I stopped reading the news about a year ago. I felt like my emotions were being manipulated by a sharply-honed system built precisely to invoke outrage and draw you in to read more and more of it.
I've been able to direct my focus and energy to much more productive tasks since I disconnected. Of course I entirely missed that whole Supreme Court thing until after it was over, and I have no idea what people around me are talking about when they discuss some iteration of the most recent outrage. To some extent it's like they're living in a different culture than I am. I still feel that it was a good decision, and I continue to ignore the news.
I might come back if enough journalism sources can take the New Yorker's suggestion to heart.
Did the same thing about 4 years ago and haven’t looked back. I find though that a lot of people are actually offended by it since I have no clue what thing they and everyone else is outraged about. I get accused of not caring, being disengaged, blah blah blah. It’s difficult to explain to people who are still deep in outrage mode, so I mostly avoid taking about it.
My life is so much better since cutting out the news. I am happier, more focused and able to actually concentrate on the things that I care about.
I prefer to think about how I can positively impact people around me and my local community, rather than embracing the culture of outrage about things happening thousands of miles away that are ultimately irrelevant.
I did the same 1-2 years ago, and haven't regretted it. Interestingly, I've experienced the same thing where others seem offended by decision, and I also get accused of being insular and "living in my own little bubble". I just don't get this though - what exactly am I losing out on?
Well, the good news is that you guys aren't losing out on it!
You're on HN. Which means you get your daily dose of "outrage porn" like anyone else. I think many people don't think of HN as, basically, a "News" site. With a large percentage of the front page dedicated to "outrage porn". "Big Tech Helping China." "US Workers Highly Taxed." Etc etc etc. And those are just the more, kind of, moderate examples. I think yesterday's: "San Francisco's Slow Motion Suicide" was an example that went a bit further. And there have been discussions on here that just tend to devolve into extremism relatively quickly. (I guess the San Fran post from yesterday devolved into extremism relatively quickly as well. But I suppose I'm talking about discussions that tend to devolve right away.)
At any rate, yeah, if we're on HN, we can't realistically claim to have sworn off news, or "outrage porn". We're just, kind of, comfortable with the "outrage porn" that we get from Hacker News. So much so that some of us, apparently, don't even recognize it as news, or "outrage porn".
Exactly. I've seen many ridiculous stories, nonsense etc on HN which existed purely to fuel outrage among the more tech-oriented crowd.
Ultimately when people say they've dropped out of a specific news bubble: that means they've just started ignoring things that don't personally affect them or they don't care about. It's essentially as another commentator said meant that you're in favor of the status quo, which means you shouldn't be surprised if you encounter someone who is negatively affected by the status quo and calls you out on being OK with it.
This is a good point. However, I think the major difference is the proportion of the content that is "outrage porn". I would argue that HN has a notably lower proportion.
It's difficult to tell, because the front page of BBC has so many more articles on it than the front page of HN, but the "outrage porn" proportion seems about equal to me. Right around 1/4 or 1/5 of the articles I would classify that way. Seems about the same as HN.
Just for context, at the moment on HN, I'd say these are the "news"-y and "outrage porn"-y posts on the front page.
"Amazon Workers Are Listening To What You Tell Alexa" - Obligatory "outrage porn" post for FAANG company. (Generally a minimum of one is always present on the front page.)
"Urgent Quest For Slower, Better News"
"Most Prestigious Journals Publishing Least Reliable Science"
"New Human Species Found In Philippines" - (Predictable descent into extreme views on evolution. No more "Out of Africa", all that "scientific evidence" stuff is nonsense.)
"Startup Stock Options - Good Deal Gone Bad"
"Logic of Political Survival"
And that doesn't even count the posts on the front page that are borderline.
For starters, I think you're being extremely cynical.
Second, unlike other news sources, HN tends to have moderate to high quality discussion. I come to HN because I tend to learn things and grow here. That's not to say that it's perfect of course, but I think you're being more than a bit dishonest when you compare HN to mainstream media news.
HN is a aggregator of (mainstream) media news. It is in a position where it should be able to achieve a better ratio between clickbait and non-clickbait than others. Parent suggested it doesn't. I agree. Huston, we have a problem.
Am I outraged over the fact? Not at all. Because I do not expect HN to be better than mainstream. And in fact it isn't. HN is just a different pie.
> Second, unlike other news sources, HN tends to have moderate to high quality discussion.
I firmly oppose to this view. What you are perceiving as "moderate to high quality" is actually just the suppression of mean words, that is good by itself but does not equate to the quality.
I too classify about one fifth of the HN front page as "outrage porns"; they tend to be visibly biased and their discussions are significantly worse in my humble opinion. For that portion of HN I believe they are no better than the mainstream media. If you want remaining four fifths, good! But you have to learn to filter the problematic fifth out.
I think most of the political discussions on HN have a clear side that the commenters take. To disagree with the consensus invites down-votes into oblivion, so almost no one disagrees with the consensus.
How would you define outrage porn? I think that we have to be careful with definitions. Just as we do not define everything that produces sexual arousal as porn because we would have to call even meaningful relationships porn, we should be careful not to call everything that might produce a certain level of disagreement "outrage porn". If there is a well reasoned and substantiated article about something that is bad and should be fixed, what is your metric to distinguish it from outrage porn?
I do agree that paying too much attention to the crazy that’s going on is not constructive or healthy. But you can definitely overcorrect.
If you completely disconnect you have no data with which to make your decisions come election time. A lot of what’s happening in politics does affect you directly. Changes to tax code, the budget, deregulation of industries (e.g. net neutrality).
And some of it may not affect you directly but affects people in the communities you live in. A Supreme Court nominee had allegations of sexual assault and gambling problems brought against him. Regardless of what you believe, it behooves you to be aware that this is happening. If the accusations were true don’t you want to know? It affects the women in your life to have someone like that be given a lifelong appointment to the most powerful court of the land. If the accusations weren’t, wouldn’t that be important too?
If you’re taking a break to maintain sanity I can understand that. But if you’re simply shrugging your shoulders at what’s happening simply because it doesn’t affect you right now—and trust me, some of the policies this administration is adopting are having a big impact on some—then I think that’s a pretty shitty, selfish attitude to have.
> And some of it may not affect you directly but affects people in the communities you live in. A Supreme Court nominee had allegations of sexual assault and gambling problems brought against him. Regardless of what you believe, it behooves you to be aware that this is happening. If the accusations were true don’t you want to know? It affects the women in your life to have someone like that be given a lifelong appointment to the most powerful court of the land. If the accusations weren’t, wouldn’t that be important too?
This example is exactly why someone should ignore the news. This was pure partisan bickering and mud slinging. Not once during the whole episode were Kavanaugh's actual positions discussed. Just rumors, gossip, fighting and soundbites. No one came out ahead paying attention to this story.
I understand your frustration, but I think this logic is easily exploited. Part of democracy is keeping our elected officials in check. If we mentally check out whenever they put on a circus show, we’re rewarding bad behavior.
I see it more as by paying attention to the circus you’re rewarding bad behavior (circus creation). Being immune to the histrionics makes it harder to be exploited.
It works the other way too. No amount of leftist outrage managed to bring Trump to heel. Checking out of the news cycle and only getting involved when it seems to be particularly relevant seems like the saner strategy, particularly as our time and cognitive resources are the most precious ones we have.
Why blow it all on generating outrage when it'll just get manipulated into a bottom third talking point?
The Supreme Court example isn't very good, because you can't act on the outcome in a sensible democratic way.
A better example would be news that brings X to attention, so you can voice concern to the government. Or in the case where politicians are the focus of attention, it can affect your voting choice.
E.g. the internet filter law proposal in Europe. It's not practical for me to review every individual piece of legislation, so I rely on journalists/news platforms to highlight the important bits. As a consequence of the MEP vote I have now blacklisted one political party I considered moderate before. They will never get a vote or a good word from me again, ever.
Other examples you could have mentioned are stuff like the Panama papers and Wikileaks. If I heard a local construction company was funneling money to tax havens, I'd email my municipality and/or IRS.
News is the here and now presentation of events (and basically press releases/packages), which one absolutely does not need to consume daily in order to do informed voting.
What you want to be reading is aggregate analysis, and quality articles of that kind are found on sites which mostly avoid feeding you the other bullshit. Publications like Economist, Atlantic, Politico, etc.
Publications like those you named are tuned to your particular brand of "bs" but they have just as much bias as publications you find distasteful. That is the state of our news these days. I can't think of a mainstream news org on that level that is without significant bias.
I really disagree with the consume daily part. I consume news most days, but why can't I just spend some time doing research on the various candidates and what they did over the past several years that was newsworthy in the few weeks immediately before an election? If anything I'd think that would be better as they won't have to worry about having forgotten some dick move some candidate pulled three years ago
I understand the US doesn't have a lot of choice on the ballot, political news is highly polarized and latest/developing news is probably not worth following. But somewhat keeping up with what your government does so you can hold it accountable seems like a civic duty to me. And what better way to do this than news?
I understand the US doesn't have a lot of choice on the ballot
That is not at all true. Sure there may only be two parties with one candidate each on the national level (assuming you don't get involved with the primaries), but in the US a lot more local positions are elected (which in many ways have a much greater effect on your day to day life) and local referendums (or ballot initiatives) are very common.
When it comes time to vote I research each candidate and ballot measure and make an informed decision with the information that I find. I don't need to be plugged into to every daily scandal to know that I fundamentally disagree with Trump's policies, a few minutes of research will tell me that just fine.
You'd be surprised how even fascists can portray themselves as reasonable on their own websites, or how lacking wikipedia is on some parties.
Ballot measures only address a small subset of policies, and they don't exist in many places. From what I understand making a 360 turn on them after being elected isn't uncommon either.
So your 'informed' decision is probably just as biased as someone who bases their decision on news.
I would never use someone's own website as my sole source of information, that's just begging for trouble. I search out as many different sources as I can find, including voting history, town hall transcripts, interviews, endorsements, etc. etc.
I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. Are you saying nobody can ever know enough to vote responsibly?
I'd say the easiest source is the archive of a reputable news site, since journalists are historically responsible for collecting and refining this information. Thus we are back at the initial question: How to get Slower, Better News?
When all the major parties have completely stopped serving your interests, following big media is pointless as it neglects the minor parties. You need to research it yourself or subscribe to fringe media, and you have more time to do that and are better informed if you don't waste your time with big media.
Sometimes, sort of. If you think about the things you read on the news, you'll notice that 99%+ ends up being of no consequence for anything. A lot of what people get outraged about daily is total bullshit, and it gets forgotten the very next day, but even the more important-seeming issues really average out to zero impact on the community. In terms of information, the news is a channel with absurdly low signal/noise ratio. If you want to positively impact people, your first job should be finding a channel with higher SNR.
There's a secondary value to news (or rather primary, in terms of value delivered) - social objects. Most people know what's currently on the news, so even though the raw information value is near-zero, it becomes a great conversation starter.
Local news is how I find out about ballot issues, restaurant closures and openings, new public works projects, etc, as well as more sordid things like failed health inspections or the deep dysfunction at a neighborhood school we might have sent our kid to... The SNR might not be super high but it seems useful.
Most items of local news are highly relevant to a small proportion of locals. E.g. roadworks probably just affect a few % of people using that road.
Then there are shock-news stories like violent crime. How is it relevant to know some kid from my street stabbed another kid over a pack of gum? If I want to know how safe my area is I'd look at crime statistics collected over years and compare it to other areas.
Not reading anything will not allow you the relevance of climate change.
I prefer to read specific things to stay in the loop and I see it as a responsibility to be aware of things as my position in our society allows me to do so.
There is a lot of bad stuff going on all over all the time. Focus is what's important. There are billions of people on this earth. You could cry at hundreds of stories every day if they were told in great enough detail. Those stories could be embellished or made up, paid for by someone with an agenda to promote and you wouldn't know the difference.
Save your outrage for things you have first hand knowledge of or knowledge of through trusted contacts.
The world did ok before 24/7 news, so it's not like you, king of the world, need to be up to the minute informed on whatever thing you're supposed to take your outrage vengence upon today.
