Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)

I fully agree with this. Scanning Google News or a couple of the more professional international news services like BBC &#x2F; Al Jazeera &#x2F; Reuters I still feel pretty well informed (and confident that there&#x27;s usually nothing of immediate consequence to me) but it doesn&#x27;t grow into &quot;expert analysis&quot; or impact my feelings much. Here&#x27;s another thing I noticed: how manipulated &#x2F; manipulative it is. And not just news and I don&#x27;t just mean politically - I know everyone thinks that news that doesn&#x27;t align with their politics is just brainwashing. Broadcast TV is just generally awful now IMO.<p>We went quite a few years without ever seeing cable. My kids would stream shows and consume other media on-demand, but any advertising was minimal and fairly non-intrusive. And then they were watching a kids show at a hotel once and the ads came on and the effect it had on them was crazy. They suddenly desperately needed all the toys in the commercials and were repeating catch phrases from ads after only seeing them a couple of times. The contrast in their behavior was insane. And they HAD to keep watching it like I hadn&#x27;t seen before. I spent a week off-grid with my parents a while back and it was great. We came home and my Mom put on the news suddenly everything was terrible and she was angry, but she had to keep watching.<p>Just awful for mental health if you can&#x27;t separate yourself from it.

As someone who just stepped back into pop culture after being in prison for years (so might as well been on the moon) my first shock was just how horrible it all is now. There is no news worth watching. Cable news is just a pile of filth excremented by a Labrador Retriever that solely eats baby diapers. I thought I will watch Bloomberg since if real money is involved it can&#x27;t be too manipulative. Nope, wrong. The internet is just a fireheap. Let&#x27;s check Reddit. Oh god close the browser window immediately. WTF? Slashdot? Um, what is this, someone wearing a Slashdot skin suit? How about the sites by supposedly rational academics on each side of the political persuasion to get some balance. WTF? Just hate and anger and toxicity on a crazy level otherizing any opinion not their own. People are once thought great intellectual insides making incredibly uncharitable frankly hate filled comments and self isolating in echo chambers. Google Discovery app... &quot;here&#x27;s some blog posts summarizing relationship posts made on Reddit&quot;. Huh? Why would anyone want to read this let alone have it further aggregated for them? Seriously, modern American discourse has less humanity, compassion, depth, and recognition of nuance THAN PRISON. Or maybe prison just made me less patient of bull crap and able to immediate horrible people by their mannerisms. Seriously this site is the only place I have found still sane and enlightening.

I strongly agree with this. I would, however, like to call out one TV program here in the U.S. that I think comes much closer to approximating the experience of “reading a 5,000-word article”: PBS NewsHour. It’s great, completely free and available to watch online, and you can even get most of what you need from their podcast alone (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;newshour&#x2F;feeds&#x2F;rss&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;segments" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;newshour&#x2F;feeds&#x2F;rss&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;segments</a>).<p>It consists of fairly in-depth, thoughtful coverage of both domestic and worldwide news topics, as well as a tiny bit of political analysis on Mondays and Fridays. It almost never devolves into the breathless, “the world is about to end”-type coverage found on basically all cable news programs. Judy Woodruff and her team are really great. I dearly miss Gwen Ifill and Jim Lehrer.<p>The Economist is also a great resource, as has been pointed out by other commenters here. They publish an audio edition of each week’s newspaper, too.

Spoiler: He did not actually quit the news, just watching news on TV as opposed to reading articles.<p>&gt;<i>I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole. There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic.</i>

So much to unpack here.<p>For starters, being informed makes for more interesting conversations with others. It means that you get to reflect on what you stand for, and grow as an individual with an opinion.<p>News is also the gateway for deeper information. If you stick to just the news, that&#x27;s one thing, but if you then go deeper into the topic (what is the relationship between Ukraine and Russia?) then you get invaluable context. Without following current events, how would you know what is an important topic to follow?<p>Finally (but not lastly), news makes you informed when it comes time to vote at the municipal, state, and federal level. If you don&#x27;t follow the developments in your community, your vote is at best useless, at worst it&#x27;s harming the democratic process.<p>Edit: I should be clear on what I mean by news. In the traditional sense, it&#x27;s reporting on facts, checking sources, and providing two sides to every story. Opinions and partisan &quot;news&quot; are not that.

At someone point in the last two years I stopped watching the news, because it was just an endless stream of useless information about COVID. I’m not sure I felt better, but it certainly saves some time.<p>Point 3 is spot on, most of the commentators have no idea about what going to happen. At best their guesses a marginally better than my own. Once you realise this, watching debates between journalist and political commentators becomes pointless. I simply don’t see the point in some expert trying guess when Russia will attack Ukraine for instance. Tell me when they attack. Just report whats happening, not what might happen, because your going to get it wrong.

In light of the current situation in Europe I&#x27;ve thought of a rule of thumb I give people about media they consume.<p>If someone is painted as an enemy, and the information you&#x27;re given makes their actions or motivations seem irrational, you&#x27;re likely not being given all relevant information.<p>In the same vein as this article, I&#x27;ve also quit Twitter a year ago and it&#x27;s been great. Pretty much the same effects also.

One item he only tangentially refers to: Most developing stories are not worth reading.<p>At one point in my news addiction, I decided to stop following it on a daily basis but instead &quot;catch up&quot; on all the previous month&#x27;s news once a month.<p>So when the new month began, I scrolled and caught up on all the news feeds in my RSS reader. And you&#x27;d then see this pattern: Breaking news story. Lots of follow up stories that day and the next few days. If you compare the information content at the tail end of these stories vs the early stories, you&#x27;ll realize how much junk is in the early stories: Wrong information and filler information. By the end of the saga, it&#x27;s mostly accurate - there&#x27;s not much information churn.<p>So when I would read day to day, I&#x27;d read all those articles, and have my knowledge slowly get updated&#x2F;amended as each day passes. Why go through that much trouble? Just wait towards the end. You&#x27;ll get more information from reading 2-3 articles at the tail end than the 20-30 you may read throughout.

&gt; A common symptom of quitting the news is an improvement in mood.<p>Anecdotal data point here, but I experienced more than just an improvement in mood. I had a completely unexpected blossoming of immense amounts of creativity.<p>About three weeks into my total news cut off, I started to feel sober in a way that is similar to discovering sobriety during December holiday weeks with family after non stop drinking for months in College.<p>Unlike the author in the linked article, I did a complete cut off from all &quot;news-like&quot; sources: TV news, Youtube channels, social media, reddit, podcasts that talk about current events, blogs and newsletters that discuss news - all of it.<p>When conversations started to become awkward (about 6 months after being completely cut off and I could no longer infer&#x2F;derive the common assumptions underlying a conversation in a group), I subscribed to The Economist, directed their Espresso newsletter to Feedbin and started reading that about every other day. I found that a handful of bullet points about what&#x27;s going on in the world per week is sufficient for me to keep up with any conversation I find myself in.<p>If there are any other news abstainers here, I&#x27;d love to hear your life hacks and tricks that you use to navigate the world.

