I don't know that I've ever properly followed the news. The closest I came was regularly reading Business Week as recently as ten or so years back. It was, then, approximately the same as reading the first 80% of each article in the economist. It didn't have that final segment where the writer acts so proud of him/herself for reaching obvious or silly conclusions, but it had the great information. Unfortunately Business Week started to grow increasingly lengthy, and the writing quality probably declined somewhat in the same time.
> “Being concerned” makes us feel like we’re doing something when we’re not
Corollary: retweeting about being concerned also does nothing. That is, retweeting about climate change won't reduce emission. It might feel good but does nothing. Retweeting about homelessness and telling everyone to be concerned about it does nothing to clothe, provide shelter or food. The article mentions about a substitute effect and I think it is even strong when it comes to spreading concern via social media, there it feels even more like "doing something".
This is why the break from political news on HN is so welcome. Just about any topic that has a partisan angle is going to be reported with a big slant, or outright fabricated.
This is selective ignorance, and all people do it to some extent. An extreme example would be when you eat a bacon sandwich, or when you walk through a street without stray animals. You don't want to know exactly how it happened, for the sake of your own mental well being.
Now, what if everyone was selectively ignorant regarding news? Public opinion is a major deterrent for a lot of things. In great part net neutrality has been maintained thanks to pushback from the community. That is only one example, there are many many more.
I would suggest this as a 30 day challenge. Remember doing it a while back. Found out that I had no idea what my colleagues were talking about when they started discussing some recent events. I was buzzled for a few seconds, feeling like I must have missed something important, but then I remembered that I'm doing this challenge. But it's interesting to observe how people start talking about recent news as if this was common knowledge.
The thing about skipping the news completely is that it's dependent on you not being impacted by a black swan event that significantly and negatively impacts you. The White émigrés from Russian in the early 20th century and the Jewish refugees from Germany in the 30's show clearly the value of paying attention to the news. Not doing so can cost you your life.
I can't help but feel that this article was targeted toward TV news.
I usually read the news online. And most of the time, reading only the title is enough to be informed.
It just takes a few minutes per day.
Go to CNN, Fox News, NBC, etc. and count the number of "scary or negative" headlines/links. You can be the judge on what's scary/negative. I bet you it's probably near 90%.
I depend on NPR and PBS for the news. It might not be the most impartial source when it comes to U.S. involved foreign affairs but it is much better that all the rest that's available.
I could not name any news outlet today that I would consider unbiased or trustworthy. Every news outlet seems to unashamedly have a clear political affiliation.
Disclaimer: I work for the BBC.
The BBC doesn't have 'a clear political affiliation', and neither does Channel 4. Both are public service broadcasters that are committed to non-bias reporting. However, they are run by people, and people are bias.
I think its very common in most countries for public broadcasters to lean left, and there is nearly always the perception. In my experience this has always been true.
It might be because a right-wing government is more likely to make cuts in funding of a public broadcaster than the left. I have not thought the reason why it is in depth though. I wonder if you have an opinion?
I wouldn't say that its an unreasonable theory. There's also the tendency for those working in media to be of the left. My main point though is that any perceived bias comes from the individuals that happen to be working on that production. The organisation itself is non-bias and has many measures to avoid bias.
In general conservatives seem to be more close-minded. It makes sense, really - they want to keep things the way they are. Liberalism on the other hand encourages introspection and change; informing oneself is a necessary part of that. So, those that distribute information are likely to be less conservative. You see the same trends in technology and science in general.
Note that this is not an absolute endorsement of liberalism; change can only be positive if people are properly informed, and doing it for the right reasons. And, well, they aren't - not for some time now. And it's been hijacked by identity politics (some is very good; some very bad, more to do with narcissism than anything else, sigh)
I find the best source for current events news is large general internet forums, if it's not related to some hyper-selective socially slanted cluster like social media groups. You tend to get multiple perspectives, but also a higher chance of having actual people close to or directly informed about the goings on, and hopefully decent moderation to keep the discussion sane.
Real perspective and information is nearly impossible to get from for-profit sources. It's not really what they peddle, but rather sizzle and shock value.
IMHO, a lot of what is in the OP is correct, but I conclude that a more nuanced view is important.