>God, give me grace to accept with serenity, the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
I think this is a case of these people realizing that they cannot change the world in such a way to solve each and every problem that is presented to them in the news. As such, they choose to focus on their own personal lives and they people they come across in their day to day lives.
I hope this helps. It's not that they just don't care, it's that caring is damaging their psyche and performance. They've learned it's healthier to tune most of that noise out.
>God, give me grace to accept with serenity, the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
I'm not sure what whimsical platitudes that essentially absolve you of your civic duty have to do with this conversation, or how it could possibly negate anything that was said.
>I hope this helps.
No it just solidifies what I think about the type of people that harbor such opinions.
I don't think that reading or not reading the news is engaging with the plight of "my fellow countrymen". We all ignore the plight of millions/billions of people every day. That is the way life has always been.
I remember someone coined a concept recently that when you read about a problem in the world that you can help alleviate then you become morally responsible. It’s liks quantum entanglement but with ethics. Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949572
What about that? Coming upon news where you can make a difference right now, by sending money to NGOs with workers on the ground.
Say there is a situation that Alfred have the power to effect. To reliably cause change for the good Alfred must:
(1) Identify a problem and its root cause
(2) Change the root cause
(3) Confirm that the problem is solved.
There are people who claim you can leap straight to (2) and skip (3). These are people who (if they ever honestly checked) would discover that they are not responsible for very much positive, meaningful change. They are flailing, looking busy and have the best of intentions.
For anything reported in the news step (1) represents a huge investment of time because the news has probably got the situation at least somewhat wrong. To say Alfred has a moral responsibility to do something is equivalent to saying Alfred has a moral responsibility not to read the news; because Alfred doesn't have enough time or resources to confirm what the problem is for all the sad stories he can read about.
In your specific example - 'sending money to NGOs with workers on the ground' - Alfred would probably divert a lot of money to organisations who are good at emotive advertising campaigns with administrative costs verging on embezzlement. We have good historical evidence that Alfred's best bet is to go all-in on capitalism, make a fortune, and then do some philanthropy to maximise his impact.
Giving to a worthy cause creates incentives that are terrible. I can't be convinced that it is a good idea. I have a lot more respect for people who volunteer time, but even then I'm suspect of their ability to correctly diagnose the problem they are trying to fix.
You can frequently skip (1) because the actionable options are clear, or you can trust the news/charities have identified the cause that requires the least resources to fix/mitigate the problem.
The term 'root cause' is problematic because it assumes a simplistic cause-effect model. However, a problem may be the consequence of a complex 'chain reaction' of events. Most charities identify a single event leading up to a problem and focus on eliminating/mitigating that.
E.g. a problem is: people in country X dying unnaturally every year. The immediate cause is starvation, which is indirectly caused by famine as a result of multiple factors like poor farming technology and government policy. There is no 'root cause', and attempting to solve the farming problem might be much less resource efficient harder than just providing emergency rations every year.
Another problem with your wording is 'change for the good'. If famine death is reduced by 100 deaths for each 1000USD donated, is this a 'change'? Or would Alfred only take action if it would possibly result in entirely stopping the deaths 100%?
Someone else may have already been working to help the people. You just need to provide the money. The question is -- will you? Like Doctors without Borders or whatever.
Or Alfred's best bet is to go all-in on politics, and affect positive change on a large scale via writing government policy. Capitalism and philanthropy are small potatoes compared to the sort of impact you can have by being a vocal positive force for change.
I agree with your point about incentives in philanthropy though, there are some organizations that do a better job than others about that.
You can't do anything if you're not even informed about it. There are numerous examples of the public giving enormous amounts of money and relief to victims of, for example, natural disasters.
I think having empathy for those directly around you is a good start. The saying "all politics are local" goes the other way around as well, that most change is local change. It is unlikely that I can help people gain asylum from oppressive regimes, but it is very likely that my donations to local charities and volunteer work is directly helping those around me. In a categorical imperative sense, if more people acted this way fewer things would be so bad about the world.
Who said anything about ignoring the plight of others? The news does nothing at all to aid me in helping other people. Indeed, most of the time it distracts me and keeps me from being aware of all the myriad ways I can give back to the community.
I volunteer lots of my time with various organizations and I didn't need anyone in the news media to tell me that what I'ma doing is important and valuable.
I don't experience this kind of empathy very often.
For example, I don't get upset when a plane crashes or there's a mass shooting. I can imagine myself in the position of the victims. I can imagine if someone I loved died in a situation like that and I can simulate some of the grief and anger I think I'd feel. But that exercise seems sort of selfish to me. In general, these kind of tragic events don't affect my mood.
I do sometimes experience this kind of empathy when I'm reading history or a human-interest story about some tragic or unfair situation.
It seems to me that many people assume that all good behavior flows from empathy. I don't think this is true. I use various philosophical viewpoints to justify (or rationalize) my behavior: sometimes utilitarianism, sometimes the categorical imperative, and often a vague sort of humanism.
I wanted to start an honest discussion but my thread seems to have quickly devolved into the haves vs have nots of a capacity for empathy. Which is not my intention. This is probably my fault, for not considering enough viewpoints before writing my question.
Let’s consider starting from this standpoint instead: Everyone has differing levels of empathy and it’s not going to be the same for every person. Despite this, we all need to get along and work towards whatever our individual goals are peacefully.
Given this vast spectrum of empathy, advice from the extreme edges of that spectrum (“just tune out all news 100%” on one end, “cry for every single suffering being everywhere” on the other end) is particularly useless, because the only reason this situation even exists in the first place is because of extremism / polarization.
Anyone on Hacker News, has not "stopped reading the news".
Maybe they stopped looking at the FOX news website? Or maybe they stopped looking at the CNN website? Or what have you. But they consume a lot of news every day. The reality is that a very large percentage of the front page of HN is political type stuff:
"US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums"
Or stuff intended to trigger discussions of political type stuff:
"Big Tech Helps China Censor People"
etc, etc etc.
There is a lot of negative, outrage focused, news on HN.
Not the OP and I haven't stopped reading the news entirely, but actually on HN, I do not usually read the articles (horror!). I especially don't read articles from the major news outlets. I come to HN for the comments and links to blog posts about programming.
And, no, I did not read TFA ;-). I was just curious if anyone had comments on finding slower, better news.
True. Hacker news is the only news I read. Because it mostly filters out the stuff I don’t care about.
Pretty much every “traditional news” headline basically says to me:
“This horrible thing happened somewhere that has no bearing on your life!”
That seems like it should hold true, generally. However, it doesn't seem to hold true in present day US politics. Most people who pay attention aren't any less punished than those who don't. Very little of the political news has to do with policy or issues that are up for meaningful debate, and when it does it lacks nuance. Sometimes when unpopular legislation is in the pipeline there's not even an adequate description of what it is in popular media, let alone meaningful debate. Mostly I see divisive partisan propaganda and finger pointing. There's evidence to suggest voters preferences don't really impact policy in the long term, such as the Princeton study.
> There's evidence to suggest voters preferences don't really impact policy in the long term, such as the Princeton study.
The dirty little (open) secret of US politics: nothing, nothing an individual does really matters unless they put in tons of time (time doing things, not reading Twitter), tons of money, or both. And even then it's a crapshoot unless you've got serious cash.
Less true at a very local level. Definitely true of anything past the county level or so.
In 2019, Be careful about what kind of news you uncritically believe. The punishment to those who ignore due skepticism, is being governed by those who will manipulate.
Too true... I can't stand Trump on a personal level... but he's right about one thing. There's a lot of manipulation and outright falsities in news, and almost no research or fact checking in the twitter sphere.
I think it's pretty safe to assume that he's the one benefitting the most from the lack of fact checking.
Not safe at all. (Covington Kids, for one thing.) The groupthink among the left-leaning media, particularly the news, is pretty egregious. The degree to which they communicate with each other using electronic networks and create their thought bubbles is well documented at this point. If you "follow the money," to figure out who benefits, then it turns out, it's Far Left activists who benefit by getting to push their agenda and set the narratives. This even results in monetary benefit through fundraising.
I wasn't going to dive into far right conspiracy theories.
SO isntead let's keep it simple: Take all the live footage and public statements by Donald Trump during his presidency - from rallies, in front of the white house, or even the rare press events - and have his claims analyzed by fact checkers. I'm not sure if he'd make it even remotely to a 50% truth-score. Countless obvious, easily disprovable lies on a daily basis.
That's what I meant by "benefitting the most". You might dismiss it as the left-leaning media you mentioned, but this should be a good starting point to keep track of Trump's false claims: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claim...
Two wrongs don't make a right... it's generally considered the media/news organizations that are supposed to fact check and limit bias. They absolutely don't right now, and that is a huge problem when the news media becomes more about pushing an agenda, than any single politician that should get fact checked (even the cheeto in chief).
Not following the news daily doesn't mean you can't do research before elections to makes a decision. It also doesn't mean people are trying to fool you into voting for them - I can reject lots of candidates based on what they're most proud of / what they put on their plans.
It needs to be pointed out that this is an option that originates from privilege. Ignoring the news means ignoring politics. Ignoring politics is tacit support of the status quo. The status quo does not put everyone on equal footing. Disadvantaged people would therefore suffer more from disengaging with the news than people of privilege.
I disagree. News != politics. In fact, if I replace the "status quo" in your statement with "reality", the meaning will change significantly. I don't need a journalist to tell me that the healthcare situation (to pick an example) is absurd, or that taxation (fed+state) in some states is already at European levels, yet without any healthcare or education benefits. It's easy to be aware of these facts, you just have to be alive.
But I also don't need journalists to be brain-washing people by suggesting different ways of sharing the costs (insurance? single payer? have rich people pay for me?). The real solution is, of course, to lower the cost to the levels comparable to EU countries, but the costs are rarely discussed in the mass media, only cost sharing is brought up. Why? Because it's an unpopular solution among people who set the agenda. Fixing health care (i.e. halving its cost _at the very least_) means dropping US GDP by a whopping 9% [1].
So it's not about slow vs fast news. It's about controlling the public discourse. The old system of setting the national agenda [2] is obviously not working well if a populist with a Twitter account can override the MSM narrative and get himself elected.
I don't know what you are intending to mean with your first point. Yes, you can change a word in my comment to a word with a different meaning and it will change the meaning of what I said. That doesn't mean what I said isn't true.
Healthcare is really too big and broad of an issue to really highlight what I am saying here. There is no way not to at least be aware of it if not interact with it and it has been one of the biggest political issues in this country for decades. However you can take a look at certain pieces of that to see my point.
For example, a tiny minority of people reading this have any reason to know the price of a month's supply of insulin is over $450 or that 1 in 4 people with diabetes are rationing themselves insulin in order to afford the drug. But more and more news stories are highlighting this issue which is leading to political pressure to address it. Just today there was a congressional hearing on the subject. I have no idea if something will be done to reduce the costs of insulin, but I know the price wouldn't go down if people just ignored every news story about it.
> I don't know what you are intending to mean with your first point.
> Yes, you can change a word in my comment to a word with a different
> meaning and it will change the meaning of what I said.
> That doesn't mean what I said isn't true.
By using the inflammatory vocabulary, you've re-framed the issue as a class conflict, pushing the proposed solution (ignoring the news) out of scope. This is a classic move straight from Animal Farm. I simply suggested to re-read your comment using less polarizing language. This re-focuses us back on the original proposal, and suddenly we may realize that not listening to sponsored "suggestions" proposed by the media may have us voting for (using my example) a working healthcare system, which would be great for all people, disadvantaged or not.
>suddenly we may realize that not listening to "suggestions" proposed by the media may have us voting for (using my example) a working healthcare system, which would be great for all people, disadvantaged or not.
Maybe, but what are the odds of that vs. being kept in a state of aloof hypocognition that reinforces the status quo though?
Without hearing of disasters or San Franciscan homeless slums from the news, I'd barely know about them because I don't go out of my way to research things like that -- the time and interest isn't there. Left entirely to my own perspective, the biggest problems in the world are the ones I'm facing -- usually programming or computing related.