There are things that happen in the news that may affect your day to day life.<p>Apart from the obvious things such as covid, there are a lot of things going on <i>all the time</i> that may influence your voting decisions (not just in the run up, but the entire time someone is in office), purchasing decisions, where you go on vacation, who you want to work for, how you get to work today etc.<p>I guess if that is fine for you, then please feel free to carry on and go book your vacation to the Ukraine, drive a Volkswagen, work for facebook, use too much water during a drought season, have your garden furniture blow through your windows when that storm rolls in, have a BBQ during a high-risk fire season, don&#x27;t use condoms, and then just flat out are late to work today because you didn&#x27;t know about the strike&#x2F;accident&#x2F;whatever on your usual route. Good luck.<p>By all means, quit twitter or facebook or whatever but at least read the headlines from major journalistic outlets. Something might happen that <i>deeply matters to you</i> and you won&#x27;t know about it otherwise.<p>News does not always only happen to other people.

I didn&#x27;t write that article, but I certainly could have - I&#x27;ve noticed exactly the same things, and clearly have had some identical conversations with people about the value of &quot;being informed.&quot;<p>The way I describe it is that all you can ever hope for with &quot;following the news&quot; is eventual consistency with some representative subset of world events. I don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s happening as it happens, and I don&#x27;t know everything that&#x27;s happened, so I&#x27;m (by the requirements of reality) both behind and only updated on some events.<p>I&#x27;m just happy being far longer on the &quot;eventual&quot; window and having a somewhat lower amount of representative content.<p>What I&#x27;ve also learned is that almost everything <i>actually important</i> will filter to me some way or another. It&#x27;s absolutely impossible to live under a rock if you interact with other people, because they&#x27;ll ask you about XYZ event. And, often, enjoy updating you if you&#x27;ve not heard about it!<p>I also agree with the &quot;Read three books&quot; observation - I&#x27;d rather someone recommend three books on an interesting topic to me than link me to some hour long video. The books take longer, but I&#x27;m likely to have at least some familiarity with the topic, from a few different points, with the books. YouTube will make people think they&#x27;ve got some understanding, when it&#x27;s largely missing.

I quit the news roughly 20 years ago and never looked back. The way I explain it to people is that the news is simply a form of entertainment that I don&#x27;t really enjoy.<p>I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s been pointed out before, but the news is also a horrible way to actually understand the world around you. What gets discussed is the most novel&#x2F;stimulating things that happened--if you attempt to fit a model of the world to these data points, you end up completely wrong. If I am interested in a topic (immigration trends in a country, covid statistics, what&#x27;s happening with electric car subsidies, etc.) I just seek out the necessary information myself.<p>You know what I really want? A version of &#x27;the news&#x27; that is done quarterly and is just sampling of what&#x27;s happening in the lives of 100 random people. Who are they, some basic statistics about then, and what&#x27;s affecting their lives written up in few paragraphs for each person. Just an unbiased sample of the &#x27;real world&#x27; from people outside my bubble.

Jan 10, 2021 was the day I unsubscribed and&#x2F;or deleted every news source I had. I just couldn&#x27;t take it anymore. That week capped off a decade of alarmist content that seemed to start at the end of the housing crash, but continued to get angrier and nastier every year. I lost family members to the brainwash that is the &quot;news&quot; and it has been heartbreaking. It&#x27;s honestly worse than losing someone due to death, because they&#x27;re right there, in front of you, just a different, angrier, person that uses words and expressions that make no sense, and it replaces all those good childhood memories you used to hold of them.<p>Honestly, I have never felt better being disconnected from it all. It really frees up the brain to ponder on things I can actually control in my life.

I have zero trust in media anymore. Watching un-edited videos of certain famous events, then reading what well-respected, reputable news outlets wrote about it... it was basically at tabloid level how misrepresented it was.<p>Best I can do - if particularly interested in a current event and there&#x27;s no video footage - is sample wide range of news sources and see if there&#x27;s any common strand of truth between the lies.<p>But more often than not, I don&#x27;t care anymore.

I&#x27;ve uninstalled Facebook and stopped reading &#x2F; watching the news. I read HN and a few local subreddits via RSS. I do feel much better mentally.<p>I would, however, like a way to be informed of breaking news. I tried a few apps but their idea of &quot;breaking&quot; news often involved celebrity gossip. I really only want to know if its MAJOR: war breaks out, aliens land and make contact, fusion is finally perfected and we&#x27;re all no longer required to labor 40 hours a week.<p>My current solution is basically: if something major happens my wife tells me about it.

My favorite way to demonstrate the news&#x27;s general irrelevance is to go to archive.org and look up the front page of your favorite news source from, say, 10 years ago. In hindsight, paying attention to nearly anything on the news a decade ago gave you no useful information to date. Why would today&#x27;s news be any different?

I thought it was odd when YouTube started implementing a &quot;Covid-19 News&quot; feed to the home page that couldn&#x27;t be disabled. I get why they would implement such a feed as a default, but not letting people turn it off and let people watch cat videos or whatnot in peace seems like a bad idea.

Life hack: if you do want to keep up on global current events but can&#x27;t stand the breathless media circus, get your news from Wikipedia.[1]<p>If you actually want to make a difference consider putting more into getting engaged locally, whatever that means for you. National and global scale issues are really easy to fall into a despair&#x2F;paralysis cycle with.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Portal:Current_events" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Portal:Current_events</a>

I used to listen to NPR while doing chores like washing dishes, laundry, driving, etc. As of late, I’ve come to be increasingly dissatisfied with NPR functioning as the unofficial spokesperson for the Democratic Party (chiefly broadcasting stories compressible into 0 bits…). I’ve nearly completely replaced that habit with listening to Lex Friedman. Lex does long form interviews with a wide variety of guests. He is both respectful and curious. The medium is just flat out better on both sides - you can start&#x2F;stop a podcast when the dishes are done, or to look up related info or to discuss something. You can skip the episodes that don’t interest you. And, perhaps best of all, it isn’t a constant stream of doom, gloom and outrage porn

A brief summary of my experience:<p>1. I never had a TV<p>2. I&#x27;ve read print newspapers (local, international) every day for a decade<p>3. I&#x27;ve read online news (local, intl) every day for more than a decade<p>4. I&#x27;ve never was active (neither reading the feed nor posting something) on any social network except Tumblr for visual inspiration<p>5. Today I read just one single online hyperlocal news portal, beside tech news (Hacker News + newsletters)<p>The takeaways:<p>a. Less anxiety.<p>News are, well, inaccurate since Pulitzer &#x2F; yellow journalism. Their major function is to keep you on a constant stress level. Which is good on tech news, hyperlocal news -- where you can act, but not good on national and international level -- where you are just a simple spectator.<p>b. Less biased. I know that I know nothing, so I&#x27;m listening everybody and trying to make sense what&#x27;s happening around.