Yes, I have long wanted, and
still want, to know
what is important, both to me
personally and more generally,
about what
is going on in the world so
still make efforts to be so
"informed". Then, over time,
I went through much of the
negative views
about news in the OP: (1) One summer while in college, I was with my parents in DC and read The Washington Post,
a lot of it,
everyday and
at the end of the summer concluded
that I'd learned next to nothing and
99 44/100% had just wasted time. (2) Later, one day I counted and found
that, in trying to be informed, I was getting 22 print periodicals,
concluded that even the 22 were not
telling me much of value, and cut
way back. (3) I happened to
notice in an Andy Hardy
movie from the 1930s that
then, too, apparently the movie makers
believed that their audience
would accept that the news was
junk information.
(4) I have left over from
the past three quite good
TV sets and with my phone and
Internet service have some TV service
for no extra charge.
Still, I have no TV set connected to
a cable or any other source and haven't watched
TV in years with one exception:
I tried to watch the first Republican
debate on TV; mostly that was
a flop. I watched the debate later
on the Internet and got and read
a transcript -- much better.
For the mainstream media, say
AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, Boston Globe, LAT,
ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC,
NBC, Slate, Salon, Huffpo,
Business Insider, and more,
I have a triage:
(i) I am willing to glance at the
headlines if only to see what
nonsense the MSM is pushing
onto the public now. And if there
really is a big story, say,
a nuke exploded somewhere, then
I will want to know and
likely that will be in the headlines.
Also I get some
lessons by example in, say, PR nonsense
from some experts in getting
attention from even usually next to
nothing in meaningful content! Like in the remark about
writing news stories of the reporter in the
original version of the movie
The Thing, if the real story
is not good, then he "will make it
good". So, the news distorting
the truth is an old story. I also learn about "the
common man in the street" --
from the fact that millions of
people watch that stuff --
maybe the most important thing
can learn from watching the news
is about people
from the fact that each day hundreds
of millions of people pay attention
to that stuff!
(ii) Any article written by a
reporter or news organization,
e.g., AP, I nearly always refuse
to take seriously or even read
at all anymore. From my huge
sample of such articles I did
read in the past, I assume
that such an article fails
even common high school term
paper writing standards for
meaningful, trustworthy content
and that it is likely
some or all of
uninformed, misinformed,
biased, and deliberately
distorted, fabricated, or
lying. I say that such articles
are (borrowing from the
Bogart movie The Maltese Falcon),
with bitter contempt,
by newsies and nearly always
refuse to read them or, if read them
for some special reason,
flatly refuse to take the
content at face value.
(iii) I am eager to pay attention
to news stories on topics
I'm interested in and signed
by people with high credibility.
Mostly for such an article,
I keep a copy on my computer
with a reference to the source
and with an abstract and an
entry in an index.
I believe that staying "informed"
is important: E.g., here in the
US we just had an election
for POTUS. IMHO, the two main
candidates were very different
and promised significantly
different, better/worse, results for the US
and even my own life.
So, first,
I tried to say informed and, to
some extent, more superficial
than I would like, did.
And by watching the campaigns,
the candidates, and the reactions
of the newsies and citizens, I
did get some education
in such things -- I got some
more insight into people,
personalities, politics, e.g.,
stuff I didn't learn much
about studying mathematics!
And, second, I got involved
by practicing my writing and
posting on-line --
so, I tried to do better as
a US citizen.
So, sure, now I get essentially
all my news from the Internet.
One important approach is to
use HN as a filter to find more important
content.
Here at HN, often there are
references to articles
at the NYT. Unless such
articles appear to be
signed by people
with credibility and
independent of the NYT,
I flatly, automatically refuse
to read them. I have,
maybe with one exception
a decade,
zip, zilch, and zero respect
for anything the NYT
thinks or believes.
The Internet permits a news
organization, maybe
just some one person,
to reach nearly everyone
who might be interested
in content from that person.
From that fact,
I am guessing that the Internet --
that does permit deeper
presentations of information --
is the key to an
irresistible, radical
transformation of public
understanding
and effectiveness in
the US democracy.
So, net, with some nuance,
I disagree with some of the OP
and conclude that
the news and staying informed,
are important.
Is there a reason you decided to single out the NYT at the end of your post? Is it due to its frequency of its reference here on HN?
I like your idea of archiving and summarizing articles you find interesting and meaningful. I've thought of doing something similar but, like many things, have never gotten around to it.
At the end I might have said the NYT and the rest of the MSM. But the NYT has pretenses, e.g., the highly self-esteemed NYT, and most of the MSM has little more face claim to validity than a pitch by a salesman of rusty used cars.
But the NYT is to me the worst of the sores on my back side from the media. I recently sent a carefully drafted letter to the publisher of the NYT explaining my complaints with his work and saying his paper was "dead to me". It is.