I really don't know what to say to you if you think "status quo" is inflammatory vocabulary. And I never said anything about suggestions from the media. You are mixing fact based news with opinion based news. You can be informed by ignoring opinion based news, but you still need fact based news to have an educated opinion on an issue.
The problem is not jargom, it is tone. If we criticize the ideas instead of the people we can reach an understanding. But by using "you" it becomes more personal and more inflammatory.
And, so what percent of the contemporary news media would you suggest is "fact based" and what percent would you suggest is "opinion based"? Keep in mind that opinion based does not simply mean the article begins under the section "opinion". Articles on issues that are littered with opinions are, in effect, opinion based. One other important nuance here is that while the existence of a quote may be a fact, if it expresses an opinion - it similarly adds little more than opinion to an article.
This is dangerously naive with respect to how marketing works in the era of social media. Questions you should be asking yourself... Who controls the influential twitter account or blog? Do they make money from it either by posting sponsored content or do they run ads? Could someone who controls a botnet or clickfarm manipulate them by either granting or withholding likes, traffic, and clicks?
I try to post in-depth and reasoned comments to this exact point whenever someone in my social circle posts ranty "news" articles, but they just get completely flat-out ignored.
I've never seen anyone argue that this elite vs the rest pickpocketing isn't actually happening and (what we call) the culture war is the real battle.
It would be helpful if there was, because then I could try to understand the mindset behind the dismissal of our view— it's driving me crazy.
You're out of your ing mind. One of tbe greatest abuses that lower classes have to endure is the 24 hour propoganda and emotional hijacking machine known as "the news".
God forbid people have the freedom to have cognitive peace, quiet, contemplation, and free play.
If anything, the "disadvantaged" have more to gain from disengaging from constant cognitive hijacking!
I am really hoping that one day we can somehow arrive at clean useful and possibly actionable news streams which balance issues and positive/celebratory information.
Today’s news large outlets create anxiety rage and suffering and serve as a tool for separation and propaganda. This experience is extremely toxic and one needs to exercise high level of discipline and often sacrifice well being in order to stay informed.
People point this out all the time. I think it’s used as a non-sequiteur argument to invalidate people’s opinions who have privilege.
Just because someone was born into privilege does not mean they can’t have opinions or that those opinions are incorrect.
I also think ignoring the news has nothing to do with privilege. So, you’re saying that if I did not have privilege then somehow reading the news is going to change anything?
99% of “news” is absolute garbage and a distraction from actual issues.
Strong disagree with the black and whiteness of this. Ignoring all news and politics, full stop, is less a privileged and more an ignorant position to take.
But I'd argue the worst position is one of non-stop media bingeing without action. In fact, I'd say the only way to act reliably or with clear intention is to not binge on media, to not stay in the zone of manufactured outrage. But instead to keep sanely abreast of what's happening and engage only when meaningful action can be had.
I found when I disconnected from the news and politic in my own country that the people around me didn't really have well developed retention of the new's they where talking about. For example, news event A occurs on day, and everyone in the office talks about A, and how it made them feel. Then news event B occurs the next day, and there doesn't seem to be any cognitive awareness how A connects to B, instead A is forgotten and everyone emotes about B.
I've had to use the analogy to people how weird it appears. It's like everyone talks about a blue cat one day, and the next day talk about a red cat. Everywhere you go everyone talks about the same colored cat's.
> It needs to be pointed out that this is an option that originates from privilege.
I don't know if this is what you intended, but I'm reading this as "many or most people who ignore the news are privileged". For instance, this would include many people who are at a 7th grade reading level.
I'm... not sure that's what you meant to insinuate though. Could you clarify?
Depends which news sources and whether the news is ingested without any critical lense. Ignorantly consuming news can create far more tacit support for the status quo (or opposition agenda based on bias) regardless of actual political outcomes.
Highly disagree. I can ignore the news and still be politically active. I put a lot of effort into insulating myself from whatever the latest freakout is and I also invest a lot of energy into voting any time we have an election.
my take on this is that's it's better focus on major actions taken during a mandate (and that's what people who don't care too much about politics do) to then inform the next vote.
that's why politics before the rise of the internet were much more formal, people remembered what was done and said.
now there is just so much noise it's very hard to distinguish the signal, which leads to people being influenced and directed into "identity politics" (are you yellow or green, blue or red, left or right, good or bad?)
Like disadvantaged people are gonna read something in the NYT and then successfully lobby their congressman to change it?
Serenity to accept what you can't change is absolutely the most effective strategy for those who don't have the means to change things. Worry about your family first, work within the constraints you have. That's reality for a lot of people. I'd argue it's 'privileged' to think otherwise.
They can't change it but they still need to know to prepare for it. If the GOP killed the ACA, millions of people would need to immediately take action to find alternative support. Most of us on here would be fine either way.
Immediately take what action, specifically, in your ACA hypothetical? Honestly asking.
Best I can come up with is "hope your kids don't get sick", followed by "ignore calls from debt collectors on that emergency room bill".
Reading the news obsessively and buying into the culture war actually does nothing to make those strategies more effective. Just saps energy that could be spent elsewhere.
Fair question. It would depend on the individual, lots of people would also probably run to their doctors and get increased length/dosage prescriptions so they have some emergency supplies. Younger low income people might just cancel their insurance entirely, those with pre-existing conditions would have to consider employment changes potentially (contractor -> full time) and similarly for those on the marketplace.
Edit: To get on my soapbox a bit here, I think people are being a bit black and white as usual. Yea, you don't need to read every political opinion piece by Fox, CNN and NYT, but you also should read more than exactly zero. Neither of these extremes can possibly be optimal for everyone (or anyone probably). HN really likes the narrative "Title: X is problematic and we should fix it. Top Comment: Well I completely stopped X because it was bad for me and now everything is awesome and I'm a 10x dev!" but it's never really that simple.
Knowledge about the Individual Mandate matters a lot to lower income folks. We have to follow the news to learn about such things, whereas the privileged techie does not.
Can you explain your tax planning situation around the individual mandate? Like, did you, as a low income hacker news reader, read something on the news that you used to save money when filing your own taxes?
Because being politically active at any thing but the most basic level requires knowledge of the issues and knowledge of the issues requires following the news. If you are not politically active you are supporting the status quo because you are not putting in any effort to change the status quo.
Or they could do actual research instead of reading the "news" - which largely amounts to professional blogging these days. Following the news does not make one more knowledgeable about politics or current events necessarily. Some of the most ill-informed people I know watch news regularly. There's no guarantee that news is accurate or balanced in it's reporting.
Right, when it comes voting time look at actions a candidate took and what they said they would do. Make your judgements from there and vote. That's all that matters. Everything else is like watching a drama.
And I'd also add that it's hardly even a well conceived process. Most people ideologically align themselves one way or the other and then vote that way, regardless of anything else.
For instance Chicago has been exclusively under one party's exclusive control for going on 90 years now. And so this party has had decades to carry out whatever grand vision they could ever imagine for the city. So we'd expect to see what this grand vision would culminate in. And we see a city with a broken school system, rampant crime, tremendous financial problems, horrible inequity, and that is just in general - broken.
Yet the people keep voting for the exact same party and general ideologies. It's just not logical, but it's how most people operate on most topics. They pick a conclusion they want to be true, and then find evidence to support it, instead of examining the evidence to come to the most reasonable conclusion. Perhaps in large part because the latter process often yields conclusion that we very much don't want to be true.
Politics aren’t the only way to change the status quo. In fact they’re not good at it at all. Uber and AirBnB changed the status quo far more than any politician in my lifetime.
Also, most people’s personal issues trump any macro issue by far. You can change your status quo. It’s almost impossible for an individual to change the status quo and definitely not through typical political engagement.
>Uber and AirBnB changed the status quo far more than any politician in my lifetime.
I am sorry, but that is just depressing if you believe something like that. The ACA is one thing that comes to mind. Improving healthcare for Americans would have a much bigger impact on people's lives than giving people who already own a home a way to make a little extra money.
> Politics aren’t the only way to change the status quo.
The status quo is a political arrangement. It's just a way of referring to the state of power's distribution across institutions and people. That's political.
There is literally, definitionally nothing apolitical that affects the status quo.
Changing the status quo is--inescapably, apodictically--political.
Uber and AirBnB are highly political institutions.
By this definition literally every interaction with the outside world is political. Is a definition that broad really useful?
When people talk about politics they’re almost always talking about interfacing with the government. Taking an Uber is definitely not a political statement in most people’s minds.
No it means you should analyse your motivations for doing so carefully. If all you do is read it to get angry at something, or dismiss the opinion of whoever is speaking, then why read/watch it at all?
I'd go further and say if you're doing it just so you can give a hot take on politics to someone nearby, or have your opinions validated by them then also stop doing that (it's hard) and be mindful that whoever they are may actually disagree with you but isn't interested in having their views criticised as a part of someone's entertainment schedule or to be lectured too.
Most articles are little better than click bait. Journalists writing about X usually aren’t trained in X and usually have little time to build expertise in X. They are by training writers, so for the most part they’re reduced to parroting the narratives peddled by this or that group or political party. It’s very rare I read a general news article within my areas of subject matter knowledge and think “oh, this writer really understands and has highlighted the important issues.” I have to assume the same is true for subject matter I’m not familiar with, like tax policy. In reality, for a lot of these subjects, nobody knows the answers, not even the “experts.” For those things, journalists have neither the space, time, or education to even do a good job raising the relevant issues, much less elucidating the answers.
This is a reductive and misleading summary of what journalists do. Every blogger on the Internet also writes, with varying degrees of training and success. What reporters do that bloggers don't is reporting --- surveying and cultivating sources, visiting places, making a zillion phone calls, working with fact checkers (itself a tedious job that has little to do with the craft of writing).
That's the job of a reporter. Not knowing everything, but being willing to do the legwork to find people with firsthand knowledge of things, and then relating what they have to say. That's why we call journalism "the first draft of history", and not the textbook of history.
Like every profession, journalism has limitations and is itself practiced with varying degrees of success. We're fond of Crichton's "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" on HN, but ignore the Djikstra Amnesia Effect, holding journalists to a standard we rarely achieve in our own profession, where our own errors routinely cause direct harm to people through ignorance and omissions.
I don’t disagree with your first paragraph. As to your second, I think that’s part of the problem: those people with first hand knowledge are often relaying a sound bite, a piece of packaged narrative. And the journalist doesn’t know enough to really add anything to that narrative. That may be a limitation of journalism, but I question whether given that limitation, journalism is a useful vehicle for educating the public about the highly complex issues that underpin our society.
(Someone on HN changed my mind recently by pointing out that, while judges sometimes invoke history, they are generally bad historians. It was a thought provoking assertion, because it’s not uncommon for judges to justify opinions by reference to economics or social science. But they have neither the training nor time and procedural flexibility to do a good job of such analysis. My conclusion was, therefore, that such analysis simply isn’t useful. I think journalism might suffer from the same problem.)
Sturgeon has something to say about journalism just as Crichton and Djikstra do. It is not my claim that all of it is good.
But then, there's also a 4th amnesia (so many amnesiae!), a reverse Gell-Mann, where we forget all the incontrovertibly good journalism; for instance, John Carreyrou brought Theranos down, despite any personal expertise with phlebotomy, just through the power of bird-dogging primary sources.
> surveying and cultivating sources, visiting places, making a zillion phone calls, working with fact checkers (itself a tedious job that has little to do with the craft of writing).
I highly doubt that the average article even in prestigious news organizations (e.g. NYT, NPR, The Atlantic) goes through that level or rigor, given how frequently they cite provably false information. The overwhelming majority of the news articles I read, even from preeminent news outlets, amounts to summarizing a story that a different outlet broke. Often with several layers of indirection. I've seen plenty of stories about things posted on social media, and the author of the news articles doesn't even bother to link to the primary source. The latter is especially pernicious, it signals to me that the authors wants me to take their words at face value and not facilitate me viewing the relevant information and forming my own opinion.