I think you also discover that a lot of things you assumed you believed in yourself were actually just other peoples&#x27; opinions, which you signed off on to because of the mere-exposure effect. Without hearing them chanted over and over, they stop being as self-evident as you thought they were.

This is a great article, I can surely relate and confirm the main points, from my experience. I ‘quit’ news a few years ago, and it greatly improved my mood. Obsessively trying to stay ‘informed’ can be quite stressful, and I believe gives you a warped sense of what the world is really like.<p>I’m not completely in the dark. I still scan headlines a few minutes of the day, but I have switched completely to RSS feeds. I use the NetNewsWire app on my iPhone, and I have feeds from all the major news networks.<p>This way I’m in complete control of my intake, and I get a completely text based experience (my settings default to ‘reader’ mode once I click through to the article website). I get to just read, and not be bothered with all the other ads &amp; nonsense on news sites.<p>It’s really nice to consume news on my own terms, and not what the Google news algorithm wants me to see. Or not consume it at all and be happy :) Taking a step away from obsessively reading articles everyday can go along way from disconnecting from the ‘propaganda machine’, and thinking for yourself, instead of getting sucked into whatever ‘narrative of the day’ is.

Changes that have worked for me:<p>- stop reading any form of &quot;push news&quot; (so, no Google News, Apple News etc) - whenever you feel the urge to read something, save to read-later service (I use Instapaper) - print subscription to Economist<p>You realize you never needed to &quot;keep up to the minute&quot;, and it&#x27;s okay to find out about things a day or two later

A good tip is read 1 week old newspapers. You quickly realize most of it is completely unnecessary for your long term knowledge.

Five years ago or so I decided to study some history and I&#x27;ve been reading roughly 5-8 history books a year (mostly history since the industrialisation) and it has completely changed the way I read and contextualize news. I feel that I&#x27;m in a much better position to filter out the noise and to grasp the significance of some news that really contribute to major trends. This is on top of generally completely transforming my view of the world, can highly recommend anybody who wants a better understanding of our world to get into history.

I still don&#x27;t understand how we made it through the 00s with trust in television news media still fully intact, at least here in the US.<p>the nation was basically united in wanting to invade Iraq&#x2F;Afghanistan all because the talking heads on TV manufactured that consent. it wasn&#x27;t a &quot;party lines&quot; or &quot;oh that was just FOX News&quot; kind of thing—the news stations were a united front in getting us to believe in something absolutely ridiculous, and we accepted it at face value because we were scared and confused following 9&#x2F;11. we now know it was all bullshit that resulted in the further unnecessary loss of life, American and otherwise, yet millions of Americans still &quot;trust&quot; these &quot;news&quot; programs implicitly—it&#x27;s The News, why would you question it?<p>now these same news stations with overly-polished talking heads—including &quot;former&quot; intelligence agency regulars—and pharmaceutical advertising money (most Americans never bat an eye at the pharma ads on TV and how creepy and weird they are, or are even aware that they&#x27;re illegal in most of the rest of the world) claim to be the Arbiters of Truth and The Best, Perhaps Only Way To Stay Informed, and we eat it right up. my dad thinks he&#x27;s consuming a &quot;balanced news diet&quot; by watching the nightly news from every station. it&#x27;s insanity. turn it off and don&#x27;t look back. they call it programming for a reason.

It&#x27;s been about 8 years since I&#x27;ve completely stopped watching tv news or reading newspapers but this post made me realize that I still browse reddit and r&#x2F;worldnews sometimes.<p>This is just to say that quitting everything might be close to impossible considering that in some cases we even get news reports via unsolicited SMS messages but we can still reduce input and have a more focused, calmer state of mind.

A useful middle ground is to only read periodicals. These publications give journalists time to distill news into accurate, complete information with some analysis. The articles are information-dense and an efficient method to stay aware of current events without a significant investment of personal time.<p>I currently prefer The Atlantic and The Economist for this purpose, but there are many choices.

Yah, much of the news isn&#x27;t even news, its either punditry, gossip, or fear mongering because something sounds scary (school shootings vs car accidents, hours of pandemic talk without anything new, etc).<p>So, yes cutting all that BS our is going to make you feel better because in two weeks no one is going to care that $celebrity had $life_event.

All for profit media is biased trash to live and enjoy your life far away from.<p>There&#x27;s no objectivity especially with political news (barf) and world event news (things that try to control your life).<p>Ive posted this same sentiment many times here on hacker news about the garbage media .. always gets voted down. But im passionate about living and enjoying life far from it .. think for myself and for me my relationships with people are most important not some dumb for profit news cycle that&#x27;s manipulated bias trash. Such will never come between me and someone i care about! They can believe that garbage they fill their head with but i only very briefly give my opinion on it and move the topic to something positive&#x2F;fulfilling!<p>I am avid reader of tech, entertainment and some local news cause that&#x27;s fluff vs brainwashing&#x2F;try to control how I enjoy the time Im here on earth.

I actually stopped purposely reading&#x2F;watching the news some time around 2016 - and it&#x27;s been a very positive experience for me.<p>I had enough negativity in my life as it was, and it just felt like every media outlet overwhelmingly pursued negative stories - war, famine, corruption, FUD etc. I dwelt on such stories, fretting about what might happen. And it frustrated me greatly that I could do nothing about any of these events - technically I live in a democracy, but it counts for little if both main parties are 2 sides of the same coin, and the others have zero chance.<p>So, I took the drastic step of stopping watching and reading news. I still inadvertently come across some small snippit from time to time, and events that directly impact me, like covid, are apparent without 24-hour death toll coverage.<p>It&#x27;s been great - I feel &quot;unburdened&quot;, and definitely happier.