I would applaud the many links at HN to seemingly interesting NYT stories except, as I explained, I no longer can take seriously anything published by the NYT that is not signed by someone with their own credibility and independent of the NYT. As I explained to the NYT publisher: His paper has long tried to mislead me; I hate that; and they can't do it anymore because I just won't read their articles. I won't do it. It's over for me. I won't let myself pay any attention to their stuff. I have no more patience with their deceptions. I have better alternatives. Life is too short to do more mud wrestling with NYT nonsense; it's better just to ignore it. It's kaput for me. I can't know what the NYT has in mind for me, if anything, but I know I don't want it. Much the same for the rest of the MSM that, however, has been claimed, used to follow the NYT as their highly esteemed, revered leader.
Memo
To: The NYT and MSM
Subject: The Internet
Body: The Internet is here! Now even just one person alone can publish for 100 million readers without even a square inch of paper or a single drop of ink. Might want to think about the consequences of that situation.
Possible consequences: Lots of fragmentation of the media business with something for everyone and next to nothing for everyone -- that is, for each reader, there is at least one good publication, and there is no single publication for all or even nearly all the readers. Anger a reader, e.g., can anger some readers by misleading them, and they can be gone in a single click.
> I like your idea of archiving and summarizing articles you find interesting and meaningful.
For me, the keys are: (1) Good exploitation of the hierarchical file system on my computer, HPFS on Windows. (2) A good text editor that has a powerful macro language (KEdit). (3) A dirt simple way to jump to (go to) the more heavily used parts of the hierarchical file system tree -- a command line macro G <token> where there is an environment variable of the form <token>.MARK (set from a file a maintain with my editor when a console window opens) with value the tree name of the a particular heavily used part of the tree. E.g., I can type
G ASP
thus make current a
file system directory with
such information on
some hundreds of references on
Microsoft's ASP.NET software
for building Web pages. For the
software for my startup, I have
now well over 5000 articles of
technical documentation, and I
can find and get to each one
quickly. Indeed, commonly
my source code comments
have my file system tree names
of relevant documentation,
and one keystroke in my editor
invokes a macro that
displays the documentation.
Right, the editor macro reads
and
parses
the line with the tree name, keeps
the tree name, and discards
the comment delimiters, right,
with the comment delimiter
tokens determined from the
file type.
Then some more command line scripts
and editor macros make it easy to
grab and save content and
abstract and index it.
There is one more in a sense above all the rest: I have a little command line script FACTS
that basically just uses the editor
to open a file FACTS.DAT (the
script does check to see if the file
is already open and, if so,
does not open it again and instead
un-hides it and
raises it to the top of the Z-order).
Then this file has little notes, often
as short as a Tweet. Each note has, right, some key words.
Usually there
are links as Internet URLs or local
file system tree names.
So, there are phone numbers,
e-mail addresses, user IDs,
passwords, street addresses,
open hours of businesses,
just things I want to remember,
etc.
What is astounding is (1) how
useful it is and (2) how few bytes
it has. So, since 9/2/2005, the file has
2,128,672 bytes and 3811 entries, e.g., an average of about one entry a day. It is shocking what an effective memory aid that little thing is and even
suggests that maybe real AI
will need much less memory than
one might guess. So, right, I have
a few, simple editor macros to help
me use that file, and with only the 2,128,672 bytes the simplest, least
efficient text search and select works fine.
News is one thing, political spin is another. I think news is good. Most "news" is really political spin though. As a US citizen, what I did was start only reading UK news. That helps because I'm not interested in UK politics, and articles about US politics there are both fewer and a little less spinny. So reading BBC/Guardian lets me focus more on the actual things happening in the world.
I traded in TV news for The Wall St. Journal, New York Times, and Economist. I read Ars and Hacker News for tech stuff. I get my sports news from Reddit. Best decision I've ever made.
I'd argue that 9/11 is a good example of news media blowing something out of proportion with 24/7 coverage and lots of drama. Yes it was a tragedy, but ultimately the amount of people that died is a tiny fraction of the amount of lives lost in the middle east due to a disproportionate response.