If I were in that situation, I would want all the relevant news possible, in any and all formats available. TV broadcasts of cease-fires are great news for someone who wants to get out, as are radio reports of major hot-spots, etc. Getting the relevant news can be the difference between life and death in these situations.
Don't the yuppies generally vote democrat and the democrats usually oppose these things while the very-not-yuppies tend to vote GOP and the GOP usually likes/is ambivalent about these things? Like, I get it, gotta grab a side in The Culture Wars, but we should at least be fair about it shouldn't we?
But you can just ignore the news and vote Democrat and get the same effect. It’s not like those yuppies were going to vote Republican until the NYT opened their eyes.
What are the things that the average person who doesn’t like the status quo does? They vote every 2 years - it’s the only power that most people have that really moves the needle. Otherwise for national issues there’s almost nothing one can do without dedicating a large portion of life time and energy.
Would you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? I seem to have noticed you doing it a lot again recently. It would be good if you'd take a step back from that because this comment is over the flameline. That's not cool, regardless of how good or right your points are, and I'm sure you can make them without that.
My read was that he was making a rhetorical point, which he continued carefully and at length below, not actually calling people here "bad". This would be an odd thread in which to accuse him of flaming people.
I don't blame OP for choosing his macbook and burning man over a single Bangladeshi child when OP is likely paying rent to and also employed by people who are personally hoarding wealth to feed millions of starving children and instead using that wealth to invent new ways to make people pay even more for a basic modest existence.
The point is that you have no moral obligation to read the news and learn about the suffering of distant people in some ill conceived attempt to try and empathize with them. Humans aren’t built that way. You don’t have a generalized obligation to inform yourself about the abstract struggles of others and give up your own priorities in some token gesture of support for those people.
Take two people who both go to Burning Man instead of changing some kid’s life in Bangladesh. A reads the news and votes for X out of concern for some disadvantaged group. B doesn’t read the news and votes for Y because he doesn’t perceive the struggles of that disadvantaged group. Notwithstanding that difference, radius of empathy of A and B are almost the same. Both exclude the majority of those suffering in the world—billions of people—from their radius of empathy, not caring enough even to give up a frivolity for themselves.[1] Excessive moralizing over that small difference is indeed rather hypocritical.
[1] The moral rabbit hole here runs very deep. For example, all else being equal, buying an ICE car hurts people in Bangladesh who will suffer the most from rising sea level due to global warming. But at the margin, taking the extra money you’d spend on a new electric car and just giving it to some kid in Bangladesh will do more good than the incremental environmental benefit from buying that electric car.
Please do not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News, regardless of how wrong or annoying you find someone else's comments. Personal attacks, in particular, are right out.
No more of this please, especially since we've hard to warn you multiple times in the past.
Exactly. And my initial point wasn't even criticizing or assigning blame. I was simply pointing out an action that is available to many of us that we may not realize isn't available to everyone. I know in the past it has helped me build my own empathy to learn that I choice I have made isn't open to others and why that might be.
It also needs to be pointed out that the only political system where people aren't allowed to be indifferent is known by the charming name of "totalitarianism".
Truly "disadvantaged" people have little to win from any sort of politics and have little time for it. I don't think hobos give a lot of thought to the supreme court.
I pay a news site and I get high quality news from them that is curated. And since they make money from subscriptions, the need for eyeballs and page views is not a factor. Something to consider.
Not OP, but for me it's an economist subscription. I've also dropped most of my news app usage (I feel disconnecting from the news altogether is a little too drastic) but I definitely feel less irritated without missing too much.
Same for me (reading The Economist). Having a few days or a week to filter news down means I still hear about things in a semi-timely manner but that I don't seem to get caught up in most media's daily churn.
I pay for certain categories: some software (eg, lwn), some industry associations, government/law, and economics (Economist is not one, but is a great idea).
The Economist and Stratechery for me. Also CaspianReport for bigger picture geopolitical stuff. CaspianReport is free, but I give on Patreon which ensures he can focus on quality content rather than attracting advertisers.
I really like the Patreon model, I give to 20+ different Youtubers and writers because I hate what advertisers and corporations have done to modern day media, making it all about eyeballs instead of education.
Have you ever read the Financial Times? More broadly, in addition to FT I try to get a multitude of perspectives without straying too far into extremes (so no Fox News, no CNN) and I try to rely on single-topic sites. FT, NYT, Jerusalem Post, AlJazeera, Aviation Week, BBC, SkyNews, a handful of science and tech journals, HN, and some others. You can get a fairly balanced (not perfect) perspective without the kind of moral panicking and clickbait you’d often find. BBC and Sky being exceptions, but that’s my local news.
I'm with you that disengaging from the news can be a good idea and make one happier, but I strongly disagree that this is owing to journalism having gotten worse. I think that the point of journalism should be to find things that make people outraged, and while this may not be so healthy for an individual, it is healthy on a societal level. This is how scandals are dug up and the powerful held to account. The print news industry isn't inherently less scandal-oriented than digital (at least if you compare apples to apples), it just isn't as fast.
I had a similar reaction reading Aaron Swartz's post on why he hates the news[1]. I'm sure Thoreau would have had the same view of the news in his time. Sure, you are unquestionably better off and probably happier learning Japanese or PDE instead of the daily newspaper. But it still has an important function.
I did this about 4 years ago as well and haven't looked back either. The habits I'd formed around news reading just were not helpful or useful. If you think about it for it a second there is very little informational value given by news articles. The who, where, what, why can be done in a paragraph, the implications and future projects can be done in an opinion piece, because any forward future looking projection is 'opinion' and has error, bias embedded in it. All of this is cheekily now lumped into one. Well that's my view.
I've seen my colleagues go through the most anguishing emotional roller coaster over the the last 3 months with the brexit madness. I've seen emotions run high, I've seen the highs and lows. Everyone is stressed and I'm blissfully content.
I'm yet to experience a life altering impact from skipping the news.
I have been reading news (news on real paper) since I could barely understand what I was reading about. I read news often just for reading.
But I have also stopped reading/watching/hearing news. When election time comes, I will read the laws being proposed, do some google search and pick a candidate or yay/nay a proposition (I live in California).
Just step back and reconsider what 'news' is trying to tell you from a 3rd person view. Ultimately you are being manipulated, imho. To vote for a candidate and/or clicks so that ads can be sold.
Just check this book out. Or at least read reviews of the book.
> How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society Paperback – March 17, 1999 by C. John Sommerville (Author)
You read the law proposals? I don't have weeks to decipher and interpret dry verbose text and cross-reference each party's stance on it by sending emails. Especially since my country has 10+ national fractions.
In general, I try to understand their underlying values by reading discussions and previous news items. I vote based on values, not legislation snapshots.
In California, weeks before an election each voter gets mailed a booklet listing each proposition (proposed law that citizen or groups got on ballot) with argument from groups advocating both yay and nay. Quite handy to view.
And you can get the value each group advocating yah/nay also.
Same with candidates for elected positions.
No average voter can read all proposed laws and hope to understand it. And most definitely no news articles can help anyone to do so imho.
I don't have a choice but to follow some news. For example: I want to know when politicians are trying to ban me from public life. That's a regular occurrence. Following the ACLU and SCOTUSblog will get you enough of the news that matters.
I think that 90% of news is totally unimportant. Its just non stop bad news about stuff that doesn't affect me and I can't do anything about. I would like to stay informed about some level of politics so that I can make informed voting choices but it seems hard to find the worthwhile news and cut through the crap.
I've recently let a couple of subscriptions (a local newspaper, and a car magazine of all things) because I also sensed that politics were being inserted where they didn't belong.
I'd gladly pay a slight premium for news content that's completely politically neutral. I long for the good old days where you couldn't tell where the news presenter fell on the political scale.
I would be inclined to read past the headlines if I received it as plain text, via email. I might even pay for it if that's all it was, and contained absolutely no ads or even links.
That said, I don't know that I'd actually read it, since most news strikes me as obscenely polemical, even when it feigns objectivity. Even the New York Times rubs me the wrong way in this regard.
I stopped reading the news about a year ago. I felt like my emotions were being manipulated by a sharply-honed system built precisely to invoke outrage and draw you in to read more and more of it.
Tim Pool was falsely tarred by the SPLC as a speaker at a Holocaust Denial conference. The only citation given by the SPLC for this was an unvetted web page from a white supremacist website. Turns out, this was (yet another) bald-faced lie.
However, it's his words as a commentator in this video which I find the most informative.
I've had several discussions about this and, as inhumane as it might sound...I'm not sure what value news has in its current form. I don't feel like I'm learning more about other humans, I'm just being spoon-fed a carefully crafted narrative.
If the purpose of news is to disseminate useful information then it has failed. It's now about opinion, entertainment, advertising and maximising engagement (usually by getting people pissed off because misery loves company).
There was a recent story in the UK about a young man from the North West who plotted to murder an MP, who also happened to be a paedophile and a white supremacist (according to reports). Most of the news is a dramatic retelling of how a young kid could get to that point so soon. Our national broadcaster, the BBC, gave him the gift of notoriety and I can't imagine what that has done to his ego except to say he was right.
That isn't news, it's fetishising a burgeoning problem in our politics and titillating readers.
Upskirting celebrities getting out of cars and getting sly bikini shots from a telescopic lens somehow has more priority over proper investigative journalism that can have a positive, legal outcome.
In a more simplistic way, we revel in the pain of other people.
Amen, faster and more frequent news is certainly broken. However, I worry that we are fighting against human nature.
The use of smartphones has demonstrated, I believe, that people will blindly chase their dopamine hits coming from a variety of formats because it is ingrained in human nature. The dopamine reward pathway gives a good feeling and people are naturally inclined to follow the path of least resistance to more hits. If an organization or app tries to fight this, then people will simply use it less. People will naturally gravitate towards (thus pushing the market towards) easy methods of getting a little dopamine rush.
The consumption of fast and frequent journalism is just a symptom of human nature and I have my doubts that there will be a unilateral disarmament by apps and companies to use such tools.
I personally try to recognize this and cut myself short when i keep scrolling, keep refreshing on my phone, etc. However, I am not that good at stopping myself and I am aware of when I do it and work on it. What about people who are unaware of their habits? Looking down at your phone and refreshing likely has become second nature for billions of people.
How can industries fight against this human nature?
(I did not cite any sources I know, if I'm dead wrong on any points please let me know!)
The use of smartphones has demonstrated, I believe, that people will blindly chase their dopamine hits coming from a variety of formats because it is ingrained in human nature. The dopamine reward pathway gives a good feeling and people are naturally inclined to follow the path of least resistance to more hits. If an organization or app tries to fight this, then people will simply use it less.
The way this has been resolved in the past, is that the "trash" news is relegated to the riffraff, and more reliable sources of news are used by the wealthy. The problem, is that even the mainstream news was of the trashy click-bait variety, even in the past going back many decades, if not hundreds of years. Even the news sources that are supposed to be higher end will succumb to the greater speed and greatly accelerated news cycle.
How can industries fight against this human nature?
Industries need to have faith in basic human nature. They need to let everything go viral and stop picking winners and losers. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, after all. We need to have faith that the truth will eventually win out. In 2019, when there has been suppression of speech, that has merely given ammunition to the toxic voices. This also takes the form of bad actors pretending to be on the side of the angels, acting in bad faith by using emotional tactics which act to hide the truth.
Contrarian voices need to be protected. This is precisely what Freedom of Speech is for. Lots of those are going to be toxic, but some of them are going to turn out to be valuable. In the past, Freedom of Speech meant that bad messages could be discredited on their merits. The problem in 2019, is that people are trying to do end-runs around Freedom of Speech not through argument, but through reputation smearing and de-platforming. Basically, short circuiting Freedom of Speech by hacking the right to hear. Do this for a good message, and it only de-legitimizes the good message and gives ammunition to the bad ones.
So, I had never heard this phrase until maybe a year or so ago. Now it seems like (on this site particularly) someone parrots this exact sentence in any thread at all related to news and/or social media.
Where is this coming from? Especially since it is... Emphatically untrue. It's just another one of those turns of phrase that asks you to believe it purely because it's so pithy.