&gt; To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole. There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic<p>I guess in that respect I&#x27;ve long quit the news. I&#x27;m honestly surprised some people still watch TV news, I&#x27;ve cut the cord a long time ago personally.<p>I tend to go to axios, New York times, Atlantic, Reason, etc., and not on a daily basis, since long form news doesn&#x27;t get published as often. Been doing that for a while.<p>Axios is my favorite for keeping up with daily news, no opinion pieces, just reporting on events and a quick summary of why it could matter in a digestible form.

So true. Now more than ever. Watching people around me talk about what&#x27;s happening in Ukrain, obviously feeling miserable about everything while doing so is really just sad.<p>Just by glancing at a news article the agenda of spreading fear for clicks&#x2F;views becomes so obvious.

645 comments so far and no one has pointed out what struck me as obvious red flags:<p>1) This blog post is from 2016 and yet it is the hot story and discussion today on HN. The main argument is that following news is pointless and we are better off not doing so. 2) It has been upvoted and commented on 600+ times today, right as Russia is invading the sovereign nation of Ukraine. This is objectively news worth following. Russia has lost the debate across most of the mainstream english speaking internet regarding this invasion. 3) Russia is the main party that benefits at this time from convincing people to ignore the news.

<i>Situations that are vast in scale and yet out of our control naturally cause unease – it would be weird if they didn’t. It can seem as if our multitude of aspirations, intrigues, and interests are once again subject to random, fluctuating factors. It’s particularly stressful in the wake of Covid inc and many of us feel like we’ve already fried our adaptability mechanisms.</i><p><i>However, re Russia and Co, if you’re not living in the directly affected areas – and I hope you are not – or required to deploy there, remember this: Before this century, no population in history was ever instantaneously aware, in real-time, of hostilities happening around the world. If staying informed by the moment is important to you or you think it will help you muster an appropriate policy recommendation for your local government representative, go for it.</i><p><i>But if not, consider that you’re spiking your adrenals by basically live-streaming blow-by-blow intelligence on s**t happening, keeping your body + psyche in fight&#x2F;flight&#x2F;freeze mode. Be aware and of course, if you’re a student of history, yes the developments are fascinating but claim&#x2F;retain your agency in all this. You control yourself, your outlook, and your immediate environment. Asserting your creativity, enterprising nature, and sensuality in such an atmosphere is not denying that it’s disturbing – it’s good for your morale and those around you.</i><p>&gt; [Source] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mysticmedusa.com&#x2F;an-astrological-pep-talk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mysticmedusa.com&#x2F;an-astrological-pep-talk&#x2F;</a>

I agree with most points and I myself read and watch very little news, except for the most important ones. But I want also to highlight the still relevance of news and more importantly the conversations surround it.<p>For me as an on-the-side investor, relevant news can mean gain or loss. Conflicts like the Ukraine-Russian one can affect the price of oil and gas significantly, not just in the short term. We’ve also seen how much global logistics was affected by the event of Evergreen blocking the Sue canal. There are countless examples like that.<p>The second important aspect of news for me is the sentiment and conversation surround it. I want to understand what other people are thinking, what do they feel and how they are trying to explain and substantiate their thinking&#x2F;believe. It’s not always intellectually enriching but sometimes it can be even enlightening, especially when it proved I was wrong or mistaken. Completely unaware of current news would not allow me to converse with people like that.<p>Nevertheless, I also see that most media today are trying to polarize people more than ever with the results that people are increasingly driven by belief and ideology instead of facts and logics. I afraid the classic news and reporting is an endangered species and reading news today will likely endanger your (not just mental) health.

&gt; To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here.<p>Well, that was never more than barely following the news, and arguably closer to following distractions from the news.

I used to listen to the whole of Today on BBC Radio 4, every day. Plus Any Questions and watch Question Time, News Night etc on the TV.<p>I quit, and now other than a 5 minute scan of the BBC News Website occasionally, I am news free. I know the important stuff, such as the ending of Covid restrictions in the UK and the invasion of provinces in Ukraine, but I don&#x27;t dive deeply into the articles, or do any wider reading.<p>The reason for my switching off from the news, is that there is bugger all I can do about it, other than voting once every five years, or becoming an activist.<p>I don&#x27;t have the time or energy to campaign as an activist on issues I care about. I have a family to look after and a job to maintain. My priorities are selfish.<p>Voting for me, is a waste of time (although I always do vote). I live in a Tory county, and my vote counts for nothing without proportional representation (which I voted for, but did not happen).<p>What&#x27;s the point of digesting news. I learn stuff that mostly has little impact on my life, and when it does have an impact, there&#x27;s nothing I can do about it.<p>My quality of life is certainly better since I cut back on digesting the news, in any form, other than this site.

The thing about trying to follow the news, rather than following news coverage, is that correcting for bias requires:<p>1. Reading&#x2F;viewing multiple source, from different countries.<p>2. Reading against the text, using claims from one biased source to contrarily interpret another source, but also holding those claims in suspicion, allowing for the second source to potentially disprove or at least recast what the first source wanted you to know.<p>3. Watching for things like subtext, timing of stories, _absence_ of coverage, distribution of sources etc.<p>4. Often, reading languages other than the one you&#x27;re most fluent in - at least to some extent.<p>5. Getting used to the most significant and controversial stories being a mess of not just conflicting coverage, but personal and collective accusations which are often at least half-true even if they are a distraction, having to live with how some authors combine conspiracy-theorism or zealotry on some points with decent journalistic work on others...<p>---<p>Bottom line: It&#x27;s frustrating, it&#x27;s time consuming, it draws you away from your social surrounding who either know nothing about things or are repeating shallow slogans they heard in some mainstream news show.

&quot;To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole. There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic.&quot;<p>This is important.<p>I haven&#x27;t watched cable news in years (maybe a decade now?) but still check in with long form journalism for in-depth exploration of a topic.<p>I think this right here is a source of all of the evil mentioned in the article:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fs.blog&#x2F;narrative-fallacy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fs.blog&#x2F;narrative-fallacy&#x2F;</a><p>I&#x27;m not always above creating narratives and cherry-picking information that feeds those narratives because, end of the day, Im human just like everybody else. But being aware of this and learning how to better catch yourself as you&#x27;re doing it does make a massive difference. It also damned near forces you to try and look for information closer to the source.<p>(Try reading news sources in another language from another country and watch what happens. Ideally you wouldnt use Google Translate)

Am I paranoid or do certain topics get upvoted with suspicious frequency lately?<p>Now that shit is popping off in Europe there is an uptick in NSA&#x2F;CIA&#x2F;America bad posts with anti-free press sprinkled on top. Every post about events unfolding in Europe were flagged and didn&#x27;t even reach the front page here until the last few days.<p>In the Jeff Geerling post Dang revealed that there are groups of inauthentic actors on this site.