2) You were never actually accomplishing anything by watching the news
3) Most current-events-related conversations are just people talking out of their asses
4) There are much better ways to “be informed”
5) “Being concerned” makes us feel like we’re doing something when we’re not
My own personal experience: I quit watching the news the day after the 2016 Election ended. I felt so ill the next day I couldn't even get out of Bed. So I googled stuff on "how to stop watching news" and came across this post by Buffer Co-founder Joel Gasgoine => http://joel.is/the-power-of-ignoring-mainstream-news/
It completely opened my eyes. Ever since I quit the news (everything incl. google news, reddit, huffpo 538, etc etc, except HN of course :) I've been feeling the following +ve effects
1) I am generally more happy and mindful, less stressed
2) I've finally made the most progress on my side-project that was languishing for years.
4) I smile more. I think this is because I finally realized that I can neither control, nor contain all the bad things that happen around the world, that we read about in the news.
Don't let the new "wash over you". Take control of the things you need to get done, for you and your family and friends and career and retirement and life, and start hacking away at them using all the time you would previous waste on following and watching "the news"
I would agree, but some news affect your life deeply. Personally, I'm reading news daily to answer the question "should I complete that Canada residency application today, or can I wait a few weeks?"
You don't just sign up to be a resident in another country. You have to be invited. I know its fun to say "Screw this! I'm moving to Canada", but it doesn't work like that.
Not to ruin my own chances, but New Zealand is apparently quite welcoming to a high-skilled professional.
I mean, yes, you then have to live in a boringly peaceful country on the other side of the world from anything exciting. But right now, that means you're on the other side of the world from anything "exciting".
> Except for things like volcanoes and earthquakes... Though grantedly that is a different kind of excitement.
Call me silly, but that really is different to me. There's always some chance a natural disaster will wreck things up for you, but as long as society works together to respond to natural disasters, I feel fairly comfortable coping with that. Likewise, actually, to the terrorism problem in Israel.
The kind of "excitement" I really don't want to live with is the breakdown of social trust: having to worry that my own neighbors or local institutions will turn on me.
> Except for things like volcanoes and earthquakes
As someone who lived and worked in Japan for 6 years, lived not too far away from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (Koriyama city), and went through the M9 quake in 2011 I can confirm this 100%. Life got rather wobbly.
If you live in some location prone to natural disasters, inevitably you will become the news, or at least live in the news.
I looked very hard at moving to New Zealand. Auckland sounds AWESOME, but what really scared me is San Francisco-like property costs and a really, really high cost of living.
It died around the same time German women were molested by the dozens during New Year in Hamburg by newly arrived high-testosterone male refugees from war-torn Syria and parts of Africa (via Greece)
There was a period of time, starting upon the day of, and then continuing for some years after the 9/11 attacks, where "The News" was something you couldn't help but be engrossed by.
Growing up during an era of Johnny Carson, in a house with no cable, and attending high school in the 90's, "The News" was something very different prior to 9/11.
24 hour cable news started providing information on fast moving events, and that was relevent, in the lead up to the Iraq war, when everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It was obvious something bad would come out of 9/11, but what? There were hushed whispers of an Iraq invasion exfiltrating into grapevines by word of mouth (but not in the news, and not on TV) as early as January 2002, but would it become a reality? And if so, my god, why?
By summer, word of mouth was firm. Iraq was going to be a thing, according to people with family members in the military. And so, you waited for that to show up in the news.
By 2005, George W. Bush had been re-elected, and there was no longer any relevant information to be had.
The ruse was over. It was clear that cable news was a sham. Popcorn, for the mob attending yet another gladiator tournament at the colosseum.
But by Christmas of 2001, a lot of people would just roll their eyes, and say things like "Oh come on. Iraq? Bullshit. No way." [0]
By mid-2002 there were weird goings on, things like lumber shortages, and it was like "Oh fuck. Iraq is happening for real, and this isn't going to be a quick in-and-out." [1]
This is just according to my personal memories, of course. They pretty much line up with wikiepedia:
[0] Donald Rumsfeld memo dated 27 November
2001 (still bullshit territory)
[1] During 2002, the amount of ordnance
used by British and American aircraft
patrolling the no-fly zones of Iraq
increased compared to the previous
years and by August had "become a full
air offensive". (was actually happening)
My house didn't have cable at that time, and I was not yet in high school.
We watched the first gulf war in social studies class, putting it in league with the space shuttle challenger disaster. It was a classroom topic for a few months, and then gone.
Next year it was Rodney King and Amy Fisher or something. More irrelevant popcorn.
I remember specifically one day, I think in Oct '11 walking up the stairs from the train station and seeing someone reading a newspaper with some heading like 'US is going to look at invading Iraq for 9/11'. I just remember thinking _WHY_, that didn't make any sense.