People have studied this. A lot. It's just not true.
Or that the figurative meaning is wrong - that "shining a light" on shady or immoral acts and behaviors is not "the best" for some sense of that word, and there are better options?
As far as I can see, people like the KKK and other White Supremacists have been and still are thoroughly discredited. The only countervailing force to that in 2019 is outrage driven media, produced by other extremist counterparts. If one's business is based on outrage, then you want an enemy to play off of, to generate a vicious circle of outrage and reaction and counter-reaction.
Do most people actually think of the "Ok" hand sign as a Nazi signal? Absent the media spamming this idea, I highly doubt this would ever have been considered anything more than a stupid joke by the mainstream. The reason it spreads, is precisely because it acts perfectly as viral outrage clickbait.
Also, the counterparts on the Far Left also seem to demonstrate the truth of this, through their use of smearing tactics and de-platforming. If anything, they seem to fear the disinfecting qualities of sunlight, the most!
'Sunlight' from the press doesn't necessarily do anything in a court of law, which is the actual thing that is supposed to disinfect society.
A bomb-shell story which drags a corporation or white collar criminal through the mud won't necessarily lead to successful prosecution.
And using sunlight to simply damage a reputation has been used as well. It depends if you believe it's sunlight or not, so we just go back to old-hat media problems.
And using sunlight to simply damage a reputation has been used as well. It depends if you believe it's sunlight or not, so we just go back to old-hat media problems.
So let there be a "Free Marketplace of Ideas." This is again, precisely why we need Free Speech! It's when our society lets someone be the arbiter of what's allowed to be said and heard, that we run into problems.
Well, we can't uninvent the technology of the day, so that's likely to end up like unregulated social media, but we know there are issues with disinformation easily reaching a large number of people (again, old-hat propaganda, just we don't have to throw pamphlets out of planes now).
This isn't an easy problem to solve and I certainly don't have the answers.
Wow, I had no idea that the "Ok" hand sign was supposedly co-opted as a white-power sign until you mentioned it here. I guess I'm still in the shadows, thankfully!
> The problem in 2019, is that people are trying to do end-runs around Freedom of Speech not through argument, but through reputation smearing and de-platforming.
This is absolutely not a new phenomenon. "Red scare" anyone? Free speech has never protected an individual from social consequences only government/state consequences. We probably agree that it's not a good thing, but it's definitely not new nor has it ever not existed.
Jewish people being excluded from clubs is one example of "social consequences." Women being excluded from the clubs other executives attended was another.
Sure. I see how you are using "free speech". I was just objecting to your conceit that this is somehow a new thing which you clearly, with your examples, realize is not true. A misreading on my part I think.
Not sure what you mean here. If Jewish person were allowed into restricted clubs, and people could talk to them and evaluate them on their character, then the true spirit of Free Speech would have been served by this. If a woman would be allowed into the old boy circles, allowed to succeed on her own intelligence and merits, then the true spirit of Free Speech would have been served by this.
Free Speech is important on a purely Epistemological Basis. Sometimes, it's the unpopular ideas which turn out to be the important ones. So long as we can protect Free Speech and the Right to Hear, the unpopular ideas can have a chance to be heard.
> How can industries fight against this human nature?
They don't but in fact, monetize. As you've pointed out this constant need for refresh/dopamine has become second nature for billions. This is a fabulous opportunity for industries to monetize this attention.
This is really not a new fight.
It used to be tabloids vs "real" news - I'm not sure how different today's online battle is. Except for some reason, most of the "real" news are becoming tabloids when moving online.
It may be that now editors and journalists get instant feedback about number of clicks, shares, ad impressions and so on, so that they can chase dopamine hits just as much as the audience can.
Interesting view. With respect to the news industry: the TV format seems to have evolved. Have you seen HBO's Last Week Tonight? In a half-hour, John Oliver (and his writing team) recap the key news in 5-6 minutes and then finish by investigating one topic in depth. That is quite a model. It looks like shows similar to this are being made now, such as Netflix's Patriot Act.
But the print industry hasn't changed much. I wonder how they will evolve?
1) A common and agreed upon standard definition of news.
Facts alone are not news. News also has importance and relevance. It's not news simply because a (major) "news" outlet publishes it.
I ate eggs for breakfast. That's truth / fact. It's not news.
2) A common and agreed upon standard definition of journalism / journalist.
Again, working for a "news" outlet does not make you a journalist. Journalism is a verb. It's a series of actions. It's not a (self-anointed) title.
3) Transparency and full disclosure about what is news (objective) and what is op-ed (subjective).
True story: I've seen a friend who has formal higher edu training in journalism (major'ed or minor'ed, I don't recall) take a (political) position on FB and then back up his "facts" with an op-ed piece. This isn't uncommon.
1) News is an account (story) of an event. The degree with which it is "true" is the degree with which it holds the events to account, and the degree with which the news organization/publisher holds itself accountable for that account/story. Good news is accountable and provides accounts of events. "Truth" is the wrong focus; "fact" is far too malleable (hence the status-quo legitimacy of "alternative facts"); accountability is the goal.
2) A journalist is someone who writes accounts/stories for a news organization/publisher and, in turn, is held accountable (either professionally or legally) for their story. Anyone can be a journalist, but few are willing to hold themselves to the standards of accountability good journalism demands.
3) The division between news and op-ed is marked by the degree and nature of accountability. News organizations are accountable for the news. News organizations call for op-eds and those op-eds have a different standard of accountability. That's why we call them op-eds. If a news organization will not hold itself accountable for a story then it is an op-ed.
We are far too focused on "truth" "fact" and "objective vs subjective". Instead we should focus on what the use of journalism and the news is. The use is accountability. And the special nature of news and journalism, what differentiates it from fiction and bullshit, is that it is also held to standards of accountability.
1) Being an account of X isn't a high enough bar. 100% of what I see on "the news" is an account of something. The problem is, the line between TMZ and Fox or CNN is less defined.
2) " but few are willing to hold themselves to the standards of accountability good journalism demands."
Well yeah. But it's because the dentition of journalism has become "anything done by self-proclaimed journalists." It's entirely self-serving. There is no higher standard. Mainly because the pot is afraid of calling the kettle black.
3) We might call them op-eds but plenty of "news" orgs are all too comfortable presenting their op-eds as news and/or journalism.
You have wedded your opinion of US news organizations to your definition of the news. Those two can and should be kept seperate.
1) Being an account is all the news is. It's a story. The division between TMZ and Fox and CNN is defined. They are all news organizations. They differ in the nature of their accountability and the degree with which they hold themselves accountable for their stories. They show this in their willingness to retract, correct, or stand by stories. And they have a history that we can judge.
You already show that in your opinion of them.
2) Anyone can be a journalist. Just as anyone can be a scientist or a programmer. But to do those things, to be considered a professional in those things, is to hold yourself to a certain set of standards, that is, to hold yourself accountable. I have read excellent and insightful journalism in a newspaper just as I have read it on a local blog. In both cases they have acted with professionalism. I have also seen the inverse, in which case I don't consider them credible journalists or their news to be credible.
3) That's a completely credible criticism of many news organizations. That however, does not target my definition of news, that targets the use of op-eds by news organizations to evade accountability. In which case, they are bad news organizations and you would be justified in considering them as such.
However to insist on 100% "truthfulness" or "objectivity" leads to a metaphysical paralysis where news or journalism is impossible. Show me an 100% true and objective news story? You can't (or you could show your fact from your parent comment, but, as you admit, that is not news). Because it has never been like that, nor need it. Instead we can be pragmatic and demand that the news be useful. what the news is is its use. That use is accountability. Because neither I nor you can be everywhere at once. To overcome that, we rely on news, on accounts of events. But, in turn, we can also, as you have, insist that we have good news and criticise those that are not useful (a Fox News, for instance, that insists on only holding one party accountable).
Agreeing that relevance and importance are important isn't political.
Nor is journalism.
Nor is transparency.
We can't make everything "political" simply because we lack the will and wherewithal to approach it otherwise. The willingness to give "political" that much importance is simply another symptom of the problem. We're lower expectations i instead of raising them. We're rasing to the bottom, for what? To look "political" in the face, eye to eye?
Can we agree that the Fourth Estate's most important role in society is to report on politics and the powerful?
Journalism may not be politics, but reporting on how politics affects people (and even other nations) is journalism's highest purpose. But it's impossible to completely "cover" all aspects of all politics and be 100% unbiased. Therefore, the most important part of journalism is inherently political.
Facing that reality, we can view journalism with a cautious eye. This is critically important for all journalism, actually, as stories are constantly published that mis-state problems, inaccurately describe complex issues, or just blatantly disregard an important detail of a story. These micro-occlusions of information add up to a twisted view of reality for the reader. I think politics is just one of the many ways we should seek to accept and understand the bias in the news.
> Can we agree that the Fourth Estate's most important role in society is to report on politics and the powerful?
I certainly don't agree. Their most important role is to inform the public on things that affect the public's well being. This might include politics and the powerful, but that's not everything. If a hurricane is coming, you need to know about it and you need to know where to go to get safety. Sometimes politics is important to cover. Sometimes powerful people are important to cover. Sometime they are not. It depends on the impact to society. I feel usually news outlets do a poor job of evaluating the importance of the news they report and rather rely on reporting things that will bring the highest notoriety.
> Agreeing that relevance and importance are important isn't political.
Sure, but that seems to be nearly a meaningless statement. I bet we would have disagreements about what is happening around the world that is important.
I think we have a good definition of news. It's been called "the first draft of history" which makes sense since like most first drafts, most of it is garbage and needs to be thrown out.
I claim that we don't. I mean, it's way too ambitious goal to set universal definitions like this, and this is not the point anyway.
> 2. definition of journalism / journalist
Whoever who likes to be called one. This is the silliest proposition, I don't care the slightest of what do you tell a girl when she asks what do you do for money, usually I don't even care who you are at all, I just care if reading stuff on your resource adds value to my life. It's not a honorary title, for goddamn sake, you are not (or rather, unfortunately, you should be not) entitled to anything because you "are a journalist". I care only for what I read, and you (a news portal/journal or a person working for such an entity) mostly care about if what you publish brings you money, and maybe for some artistic matters that make you believe it's your "purpose" or whatever.
So: maybe possible, but not useful.
> 3. full disclosure about what is news (objective) and what is op-ed
Useful, but absolutely impossible. I find a way to publish a story about unicorns fighting dragons in the Singapore and call it news, because I'm fucking Salvador Dali and you won't do a thing about it. And if the country we live in makes it possible to sue me for that, then it's the worst form of censorship possible and basically it's just a shitty country.
> 1.definition of news
Given the 2 and 3, and the fact that your wife or your local farmer might care that you ate eggs for breakfast: both impossible, not useful and yet already solved somehow. Readers eventually buy what they feel (maybe just because of marketing, but still) adds value to their lives (and part of it is news, defined as "facts being of interest to the specific person"). Writers (journalists, if you will) eventually are somewhat forced to write stuff that people will buy, and since some potential users are interested in "news" (i.e. basic facts w/o much of an interpretation being of interest for them), there is an incentive to make such content. So, basically it's THE job of a journalist (defined as "any content maker at all") to find out what is interesting to a specific audience (both facts and op-ed pieces and stories about unicorns) and make it.
So, defining what is the news for your audience is difficult and yet, honestly, I think "journalists" are pretty proficient in finding out what that is, because, well, market economy. The problem with making quality content is not that nobody knows what people want, there just is too little incentive to make quality content, because you only care about larger audience, and the way to sell to larger audience is basically just marketing. At some point, it doesn't even matter that much what you write as long as enough people recognize you as "the source of the news".
After all, I only want to be notified about stuff I actually care about, it may be something that happens once in a few months, plus maybe some very specific stats every day, plus some "op-ed" stuff that is mostly written by actual professionals in their actual industries (which obviously pretty much never can be "professional journalists", simply by definition). In short, what I (and most people) want is expensive to make, and after you make it, you will find hard time selling it to us.