Also excellent (and amazingly in the UK Guardian, probably didn&#x27;t realize they were cancelling themselves by running this piece)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;2013&#x2F;apr&#x2F;12&#x2F;news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;2013&#x2F;apr&#x2F;12&#x2F;news-is-bad-ro...</a> Rolf Dobelli&#x27;s book this is from is excellent too

I agree with what the article says about news but I think the same idea is applicable to a wider category of &#x27;flash consumption&#x27;. One common example I can think of are the Twitter threads with clickbaity titles claiming to give you knowledge about something in 7-10 140 character chunks. They induce a certain FOMO as you scroll by but leave you with no lasting memory about the subject.

This worked really well for me: instead of checking “the news”, I look at the front page of Wikipedia. That has some of the biggest (world) news stories, but it also has a bunch of other stuff. Often when I am checking the news it’s really just because I want to read about something interesting, and Wikipedia provides that without trying so hard to get me to click on stuff.

I&#x27;ve been subscribed to Stratfor[0] for a couple of years now and have generally been pretty pleased. No fuss, no shouting headlines, just reporting of what&#x27;s happening and a clearly-separated section for analysis and implications. Maybe yall should give it a go.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratfor.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratfor.com&#x2F;</a>

What gets passed off as news and journalism too often isn&#x27;t either. Just because something happened (e.g., it rained) doesn&#x27;t make it news. News has to have relevance and importance.<p>With that proper definition as a filter, a fairly high percentage of US mainstream media news is in fact fake news. This higher revenue fluff is used intentionally to marginalize things that qualify as legit news. Yet somehow these members of The Fourth Estate are shameless enough to cry about &quot;threats to democracy.&quot;<p>The problem is, we don&#x27;t hear the news admit their definition of news is technically nonsense. Not one of them is willing to police the others. It&#x27;s hypersonic bullshit that repetition has normalized.<p>As for journalism...this is a solid filter. It&#x27;s a handy bullshit detector.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kottke.org&#x2F;20&#x2F;01&#x2F;jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kottke.org&#x2F;20&#x2F;01&#x2F;jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1</a>

It&#x27;s one of the things I&#x27;ve learned after reading &quot;4 Hour Work Week&quot; by Tim Ferris. If you want to focus, you need to quit caring about what&#x27;s happening in the world. It&#x27;s a great conversation starter by the way. You can always just ask people what&#x27;s going on and they can share any major events with you, now you&#x27;re a great listener, because you genuinely don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s going on in the world. And should you care? No.<p>When I stopped watching TV&#x2F;reading any news at all I noticed one thing: I&#x27;m less distracted.<p>Once you realize that media outlets make tremendous amounts of money by selling you their narrative and like any business they&#x27;re just trying to be as profitable as possible, everything changes.<p>Nowadays I might read an article or two from people I subscribe to on substack or something more independent, but still I don&#x27;t feel like it&#x27;s something that I need at all.

I think the value-added of journalism to society has changed drastically since the Internet. If I&#x27;m interested in a topic or issue I can find writing by people who actually practice it, and I can find the primary sources if at all possible.<p>In particular, I question the need for giant journalistic institutions like the New York Times or Fox News or any other. If anything happens anywhere I tune to the local news first, because I&#x27;d rather read that then the NYT copy&#x2F;pasta <i>from</i> that, along with some quote from some friend-of-a-former-professor expert.<p>That said, the news fills a valuable function even if you don&#x27;t read it. When Alzheimer&#x27;s gets cured, I will likely learn about it from a headline.<p>I am torn on this issue, partially because I don&#x27;t want to let my past deeply unhealthy relationship with reading about current events affect how I view it vis a vie society.

I think this is missing the point of news and this sums it up very nicely:<p>&quot;Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s why it&#x27;s called &quot;news&quot;, it&#x27;s living, recent information that is in the making, being talked about and discussed. Everything else is great but it&#x27;s something different and likely is encapsulated by an echo chamber.<p>Nothing against reading up books about politics for instance but it&#x27;s at best complementary to news. At worst - not being a political scientist - you might select the &quot;wrong&quot; book and find yourself wasting time how people describe obscure views.<p>But yes, in general I agree of course. Watching&#x2F;reading too much news can be draining. But really, our current democracy is built on the fact that people consume news from <i>at least</i> one mainstream news outlet. How else do you know who to vote for?

I very much avoid the news. Unfortunately twitter somehow forces it into my timeline but in a limited way.<p>What I really hate about news is how you jump on a topic without context. The perfect example of that is the Iraq war of course, Ukraine now is such an issue. 99.9% of people barley know where the Ukraine or the Crimea was. You can&#x27;t just jump into a topic without context think its a great way to get information.<p>And that is even before you consider that a lot of the time a simple party line is adopted and endlessly repeated. Not even because of some conspiracy simply because its easier to report on what everybody is reporting.<p>If you for example understood the Syria conflict only based on typical news, and I include even &#x27;reputable&#x27; news papers your overall understanding would still be problematic. Much better to spend your time reading a history book on Syria and AQ in Iraq.

I realized the news doesn&#x27;t matter to me at all when I left Bing.com up over a week by accident.<p>I came back and looked at the week old news stories they featured. I&#x27;d forgotten about all of them and they&#x27;d all had zero impact on my life in any way.<p>Which, outside of the weather forecast, is true for any given week since forever.

I used to get so angry at Twitter.<p>Then I watched a Ricky Gervais interview where he compares tweets to graffiti. Einstein and a total idiot would tweet in the same font.<p>Now when I see a tweet I strongly disagree with, I get zero emotional involvement. It’s wonderful, but now Twitter seems almost pointless. Perhaps that is wonderful as well.

I call it the &quot;Fox Detox&quot; for fun, but is not limited to Fox, although they are the biggest Point of view purveyor. I have challenged friends and family members to try eschewing all point of view media for 30 days and to instead do other things, oh you know, going for a walk, visiting friends, reading a book, watching a good movie, you know normal life. The regular 5 o&#x27;clock local news and perhaps a few mainstream ones online, AP, Reuters or whatever, people know when they are consuming Pov channels, the confirmation makes them feel good, like drugs, is not good for your mind. When people try it, they report similar things like &quot;I feel better&quot; or &quot;I am less stressed&quot;. Too much of anything is bad for you, including &quot;News&quot; and especially PoV news.