Of course we all now know, but it was just so weird to see that because I knew it had little to do with any of what was going on (I also knew Saddam was an ally before).
I thought that "quitting the news" meant not consuming news, not simply abstaining from watching TV. At this point I feel like watching news programs is more unusual than not.
Exactly and more so for those like us who participate in forums like Hacker News. I.e. if one is getting their tech news from a set of links online, it seems odd that that same person would be watching television for other news.
when you quit the news you don't remember or know about the horrible track record of a certain party and ideology and elect it back into power. but hey, lets celebrate ignorance and have everyone learn everything from headlines on facebook.
Anyone who thinks they can disconnect from "the news" is kidding themselves. Unless you do the whole hermit thing, you are influences. Not watching CNN won't prevent other CNN-watchers from talking to you. Reading only paperback novels won't stop their authors, who also read newspapers, from influencing you.
Politics is everywhere. Take star trek. We all know the basic stories, and the thematic changes over the years. They map to changes in US politics. Even at home watching DVDs, you are engaged and influenced.
It sounds like you're taking it as an absolutist argument ("Why try to avoid refined sugar? It's everywhere, so you're always going to ingest some anyway.")
> Not watching CNN won't prevent other CNN-watchers from talking to you.
I think a conversation with a CNN-watcher is more interesting when you yourself have read slower sources than if you have both spent your time watching live broadcasts or reading live articles. You'll find you both have different kinds of points to bring to the conversation.
I've found a large difference between the daily (or 24-hour) sources and weekly/monthly publications. The latter are more removed from the day to day events, and so tend to spend more time on the issue itself and wider trends, and less on personality clashes or rare, once-off outlier events (which by definition, you don't need to be worried about^[1]). Relying mainly on them, you'll have heard less about what has happened in the last 24 hours, but likely know more about the major events and wider trends of the past year. The daily sources are particularly bad at portraying those wider trends: they will show a violent crime every night regardless of whether a hundred or only ten occurred.
[1]. The truly significant outlier events will still be covered by the slower news cycle and in normal daily conversations. There's no risk of not knowing that a 9/11 happened. I haven't found that it matters if I don't know about the latest disaster immediately: to the contrary, a conversation can be stronger when the other person explains in their own words what has happened, and I can ask questions with genuine interest.
Note that he's not advocating being oblivious to the world. See the third paragraph:
> To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole. There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic.
> [..] There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic.
In my opinion, in some cases like this, the lengthy thousands word articles are often much worse.
Can you give an example? I suspect you're referring to the same short-term ones the author is deriding, not the journalistic kind that take time to research and prepare.
Not a specific one, I meant more generally.
My point is that length alone isn't a reliable indicator for (journalistic) quality.
It is, to some extend. Long articles, with obvious effort for research etc., are more likely to be better than short pieces that for the most part are just commentary, on average at least.
But this is not a causational relationship. I've read long essays where you could easily tell the tremendous amount of work put into them, but then I did some research on my own and found out that the premisses are extremely dubious. And so the whole thing just collapses..
Media has an important function for society, that of creating an "agora", a place where society comes together. In essence, it is an information processing system - given that we surpassed the range of 400-or-so people societies where everybody knows everybody else, how can the individual get enough information so that she can function to serve the society? In the case of western societies this means for example being able to vote, or get voted for.
An ill-informed, egotistical individual might become a danger for society as a whole, like we are seeing in current US politics and the discussion about the "post factual" society. The term itself hints towards a failure of the media system. And to that end, the filter bubbles of social networkd have a huge responsibility in it. Being informed means that one has to be confronted with inconvenient truths and become part of the quest to resolve them through argument and reason. Given that we now have unprecedented means to filter out diverging opinions, we as technologists have a new responsibility for this that we are not living up to. It might have to take a catastrophe first to hand off the power of making decisions here - eg new policies - that force social media companies to optimize for other metrics than just "engagement" to live up to this responsibility. Chanced are the catastrophe is just unfolding in front of our eyes.
I was visiting friends during a couple of major air accidents in the past couple of years (The MH370 and MH17 incidents in particular), and was astounded at the propensity for news stations on ALL channels to fill every minute of the day with news 'updates' on the events that eventually descended into getting quotes and theories from just about anyone they could get to talk in front of a camera.
I was only exposed to that for a few hours at a time, but I found it absolutely exhausting to be bombarded like that. Not only that, I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources.
No thanks. I would rather control my own news firehose, and be selective about the information that I want to learn more about.