TL;DR: "they" make shitty things, because "we" buy shitty things, and there's no way around it, no matter how hard you try to "define" anything.
P.S.: when I say "buy" I don't necessarily mean literally buying, it may be viewing ads or whatever form of monetization the resource makes up.
Slow news still exists, and always has. Weeklies and monthlies are low pass filters.
In my teens I was an avid news reader and then I heard the aphorism "as worthless as yesterday's news" and I realized: if it won't be useful tomorrow I most likely don't need to know it today (obviously there are a few exceptions, like road closures). And I started to read news sources that reported with higher latency (CSM used to send its small, 7-page newspaper though the mail) and discovered I really never missed anything important.
The article and the comments express the desire for news to be an effective tool to inform and educate the public. While appealing, this idea has never worked in the past, and there's no evidence that it can work in the near future.
The reason is not that the media or the journalists do something wrong. Rather, the vast majority of the public is simply not interested in being educated or informed.
You can send the best art / math / business professor to a school, but if the students are not interested in that field and have no need for a good grade, there will be very little learning done.
The public is quite capable to take any information they are offered, and convert it to an argument in favor of their political or social beliefs; it is also very capable, when given a choice, to select the lowest quality information.
It's unclear to me how anything can be done to counteract those tendencies. And as long as these tendencies stay in place, it seems rather futile to discuss "better news".
This sort of cynic pessimism is getting out of hand...
By most any measure, today's western democracies are the best place, and time in history, to be alive: life expectancy, crime, food availability, mobility.
This is also true of education and "being informed", although those are harder to measure. But literacy rates, high school and advanced degree proliferation, books being published, and of course internet access should be decent proxies.
That's not even including the vast improvements people who aren't white, able-bodied men have seen. Just ask around among women over 70 and you will find plenty who wanted to go to medical school and were stymied for whatever reason. My mother was told that, yes, she can matriculate. "But as long as I am professor, no woman will pass [some required class]"
None of what you wrote addressed the point of the comment you were responding to, which is that it's hard get people to be informed about the news if they just don't care. I'm not arguing that what you said is inherently wrong, it just doesn't have anything to do with the question at hand.
The OP wrote that, "You can send the best art / math / business professor to a school, but if the students are not interested in that field and have no need for a good grade, there will be very little learning done." Let's take that and combine it with the women going to medical school that you referenced.
OP is suggesting that the women going to medical school might put all of their effort into the classes that directly pertain to their field. But if they need an elective class (let's say, some kind of art class, for instance), then they might go into that and put forth the lowest effort possible to achieve a passing grade if it doesn't interest them. OP's suggesting, and rightly so I believe, that the general populous does the same thing with politics. Those that care about it invest more time in reading about it, while those that don't care about it won't invest more time in reading about it and will typically choose the lowest-effort, easiest-to-digest sources of news.
Going back to OP's original question, how to we counteract those tendencies?
That data shows only modest changes since 1940, and no discernible decline in the last decade or so. If anything, turnout was lower in the 80s and 90s, slightly higher in the 60s.
I feel like I understand what you're getting at with that data as it pertains to "interest in politics" at a general level, but I'm not sure how you intend to use that data in this specific conversation. OP and I are wondering how we get the general populous to invest quality time in educating themselves about the news/politics, subjects many people don't care about. How does the data you provided correlate with that conversation?
I am sure you would not consider the electorate that chose the Nazis (giving them by far the largest share, 44%) to be more informed / educated than the modern US electorate.
> today's western democracies are the best place, and time in history, to be alive
> OP's position is basically "everything was better in the past" [that's from your other comment below]
I think the past was horrible, and I'm glad I live in this century. Why did you conclude that I like the past? Was some of my wording ambiguous?
I said:
> this idea has never worked in the past, and there's no evidence that it can work in the near future.
In other words, I believe the majority of the public was not, is not, and will not be (in the foreseeable future) interested in being informed and educated about politics.
Also, I personally never thought of myself as a cynic - I find the world to be quite enjoyable, and getting better (just not in this particular area).
The problem might even be more fundamental than public interest. Even if we had the best possible news organizations, with the best possible journalists, only honest, upright politicians and interest groups, and the best possible news consumers that were interested in the right things, it still might be impossible for most people to be truly knowledgeable about anything but very, very narrow slices of the world, most of the time.
We sort of assume that there's some possible combination of headlines, articles, books, tweets etc that can make us informed and wise about the current state of things in the world, that matter. But what if that isn't true? I think it probably isn't.
I suspect that as long as humans remain the same species, we'll never get to the point where the majority of the population is informed. It's just not fun for most people; or it's too hard; or both.
The trick is to find a system of government that still results in a stable, functional, and comfortable society, even though most of the people have basically no clue what's going on.
I think the Federalist papers were a decent attempt to design such a system of government. In fact, I think it's worked quite well for the past 200+ years.
Perhaps the world changed so much that a new approach might work better. Perhaps that same approach will continue working for a while longer, especially if it evolves a bit. It's a interesting topic but sadly I don't have any good insights to share.
Somewhat surprised that there is no mention of The Correspondent yet. The Dutch version has been quite successful for quite a few years now, and they're launching an international version later this year[0][1].
(Having said that, the authors of De Correspondent sometimes come across as oblivious to how their world views are shaped by living in the cultural bubble that is the Randstad[2]. There is a certain arrogance to the writing style that just makes it feel like the kind of thing that people living in Amsterdam would write, and it sometimes rubs me the wrong way. I guess that makes it the Dutch equivalent to the New Yorker.)
I am looking forward to their English language release. I supported the crowdfunded effort. My wife raves about the Dutch version. I hope the English one can live up to the expectations.
Otherwise I tend to read the Economist, mostly on paper, to get a broad international analysis.
I subscribed to the Correspondent based on the proposition of in depth quality journalism until it decayed into long form leftist outcry and nothing else. I wonder if this type of decay is inevitable.
I think that there is an often overlooked product that solves this problem very well by it's very nature: Weekly newspapers.
Especially when you read them as paperback they take out all the haste. You can't "refresh" them. The style tends to be less lurid, because it is pointless to write an hot article with Tuesday's information if you print on Sunday. Topics are way more broad in my experience but still capture the Zeitgeist of current topics in whatever culture you live in (it has to be a good newspaper, of course). There is of course a certain desire to read everything, since you paid for it, but it's finite: It is not a permanent rat race to read all the news, when you're done, you're done.
Even if you don't use whatever paper you get to it's fullest, you will still realize: You do not actually become an "informed voter" by knowing the exact updated body count of some colorful tragedy on the other side of the world. Reading one well researched multi-perspective article with depth will do just fine!
I don't think this is a problem of the media but rather of the consumer. In the pre-Twitter time people used to be concerned about those consuming only tabloids or trash TV news. At best, possibly even none at all.
In fact the offer of "slow news" is so much larger than "fast news". The New Yorker is actually an example of very slow news ;-) Also on TV/Web streaming there is a lot of slow news like BBC News for instance. The truth is most people find this too boring, they are just not interested in Politics. Maybe new formats like VICE are improving this.
Maybe this problem didn't even got worse but it just became more visible in the age of Google News where you suddenly see that you can read the same article on 200 different news pages - sometimes just copy&pasting from Reuters.
And yes, news is always biased. That's why one should read different sources with different biases... That's a very time consuming task if you are only consuming slow news.
It appears they get their money from subscriptions, yes. There aren't any ads in the magazine. They also do some classes on how to make infographics and write articles.
Works out to almost $20 per issue for a quarterly. So it's a lot more per issue than Time. Not saying it's not worth it. (Time is for dentists' offices and bird cages.) My comment about cost isn't a gripe, just an observation about their business model. It takes real belief in your product to charge that much for writing, when we're so used to getting it for free.
I see a number of comments celebrating the choice to live in a bubble uninformed and blissfully unaware of local and global events. Admittedly, a number of news sources are quite bad at actually reporting the news. But there still are quite a number of news organizations and news reporters that take their roles seriously. You can find them, that is if you are actually interested in being informed.
I'm sure there's some virtue signalling going on here, similar to the "I don't watch TV" from years ago. It just strikes me as odd that people will gloat about their ignorance, on HN of all places.
> I see a number of comments celebrating the choice to live in a bubble uninformed and blissfully unaware of local and global events.
I'm pretty sure my being aware of local and global events, plus voting, plus demonstrating, plus organizing, plus god knows how much time arguing politics on the Internet has done... pretty much nothing at all. I've quit all of it (except the arguing on the Internet part, naturally).
Almost none of the news is important, because it's not effectively actionable (for most people). It's fine if you like the news as entertainment. It's not fine to look down on people for not liking the entertainment you do.
As for ignorance, if you want to be an informed voter/activist/whatever then very little of your information diet should be news. Most of it should be books.
I've seen this sentiment on HN several times before. Just about any time there is an article discussing problems with the state of news, the most prevalent conversations on HN are always about how much better life is when you don't know what is going on. They argue that being informed isn't going to change anything, and yet they're perfectly happy to opine at length about whatever slice of current events happens to make it to the front page of HN as if they have all the context they need.
I would actually argue that it's more meta than you're saying. The people who are unplugging are largely arguing that the majority of todays "fast media" is unverified, poorly sourced, and otherwise low quality. By consuming it ravenously you may feel informed (and angry, because anger is mostly what sells), but you still don't actually know what's going on. So it's easier to be happy by just accepting that you can't learn what's really going on from the media and quit listening to it.
Although to be fair this belief is nothing new. Per Mark Twain, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."
I find comments like this unhelpful. You have made a point, without any real counterpoint. If you wanted to be helpful, instead of doing your own little "You can find them, that is if you are actually interested in being informed" virtue signal posturing, why not post the name of a single such source which you find valuable?
I would sincerely be interested in knowing the sources of some great news, so please share. Until then all your comment amounts to is an insult, without any substance.
The Economist does a good job of informing and analyzing the news. That and the Sunday newspaper will give you enough info to stay informed. There is still plenty of fluff but at least you get to choose what you consume.
Just keep in mind that most news is useless and meant to entertain and hold your attention but give you little to no benefit. Also, note that it has a big impact on your mental health and not for the better.
I think if you mentioned which organizations you actually thought were credible people would disagree. Personally I’m constantly looking for a decent news source but haven’t found any. I settle for multiple bad ones on different sides of the issues.
It seems odd that you would call a lack of news reading ignorance. (What do you call a lack of fake news reading? How do you know what's fake news until the facts are borne out?)
IMO if you want to be ignorant, read the news. If you want to be informed, read last week's or last year's news, which should cure one of a few delusions. If you want to learn something, perhaps read history instead.
Unfortunately this is one of those things where if 99 media companies agree and one doesn’t, all the attention will go to the one that claims to have the latest “scoop”. The story will be completely undeveloped, half the stuff they say will eventually be proven wrong but they will get all the views. And therefore, gradually, the other 99 would follow suit to stay in business.
As long as money/advertising is so lucrative when so much trash is funneled so quickly, this will be a problem. We pretty much have to find a way for companies to gain as much money some other way, e.g. “I’m a billionaire, I will give half a billion dollars to the station that wins a quality journalism award”.
If you’re an individual and not a media company, waiting awhile for the full developed story is definitely better.
Heck, waiting awhile and unplugging works for lots of things. For instance, if you can convince yourself to ignore a hot new TV show for a year (so that it’s “new to you” a year from now), it’ll probably be cheaper; and, you can benefit from average ratings and other info to tell you if the show/season turned out to be not worth watching at all.
The Economist is good, but I find it still a little too frequent for me, especially considering it costs about £5 a week. This for me is a little too much for something I probably won't get through every week. I tend to just buy it when I go on holiday when I know I have the time to get through it.
I'd prefer a digest version once a month, the same size as the weekly version, with "more important" news and the same cost.
Le Monde Diplomatique is a monthly newspaper that focuses on international reporting. I find their reporting very good, although they are outspoken about their leftist position (just as the Economist is outspoken liberal).
Personally, I found it helpful to view information consumption like this:
All information has a time horizon over which it is likely to be valuable. For some outrage news stories, it's just a few hours, while for more thoughtful political analyses, it's a year or two.