I spent years without a TV at all and haven&#x27;t watched any sort of broadcast or cable regularly since like 2004. As a result, I have a few distinct memories of &quot;news events&quot; that persist like visits to a carnival of madmen.<p>The disappearance of MH 370 was on literally non-stop on CNN in particular, and we&#x27;d walk out of the hotel lobby to see the same group of people repeating that basically nothing had changed but oh my god maybe this personage or another will have something soon, walking back in the evening past the same thing, for days.<p>It&#x27;s really no wonder people came up with insane conspiracies about it, because for like two solid weeks multiple TV channels were going on about it as if the world had ended.

I have cut my media intake by 99% since 2016. I agree with every single one of these points.

I think this misses the cultural and social reasons to read the news. Anecdotally, friends that don&#x27;t keep up with the news or are more politically disengaged (i.e. don&#x27;t vote) seem to have a tougher time making friends, going on dates, hanging out at a party, etc. In many ways, the news seems to serve a purpose analogous to sports in my circles; would anyone say that watching sports is a &quot;waste of time&quot;?<p>I do agree with the sentiment that cable news is essentially reality TV (with less fun). Reading a New Yorker interview and debating it with friends is certainly healthier than zoning out in front of an endless stream of anger.

I know someone who keeps newspapers because the narrative&#x2F;facts of some stories gets changed over years once the fuss has died down. Basically history is rewritten, so choosing any one news outlet for your source is dangerous.

No one is under any obligation to consume any news - whether that be sports news, gaming news, or world news. Tangentially, what personally irks me is that the YouTube app on iOS forces a news feed on me with no way to dismiss it.

One thing to keep in mind is that news is really entertainment. Hollywood companies spend a lot of money coming up with scripts that mimic the drama of real lives. The news are real life and it&#x27;s basically free when compared to other entertainment.<p>Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN Worldwide, shaped his career around entertainment not journalism. And he was hired to punch up the news from NBC by Warnermedia, CNN&#x27;s parent. It just goes to show that the media companies treat news as entertainment. I think we need to be aware of that and be careful how we consume it.

I hate how difficult it can be to escape non-stop exposure to the media. Too many restaurants and public spaces have televisions blaring, most set to a news channel. Even when not on a explicit news channel, political news and activism leaks through on sports channels and through political ads that no longer stop outside of election season. I can simply stop eating at restaurants what engage in this behavior but when it&#x27;s the dentist or doctor, you&#x27;re pretty much captive until you&#x27;re called in. Thankfully not all of them do this (at least not yet) but it is disturbing how many do.

Aaron Swartz has also a good piece about avoiding the news: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;hatethenews" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;hatethenews</a>

&gt; You were never actually accomplishing anything by watching the news<p>This sounds true, but is it really? Just looking at today&#x27;s headlines, I now know that the IRS will be using Login.gov instead of ID.me [1], which will be rather useful so that I know not to sign up for ID.me and to instead sign up for Login.gov.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;22&#x2F;1082283039&#x2F;the-irs-is-allowing-taxpayers-to-opt-out-of-facial-recognition-to-verify-account" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;22&#x2F;1082283039&#x2F;the-irs-is-allowin...</a>

You&#x27;re not doing anything either when you are reading a book. It is just another form of information consumption.<p>The news can be useful for finding out about new trends, specially in technology. Bitcoin was in the news, like Business Insider, as early as 2012. Simeone who reads the news could have acted on that and made a fortune. Many other examples. Imagine reading the news in 2017 about the iPhone and buying Apple stock. Or about the Google IPO in 2004 and buying Google stock. The news cannot tell you what to do, but it can make you at lest aware of something.

What I ended up doing was crawling news from major news services and do aggregation myself. My algorithm was simple : cluster news that was reported by multple different services or multiple reports within 36 hours. By showing multiple news titles in a same box and order them by cluster size, I could just skipped those which isn&#x27;t important at all.<p>If anyone was interested the website is available here : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;todayheadlines.live&#x2F;?locale=en-US" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;todayheadlines.live&#x2F;?locale=en-US</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ozyandmillie.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;comic&#x2F;ozy-and-millie-19" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ozyandmillie.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;comic&#x2F;ozy-and-millie-19</a>

I’m a bit amazed at how many people here <i>watch</i> the news. Of course you’re going to feel better if you don’t watch it; TV&#x2F;internet news is the bottom of the barrel. If you don’t subscribe to your local paper though, you’re really missing out, imo. You get a sense of community, and info that actually impacts your life, that is actionable. And usually if a non-local story is big enough, the local paper will report on it anyway.

I was never a big news guy to begin with. Haven&#x27;t had cable since 2009. For awhile I read the NYT and for a shorter while, Talking Points Memo. I&#x27;ve quit reading most world news and especially political news. His point that<p>&gt;“Being concerned” makes us feel like we’re doing something when we’re not&lt;<p>is what really drove it home for me. I can do more to improve the world if I am in a good mood and improving myself than I can if I walk around angry that X is happening somewhere.<p>CNN and Fox are so far apart they practically touch.

I think of &#x27;the news&#x27; as a form of mind control. Whether or not is intentionally engineered as such isn&#x27;t immediately relevant; ultimately, I think it&#x27;s the effect on people that matters. There is no unbiased delivery of information anymore (was there ever?). It&#x27;s an incredibly powerful system of information delivery that influences what people think about. I think it&#x27;s interesting, with this in mind, to consider the origin of my own thoughts and opinions.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;68k.news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;68k.news</a><p>gopher:&#x2F;&#x2F;magical.fish<p>I miss the Teletext the way it was long ago. It had resumed news for everything, no bias, no bullshit.

I&#x27;ve found that I quite enjoy reading Wikipedia for a really big news event.<p>It&#x27;s the only unbiased, non-sensational, and informative source I have come across.<p>It&#x27;s basically impossible to get the facts of what&#x27;s going on by reading a CBC article about the Freedom Convoy, but Wikipedia does an incredible job of breaking it all down. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Canada_convoy_protest" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Canada_convoy_protest</a>

I quit news a few months ago, but I felt guilty about it for a while. The feeling was that it was only through my exorbitant privilege that I was able to do that, but in all honestly... do people less privilege than myself derive any value from watching&#x2F;consuming the news too? Does it help improve their situation? I&#x27;d say that in most cases the answer is &quot;no&quot;.<p>What I&#x27;ve found is that the news I really need to know about reaches me anyway.