Even if you read voraciously, if you're consuming information with a short time horizon of value, you're going to be facing a constant downward momentum of useful knowledge, as the information you know becomes outdated or irrelevant.
Focus as much as you can on reading content that will be valuable for the foreseeable future, and you can avoid that downward momentum of information 'expiring'.
Skip the news entirely. What value does it add to your life?
I’m happy reading blogs and periodicals with my RSS reader (feeder.co), which I check in the morning over coffee. I choose what’s in my feed, not some algorithm, advertiser, or news editor vying for clicks.
re: "Skip the news entirely. What value does it add to your life?"
Yes and no. If it were, by definition, truly news then it would / could add value. The problem with the current media environment is what's passed off as news is in reality fake news. That is, it lacks relevance and importance.
I found I liked watching news after I got a police-scanner and could listen to things as they happened. Police/Fire/Ambulance scratched the itch of "what is going on right now" better then the news of 'What happened yesterday' that the media offered.
It also had the added benefit of being LOCAL, when my local news mostly covered tidbits of national interest.
I'd still tune-in to local radio to get the followup or fuller-details of an event.
The sweet spot - like in most phenomena - seems to be in the middle: for trend correction we need informed people, not people addicted to trivia, neither people that only care about their own belly button. From a stream of 'news' to History essays, there is a place somewhere in the middle for monthly/quarterly 'digested news'. Even weekly news (like the Economist) seems to be too much.
I try and avoid the news whenever possible. Nothing good can come from it. I do however subscribe to a newspaper/magazine called 'Private Eye' that comes out fortnightly. Let's me catch up on the important news :)
I've stopped follwing the news cycle 4 years ago. I realized it wasn't a proper source of information. News needs to be published fast, so there is no time to do a proper source check. It it short, so there is no room for other views. It needs to be simple, easily understood, so it uses the dominant world view as a frame. News needs to get attention/clicks, so it is focussed on negative events, creating a skewed view of the world.
I only read analysis, long reads, investigative articles and news sites that do not focus on news, but on (global) developments. A good example is https://thecorrespondent.com (english version not active yet), I'm a member of the dutch version and I really enjoy reading investigative pieces about our tax system, healthcare, forgotten dutch histories and so on.
All in all I can say that when I stopped following the news cycle, the mental clutter really reduced and it made me feel better.
Just want to quickly namedrop https://thecorrespondent.com/ who are setting out to do exactly this (and have been doing it for some years already in the Netherlands). If you're interested in slower, less emotionally charged news, consider signing up.
A big source of the author's complaints actually is that there is a lot of news that comes out that opposes his worldview.
To me that area is more the problem. Most of what's counted as news comes from one somewhat extreme worldview or another. Usually it depends on the organization. Certain publications consistently come from the left and others consistently from the right and maybe there is a third category which is coming from a different direction. And actually left/right are not exact, but it seems as though people are polarized into two or maybe three camps, with often completely different worldviews in each of them.
It's actually like people are living in completely different universes. Each group is convinced that theirs is the true universe and the other is almost entirely false.
More in-depth articles could theoretically help by creating more opportunities for supplying factual detail and nuance. However, almost all of the in depth articles I see are clearly coming from one of the extreme worldviews.
I guess tests might be, can what you are reporting be verified in anyway, and would someone with a different worldview be able to gain information from it? Does it seem impartial.
To some degree it's an almost impossible task because even basic perception is tinted by worldview. But news can try to stick to uncontroversial facts and avoid assuming that other worldviews have no validity.
The other aspect is that the monetary incentives push them towards feeding a particular worldview rather than taking a chance of contradicting it with something too nuanced.
My guess right now is that there may be a way to improve the availability of truly primary sources of information by taking advantage if the internet. That can eliminate the bias that many news outlets would take on interpreting events.
Politics seems to be the most difficult case but also the most important.
Maybe it would help for people to realize that they are occupying parallel universes.
I have a theory that news occurs with a far lower frequency than people think, far lower than even when people try to account for their knowledge of the 24 hr. news cycle. In my theory, most of what counts for news, is either a story update (737 Max stories), or not news (say Trump "news").
My hypothetical news organization would strive to identify the unifying element of a given news item, and then keep one article about them. The article would include the following elements: a summary, a timeline, a fact set, and a commentary or critique. All subsections would be allowed to evolve, but the "story" would be one thing.
I've considered trying to self fund this somehow, but I've never convinced myself that it would really get traction.
Have you seen Wikipedia's current events portal? [1] It's pretty much what you describe there, sans critique (level 1, factual reporting).
In trying to escape the aggregators and filter bubbles, I have blocked all news sources on my phone (including HN!) save for Wikipedia. Since the stories are only high-priority and slowly evolving, I spend a lot less time on reading news, and am happier for it.
I'd pay a approximately $10 monthly fee for this if it was minimally biased and had wide coverage of all news stories. I'm unsure if enough people would to become profitable, but some market exists.
For some long running stories that I only tune into occasionally, such as the Muller Investigation, I do not have enough context to fully understand the newest headlines. The only place where full comprehensive coverage will be in one place is in a book, and while I often buy books of that genera it will not be released until after the topic is concluded. This seems to be a one-stop-shop for everything about a news topic.
I think you'll have more success if you find a niche to start with. Maybe US National Politics & Economics, which covers your two examples. Finding your zone and sticking to it can separate you from the mainstream news which follows hype much better than a startup organization can.
I think this type of project is a great candidate for Crowd Funding. Crowd Funding can give positive reinforcement for a product/market fit and to help attract journalism talent.
I would pay for something that let me keep up with actual news, with a time lag that allowed me to get a more stable picture after the first flurry of opinions and overselling had exhausted most of its energy.
"I have a theory that news occurs with a far lower frequency than people think, far lower than even when people try to account for their knowledge of the 24 hr. news cycle."
I gave up Reddit for Lent, and I've been shocked how little news actually happens in a day. I compulsively check Apple News (I know, baby steps), but without all of the Reddit commentary, wise cracks, trolling, and mutually reinforcing outrage, it all just seems very repetitive.
"Yep, Barr still hasn't released the Mueller report."
"No, the House still doesn't have Trump's tax returns."
"Candidate X is too progressive/too moderate/too male/too old/too young to be the Democratic nominee, even though it's still almost a year before any Democrats can vote on them."
"Still no trade agreement with China."
"Trump makes hyperbolic claims about an action he might take, but doesn't actually take any action."
That seems to be the daily news summary every day for the past few weeks.
I like the idea of "slow news." I imagine my ideal state would be a combination of slow news and rapid fire updates. You get depth on the things that deserve depth, as well as a shallow horizontal understanding of the most current happenings across the board.
From the reader side, the challenge would come in making the time for the slow news part when the rapid fire updates never stop, and in resisting the urge to equate seeing the rapid fire updates with actually being informed on the issues (i.e. "I don't need to read this in-depth look at the border situation; I've already seen a bunch of small updates on that"). From the publisher side, monetization is the ever-present issue
Your dobelli link is 404 :( anyway, this whole problem isn’t new but it’s very hard to solve. How to stay informed but not bloated? I don’t know... here they compare mainstream news to fast food so I guess that’s one way to look at it: https://thecontext.net/opinion/2017/04/4/the-post-truth-and-...
The Lindy effect is a concept that Taleb talks a lot about. Basically the best estimate of how long anything perishable will remain useful is how long its been around already. ie the stuff that will remain useful in 10-50 years are the ideas/texts/plays/ideas that have been around a long time already. Recent news is likely worthless in an equally short time.
So best to learn from centuries or millennia old books, rather than looking at twitter feed - or breaking news.
I would really like a big news service. These focuses might be a little morbid, but like major catastrophes (e.g. Idai), a single pre election explaining the stances, a post election on the results. Right now articles are being written on one person saying something about an event of interest. You can read 10 paragraphs a day on the Mueller report when nothing has really progressed on that front. I would love something that just lets me know when big stuff actually happens (e.g. wake me up when the report is out).
We are experience trust scarcity in online media because trust hasn't been part of social media's business model. By extension it stopped being part of the news publication's business model (everyone is forced to compete for clicks). That and because on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
Ironically we are increasingly willing to get into stranger's cars and allow strangers stay at our homes because a few corporations like Uber and Airbnb were able to quantify, materialize and monetize trust. So it's not that much of a stretch to imagine an internet where trust plays a role in the way we distribute, consume and exchange information online. Hacker News is a case in point.
Ready for the shill?
We're building Relevant to make it easy to set up communities similar to HN, each with its own trust/reputation metric (based on personalized pagerank algorithm). So instead of using clicks / votes, all users and content get a trust/reputation score. The result is that rankings don't represent popularity, but relevance, resulting in better feeds and making communities easier to moderate. These trust metrics are much more resistant to sybil/sock-puppet attacks and can be used to build healthier business models, from prediction markets to advertising.
I think the issue is too much trust. Too many people believe that because a Network, Publication, Author, or Anchor published quality work in the past, therefore, they can be trusted to reliably deliver news in the future. People's sources, access, knowledge, agenda, and effort vary wildly and each story needs to be judged on its own merit.
Right, so maybe scarcity of trustworthiness, or trust metrics/signals is more accurate. Plenty of popularity/click metrics, but how often do we really want to know what the masses think about complex nuanced topics?
This is a harsh truth everywhere. News are being killed, as the reality, information and the data associated with it, all have been broken, categorized and used to manipulate people so that they can not conceive another reality and views. Many people is just looking through the lenses that paints better their own egocentric conception of the world or just the cases they need to rationalize what is happening on this confusing times.
News regulation has been labeled as "useless" or "censorship" too soon. The problem is the same with other industries that have some mind-shaping power, people should have some freedom to "control" the industry and the way the information flows through their processes and from/to the society in general. This is not a trivial problem and the fact that people is vulnerable to be manipulated and their biases harnessed in some non-obvious way makes it more difficult. Also we have the problem that we haven't been educated into metacognition, structured and critical thinking. Education systems should prepared people for information overload and into processes to derive the truth even when they face an adverse and hostile environment.
Much of internet news seems to follow the TV news model: lurid "breaking stories" interrupts and soundbites designed to capture your interest and trick you into watching advertising and vapid commentary. The important information is usually summarized quite adequately in a couple of headlines or sentences the next day, and it's usually easy to dig up more information if you really care.
News has been turned into an entertainment-sport where they make sure that there are always two opposing sides. It's manipulated by a few into giving you enough information to be outraged and inflamed but not informed. You can be on the right or the left it does not matter. What matters for the news business is that you get fed enough information so that you continue to watch and they make a profit.
The heads of the news channels are ex-entertainment heads who make sure that people continue to watch by feeding people more outrage.
The best thing people can do is stop reading and watching the news on a daily basis. Most of the news that is reported is useless since there is no substance to it and will disappear without any impact relatively fast. I believe that if it's important you'll hear about it eventually.
"Slower better news" will never happen since it's not in the interest of the news business to create it. We have to be the ones that need to stop consuming it and figure out how to stay informed without being manipulated.
I've been thinking about this for a while, even pitched the following:
Good news. News that makes the world better (aka journalism). Distilled deductive logical reasoning, observations and theories. Not gossip, gawking, envy, or mindless time sinks.
For me this pragmatically works out to a combination of hackernews, hackaday, massdevice, arstechnica, atlasobscura, and podcasts/pbs/npr.
I don't think it's that urgent because most people do not need to read most news. For people with particular responsibilities, it can be helpful to be up-to-date on the narrow field of news related to your responsibilities. For most people, there may only be a 5-10 relevant news events per year. The fact that you can access news from everywhere in the world instantaneously and at low monetary cost does not make it inherently useful, and if anything, it's likely to mislead you profoundly about your level of knowledge about the world and the stories that you are reading.
Stories about plane crashes and mass earthquake deaths and things like that are mostly about titillation and encouraging a morbid fascination with death. It also discourages people from focusing on the things that they can control in their life. The press doesn't like to admit it, but a lot of the 'hard news' is just /r/watchpeopledie in a necktie.