Following the news media (not just and not only the tellie news…) has been very useful for me the last couple of years because of Covid. Or rather Covid has made it useful. In any case: Covid has made the news something that I need to be “informed” about since it impacts my humble life.<p>Most of the time, at least up until now, the news has not impacted me in any way that I would act on—I’m just an apathetic citizen like many others.<p>Truly curse these interesting times that we are living through.

One thing I can suggest is to switch to business news instead. Business news is more inclined to give all the facts rather than give an opinion on things. Also looking at things from a business perspective is usually much more neutral and you learn a lot more. Regardless of this you shouldn&#x27;t be consuming news on TV anyway.<p>This article isn&#x27;t new though. Similar articles have been posted in HN since 2010s.

A very timely article. I&#x27;ve recently decided to completely abandon the news after the most recent issue in my country (the occupation of our capital city) once the issue was resolved. It was taking up far too much of my life and was negatively affecting my emotions. It&#x27;s been a few days and I&#x27;m still amazed how much I&#x27;ve been able to accomplish on my projects now that I&#x27;ve got that time and energy back.<p>I hope I never relapse.

Reading quality news and analysis is certainly better than watching tv news. But it still has the same flaws as other news.<p>To me this is the money quote:<p>&gt; <i>Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world.</i><p>There is a big opportunity cost to following the news! If you spend those X minutes a day educating yourself instead, you will be a far more informed citizen. You will also start seeing what ignorant garbage much of the news really is.

A great way to quickly catch up is to use something like the BBCs &quot;What&#x27;s the papers say&quot; page [0] or similar alternatives. It gives both a broad overview and also an opportunity to see different perspectives on the same news.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;blogs-the-papers-60457518" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;blogs-the-papers-60457518</a>

I stayed at an airbnb a couple years ago where the hosts were the sort to just leave the news on. Having not watched for a long time and having been studying psychotherapy at the time I was immediately struck by the similarities of the structure of the newscaster speech to hypnotic patterns. Only here the payload of the hypnosis was &#x27;pay attention, be afraid.&#x27; Extremely creepy.

I quit the news in 2016, and have never been happier. First the national news, then local news.<p>I still scan the headlines from various sources and selectively choose how&#x2F;when&#x2F;why I choose to dig deeper into anything. And no, I&#x27;m not using any crackpot sources or echo chambers. I prefer more &quot;raw&quot; news reporting; before any spin or sensationalism gets inflicted upon it.

Living in Canada during the Convoy was a huge dose of this sentiment expressed in this article. You&#x27;d think that most Canadians supported a siege over our borders and capital city - but you&#x27;d be wrong. What was being characterized as a protest, resembled more of an attempt to overthrow of government via social media. You were better to not know anything about it.

Watching the news used to keep you meaningfully informed back when it was a thirty minute thing once a day. Now that we have internet and can google up just about anything, I only need the occasional tsunami alert or whatever.<p>The world was also smaller back then. With eight billion people, you can&#x27;t track everything of importance on the world stage anymore. You need to pick and choose.

I am often reminded of the person who said they recorded the news daily to watch it two weeks later... they said very little of it mattered.

I have to say this again for the Economist fan girls here. It&#x27;s still news, it may be more objective in tone and content than other publications, but it still influences negative thinking. Negative thinking is part of the job of global leaders or actual economists, so unless you&#x27;re one, you&#x27;re not doing yourself a favor

What I&#x27;m amazed is how the news directs people&#x27;s attention and forms agendas. From Covid, the Southern border migration, Police shootings, Venezuala, Syria etc they&#x27;re all multi-year ongoing problems but suddenly reach crises then a few days later you never hear again. The Media has so much power to influence what people care about.

&quot;Things you notice when you quit paying attention to your surroundings&quot;<p>What&#x27;s really needed are sources of reliable information about events, particularly about events that impact directly or indirectly on your own personal situation. Usually the written form of news is more information-dense.<p>Understanding those events, however, does require a degree of background knowledge that &#x27;news&#x27; will never provide; for that you need to at least read books in the subject.<p>Television and radio news, it&#x27;s always going to be more entertainment than information, due to its audio-visual format.<p>However, crappy sources of information that distrort reality in order to serve the interests of a government&#x27;s reelection campaign, a corporate business strategy, etc. - that&#x27;s what most what is labelled &#x27;news&#x27; today consists of. Hence the news consumer has to act as a filter, seeking the nuggets of information gold in a sewer of manufactured garbage.<p>There are however ways to help with the filtering although authoritarian and heirarchical societies seem to prefer to generate a dumbed-down population incapable of discerning truth from falsehood, because such a population is easier to manipulate by a small group of ruling elites. Which is what you might call the cynical view of the current status quo.

I haven’t checked the news since June 1, 2020. As part of some self imposed pandemic related health precautions.<p>I’ll ask Siri to read me the news and listen to the five minute overview which is all I need to make sure WWIII hasn’t broken out.<p>I’d still like to subscribe to a physical weekly. But not sure there are any good ones without a heavy slant in Canada.

As someone living in Europe right now all the news are about the Russian-Ukraine crisis and it&#x27;s very unsettling and makes you over anxious and distracted from your daily job. Problem is that working from home makes it so easy to access the news... Anyway I really needed to read these five points right now. Thank you.

Same thing goes for Twitter and Nextdoor. Also all social media in general. It&#x27;s all pretty horrible, and just like going carb-free, your head feels clearer and you feel so much happier. I deleted Twitter and Tiktok and am going to drop Reddit and HN soon too, those are my biggest time sinks of all.

This article hits the nail on the head.<p>I stopped consuming all political, health, and global news the day after January 6th 2021. Pretty much anything that was on CNN&#x2F;Fox or that half hour after the local news. I never watched local news really anyway, so I couldn’t quit something I didn’t already do in that regard.<p>I just assumed that if there were news outlets fooling humans into doing something like THAT on January 6th in the USA, then whatever I was watching was bound to fool me into doing something outrageous too, and it was time to stop.<p>I first started to consider stopping my news consumption after a certain someone was banned from Twitter. The weight I felt lifted off of me when I didn’t hear that noise anymore was immense. I figured it could only get better.<p>It did.<p>Just like this article says, within a month, you feel so much better about everything.<p>The world around you starts to feel normal. Things just are what they are.<p>Being informed didn’t help me or anyone else. Being concerned didn’t make the world a better place.<p>If something horrible is going to happen, I guess I’ll just be the last to know. And that’s totally fine with me.<p>I hope millions engage in cancelling the news. It could just be what sets things straight in this world.