I subscribe to a paper that comes out each Friday, called weekendavisen. Until May last year it didn’t have news on the web, they do have an electronic paper now but I’ve never visited.
It’s high quality news in lengthy articles, in fact I’m not even in its demographic because it has a lot of culture stuff as well and I don’t really care about that.
I really like the fact that it’s relevant though. Because it only comes out on Fridays, only the stuff that actually mattered during the week makes it in there.
If something big happens I’ll turn to internet public service, but otherwise I mostly ignore news outside of my weekly paper. I highly recommend it if you want to stay informed but cut the bullshit and have a similar option.
I subscribe to both the FT and the Economist precisely because slow news is what they do.
The FT tends to studiously avoid clickbait, avoid reporting every detail of 'this politician said that' and goes straight for the hard analysis of what it means.
Doesn’t slower, better news conflict with how news is primarily funded today i.e. advertising? Tabloid news has existed much longer than I’ve been alive, and their style (attention-grabbing, exaggerated titles) matches the kinds of ads they display. A newspaper on a slower circulation cycle would need to attract advertisers that market on similar cycle if the newspaper is dependent on ad revenue (e.g. month-long offers).
A subscription-only / patron-only news service makes sense for the typical customer of a Bloomberg terminal, but what about everyone else? Do they just pay for headlines or three-sentence summaries?
You might say that most people don’t need that frequency of news, and for most topics I would agree. However, there are topics like sports that create news on such a frequent basis, and topics like politics where one could argue that being accurately informed in a timely manner is a responsibility and a necessity for a well-functioning democracy.
Tl;dr I don’t think you can separate the news from the manner in which it is funded, and the issues in quality and business-viability that we’ve heard a lot about is evidence for it.
I simply buy a weekly newspaper and read it. I’m always 1-1.5 weeks behind so I never feel as “emotional” or follow things that closely. I want a general feel for some of the things happening in the world and that is it
Argh, it pains me that even professionals cannot get the word "peruse" right...
"I skim e-mail newsletters in my in-box, scroll through my Twitter feed, and peruse the news apps on my phone; later, in the office, I tap through my notifications and monitor more than a dozen news-related apps, including Facebook and Twitter, while juggling other tasks. I usually feel as though I’m managing to stay abreast of the day’s biggest news stories, but my reading tends to be fragmentary—I’m only skimming a story or absorbing a partial update."
There are so many interesting, rich, deep topics to study that I just don't have much interest in news anymore. It's so bite-sized, barely informative, and usually of no practical or emotional value. A great deal of our desire to "be informed" would be better served avoiding the news altogether, finding substantial things to focus on.
I have started reading the news differently in recent months. If the story seems to incite outrage, I paint all actors in the story as acting in good faith. This is obviously not true, but it helps break the cycle of feeling like the world is going off the rails, and I think it is a good method for figuring out what's actually going on.
Maybe slightly off topic but the word "quest" implies (to me at least) something long term and ongoing, and yet "urgent" seems to contradict this. If anything, "urgent quest" seems like an oxymoron.
I guess in this day and age of instant gratification, even our quests need to be urgent.
It struck me today: are URLs the only kind of "viral" anybody considers to be good? I'm not talking about dormant viruses or symbiotes or whatever, but viruses in general seem to generally have been a problem for humans throughout history (or at least since their discovery).
This was one of my goals in building https://statesreport.com. It won't necessarily be the first site to break news, but the goal is to provide better news based on NLP + ML classification.
Just read the news less often. Nobody really needs to know the news on a day to day basis unless your personal safety is at risk. Just read a monthly magazine like the Atlantic and learn the overall themes of what’s happening.
I want the best version, vetted and comprehensive, of all the news in the previous week. If it's breaking news, I want to have a single point reference of the current best information.
I read weekly-magazines mostly and listen to podcasts. Locally, mostly Respekt, a czech magazine, often cooperating with the Economist. It is decent. I like it.
I hear this same statement come up in conversation a lot more recently. A lot of us agree that the news seems broken, though every time I have this conversation we can never find a good solution to the problem.
I had tried making a simple app to fix the problem. Simple NLP to group articles from different outlets. But I even find myself going back to the news feed and not using my own project.
I remember when Jon Stewart said years ago that the 24-hour news cycle is really designed for 9/11; for anything less than a catastrophic event like that, they have to manufacture problems.
I think the worst offenders of this are Fox News, but it's not like CNN or MSNBC are blameless. Spending days talking about the latest typo on in the president's tweet ends up with a bizarre view of reality; even if you're not watching Alex Jones or Sean Hannity, there's this bizarre, us-against-them, almost-conspiratorial vibe to a lot of what's in the news.
BTW, I'm hardly better; I used to check Donald Trump's Twitter daily as well, for almost two years.
I think the worst offenders of this are Fox News, but it's not like CNN or MSNBC are blameless.
I remember being disgusted at Fox News, especially during the WMD debacle. I was right there with Jon Stewart when he criticized it as "Faux News." Certainly, "it's not like CNN or MSNBC are blameless." In recent years, they've become every bit as bad.
there's this bizarre, us-against-them, almost-conspiratorial vibe to a lot of what's in the news
Start counting the subtle references to these. It's pretty much everywhere across mainstream news sources.
I still don't think CNN or MSNBC are as bad as Fox News yet. Sean Hannity is basically Alex Jones-lite, and Tucker Carlson is pretty much completely disingenuous (and if you want to talk about us-versus-them, I recommend counting the number of times he says "elites" during his show). Plus, Fox and Friends is pretty much just an elaborate propaganda program for the president at this point.
Even if you agree with Trump's policies (I don't), I cannot see how anyone could not see the blatent and purposeful right-wing propaganda of Fox.
Try watching Tim Pool on youtube (timcast/subverse)... he's centrist/liberal leaning but absolutely calls out a lot of the crap on all sides of the coin.
Fox is the only mainstream cable news that shows the other side. The two programs you mentioned are opinion segments. The daily programming is much more balanced.
IMO the daily segments at Fox have been much more fair in the recent years than CNN or MSNBC have been.
Disclaimer: I am conservative. It's hard to watch left-leaning cable news. It's also hard watching hard right wing segments like Hannity. I do watch one segment of Fox (The Five). I like the 5 panel dynamic.
I cannot see how anyone could not see the blatant and purposeful right-wing propaganda of Fox.
It's easiest to see propaganda, when the lies are about you/your side. To see how CNN or MSNBC fit Noam Chomsky's "propaganda model" you have to look at the times when they pushed narratives against the truth. To do that, you need to have some perspective outside the bubble around CNN and MSNBC, or be unlucky enough to have them push a lie or false narrative about you.
I feel that journalists haven't shown enough self criticism on serious issues with how they operate like click-bait-ism, hyperbole-laden head line writing and the Gell-Mann amnesia. On the face of such and other issues I see them mostly on an defensive stance than that of any serious self introspection. It is rare to see even acceptance of these and other problems from them, let alone thought of any solutions.
They need to get off their ivory towers, and be transparent about their own vulnerabilities.
Are those fonts a special journalist joke? They are 100% unreadable, I just don't understand why a reputable newspaper/journal would use such font selection.
What news? When was the last time any major outlet reported a news story that originated from the heart and not the overbloated ego? Not to mention, when was the last time someone reported a news story without using terms like "left" or "right" or "socialist".
As someone who does not give a single ounce of care for the political circus that people are enslaved by, do you realise how dumb it all looks from sidelines?
New Yorker should thoroughly retract the discredited "very fine people" hoax before suggesting that we need "better news". Apologizing to Trump and to their readers would be a responsible thing to do as well.
Reading the print version of a newspaper isn't going to help, because they're just as guilty as anyone of putting up repetitions and very minor updates of the same few stories instead of actual, y'know, new things that have happened. Just look at what's on the NYT front page right now.
* "The Border Is Broken. And There's No Plan To Fix it." Yawn. This has been in heavy rotation for weeks. Also, poor grammar.
* "Black Hole Image Revealed for First Time Ever" Super cool, but after the first thirty stories I saw about this I'd like to hear about some other scientific advance.
* "William Barr Testimony Highlights: Attorney General Says He Thinks ‘Spying Did Occur’ on Trump Campaign
Video" Also on heavy rotation for days now.
* "Israel Election Live Updates: As Gantz Concedes, Netanyahu Set for Victory" OK, one out of four so far.
You get the idea. Google News is even worse.
* Trump urges inquiry into 'attempted coup' against him
* Israel Election: Netanyahu Appears Headed For Win In Close Race
* IRS commissioner "working on letter" in response to request for Trump tax returns
* Police investigating death of 20-year-old college student who collapsed at Hilton Head Island off-campus party
* The E.U. Seems Ready to Put Brexit on Ice. But for How Long?
* How Stephen Miller tightened his grip over Trump's immigration and border policy
Those are almost all retreads, again excepting the Israel election. Some are damn near duplicates of each other. It's as though even the most "modern" news sources are still stuck on one new headline per day. Every morning when I check in, there's 90% overlap with the previous day.
We're not being overwhelmed with news; we're being overwhelmed with olds. My own urgent quest is not for news that's slower or better according to some arbitrary notion of quality. I'll judge that for myself. All I ask is for news that's news.
> "The Border Is Broken. And There's No Plan To Fix it." Yawn. This has been in heavy rotation for weeks. Also, poor grammar.
That's a long form article about a variety of issues with the immigration system, from immigration courts to how migrants are detained. It's very informative. I read a lot on the subject and I found more than a few facts in here that I wasn't aware of.
> "William Barr Testimony Highlights: Attorney General Says He Thinks ‘Spying Did Occur’ on Trump Campaign Video" Also on heavy rotation for days now.
How has that been reported "for days now"? That quote is literally from his testimony earlier today.
> "Black Hole Image Revealed for First Time Ever" Super cool, but after the first thirty stories I saw about this I'd like to hear about some other scientific advance.
But it's not like the NYT has 30 stories about this, the fact that we have a lot of different news sources isn't a bad thing. Though you do have a point about a lack of scientific reporting
William Barr has never made that claim. And he went on to say, right after that quote, that the Justice Department is conducting an investigation into this. That's very big news! Trump tweeting about how Obama spied on him is very different than the Justice Department dedicating resources to investigating the FBI, Obama, and Hillary Clinton.
Let's say for the sake of argument that it qualifies as news. Does it change the overall argument that "news" outlets try to claim far too much of our attention for topics they've already saturated, in the process failing to bring new events to our attention? Or are we just sealioning here?
I think it depends. If you use NYT or WaPo or WSJ as your primary news source I don't believe you'll see duplicates (if you only pick one of those 3, obviously each of those papers will publish their own version of the same story), excluding editorials. To a lesser extent this is true with the CNN news site, if you exclude their opinion pieces and "Analysis" articles (which tend to just link to their actual news article and add the potential political ramifications. Not true journalism, but not really an editorial either). Though the same can not be said of the actual CNN TV channel, which I find nearly unwatchable because they rehash essentially the same information over and over. I can't comment much about other sources.
As for failing to bring new events to our attention, I totally agree. The 4 outlets I mentioned above don't give enough attention to international news, stuff that really is important. Even in domains that are heavily covered bits get left behind. Like a Trump-appointed federal judge for the Federal Court of Appeals who had never been a judge of any kind before (The BAR recommends at least 12 years of judge experience for that position, the nominee didn't even have their law degree for 12 years) and was an active member of a SPLC-recognized hate group (who was confirmed by the Senate, btw). I don't have a single news article about that one, which is an absolute shame.
I'm just not entirely sure what stories should be cut. Maybe it will come down to just having a better aggregation system and UI to discover and keep track of these stories.
I've been able to direct my focus and energy to much more productive tasks since I disconnected. Of course I entirely missed that whole Supreme Court thing until after it was over, and I have no idea what people around me are talking about when they discuss some iteration of the most recent outrage. To some extent it's like they're living in a different culture than I am. I still feel that it was a good decision, and I continue to ignore the news.
I might come back if enough journalism sources can take the New Yorker's suggestion to heart.