All news consumption could instead be replaced by reading this page a few times a week to stay informed about what is happening in the world:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Portal:Current_events" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Portal:Current_events</a>

I havent followed news or watched TV for years. Way happier this way. And if there is something I really must know, my friends tell me or I find out about it on my own (like reading official statements about covid for example).<p>News are just a business like any other, and I have never needed their services.

I like weekly publications.<p>24-hour news is all about reacting first, thinking never.<p>Daily publications are better, but there&#x27;s still not a lot of time to formulate thought.<p>Weekly publications allow things to breathe a bit more. Allows some context to be established, some thought to be had before taking fingers to keyboard.

The best way to stay informed about current events is with heavily curated Twitter lists. Every news organization is garbage but there are good journalists out there. You just have to find the good ones and follow only them, not the company they work for.

Imagine some kids are talking about stuff from computer games, imagine some other kids talking about memes from tiktok.<p>If you are not into games or memes you discard it as nonimportant. That is same thing if you dont watch news.<p>Its like a joke you didnt hear and some people are referencing it.<p>No big deal.

That they are staged and framed, like already demonstrated by<p>Electric Light Orchestra - Here Is the News (Official Video) in 1981<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Bzehb_yeZtU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Bzehb_yeZtU</a>

I&#x27;ve done this periodically, I highly recommend it. I hadn&#x27;t been looking at any news this year (other than pure tech news&#x2F;game sites), but broke that streak this week to watch and see if Russia starts WW3.

Depends what kind of news you read.<p>A lot of what I read makes me read Wikipedia, for verification and context.<p>News are not just the latest events, they also remind people about the current state of world&#x27;s history, and invites people to learn some actual facts.

Discussed at the time:<p><i>Things You Notice When You Quit the News</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13153539" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13153539</a> - Dec 2016 (487 comments)

“Being concerned” makes us feel like we’re doing something when we’re not&quot;<p>- yes! just stop saying &quot;we are there for you and we support you&quot; - well no you are at home on a phone typing things to make yourself feel better and useful.

The only news source I follow is bloomberg.com. I was introduced to it through the Bloomberg Terminal, and continue to follow it after leaving the industry. It seems to me like the only news service that reports without any bias.

I&#x27;ve been trying to avoid the news for my whole life, but there really is no escape from the US news cycle if you are online. Still, it&#x27;s probably a huge quality of life improvement if you stop actively seeking it out.

Most of the day to day of the news reel is basically Reality TV.<p>Firstly, the Cable news stations (CNN, Fox News) aren&#x27;t news programs - despite the name - they are talk shows. It&#x27;s Maury for politics.<p>The broadcast news, that&#x27;s news. But it&#x27;s not without its problems. Whenever I would over hear my mom watching it - it&#x27;s so shocking how it&#x27;s done. some of my gripes, based on what little I&#x27;ve seen over the past few years:<p>- The tone of the newscaster has changed - they don&#x27;t sound like they&#x27;re just reporting it - there&#x27;s emotion or gravitas in their voice that make what they&#x27;re saying authoritative.<p>- When they cover politics - especially elections - it&#x27;s always a fluff piece about the big two candidates. When the democratic primaries for the 2016 election were happening - they&#x27;d barely mention anyone but Hillary. You&#x27;d have 10 minutes of Hillary, 1 minute of Bernie and 0 minutes of everyone else. Same in 2020, but add Biden. It&#x27;s no wonder my mom had no idea the other candidates even existed. (and don&#x27;t get me started on how the candidates make up issues just to debate them - so tricky - pick a hot button topic that is important, but may not be important right now - I think we know the big ones)<p>- Fear mongering - this goes with the first one I listed. Instead of simply reporting that tragedy happened and giving the facts, they&#x27;d just keep the emotional level up. It&#x27;s a bait and switch. You get drawn in by it and then vote for whoever is going to &quot;fix&quot; everything. The morality of it is, in my opinion, similar to what psychic does - play on the emotion of someones tragedy for money.<p>And I say all this as someone who doesn&#x27;t follow the news or politics very closely.

These arguments are nearly identical to those laid out by Neal Postman in <i>Amusing Ourselves to Death</i>, who pointed out -- almost 40 years ago, I might add -- that television news has become entertainment, not news.

I haven&#x27;t watched TV news in 6+ months now and don&#x27;t intend to. I still read the news, but much more so blogs and writers on Substacks. I&#x27;ve subscribed to a bunch. I do like primary sources too.

&gt;The news provides information in infinite volume but very limited depth, and it’s clearly meant to agitate us more than educate us.<p>the whole article is outstanding but this excerpt alone sums it up quite nicely

My parents have gone to watching Fox News regularly and my in-laws are MSNBC junkies.<p>It&#x27;s brain rotting and emotional content that should be socially treated like a drug, keeping viewers addicted to drama and outage.

Related read is this article by Aaron Swartz: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;hatethenews" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;hatethenews</a>

I quit social media two years ago, and pretty much all the point about news also apply to social. It feels soooo good to not care what people say on the internet, it’s remarkable. HN rocks tho ;)

Aaron Swartz also has good insights not in this article:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;hatethenews" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;hatethenews</a>

This is all solid. I would only add that it&#x27;s our duty to avoid the news as its largely a source of propaganda serving the interests of concentrated capital and the two party system.

Isn&#x27;t half the problem in the U.S. at least, we don&#x27;t have a legal differentiation between political commentary and &quot;news&quot; as in reporting the facts as they are?

My goto source is the text version of NPR, much of which is directly from the AP: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;text.npr.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;text.npr.org&#x2F;</a>

I don’t have it twisted, I watch the news daily to be entertained by the dumpster fire of current events and idiot talking heads making nonsense of it.

Being informed does not take a lot of time. But there are many wrong ways of doing it like reading what comes up on your twitter timeline or visiting a clickbaity site like CNN or reading any algorithmically-created newsfeed.<p>Here&#x27;s what I suggest: subscribe to The Washington Post. Once a day, scan through the homepage and read through any articles that catch your interest. When you hit the bottom of the home page, you are done. Depending on how much you are interested in, this could take five minutes or twenty. You will get a reasonable overview of the most important topics primarily focused on the US.

I recommend whathappenedlastweek.com for a thoughtful, curated weekly email summarising under-reported news. Helpful for resisting the urge to hunt news out.

Quitting pro sports has the same effect as quitting news.

The commenters on here are hilarious. They stopped watching the news on TV but are still reading the news online. Lol. That’s not quitting the news!

If you want an extremely quick scan of the front pages of many world newspapers (less than 5 mins), check out &quot;NEWS ACC&quot; on YouTube.

Sticking your head in the sand is more comforting than facing the horrors above it. That doesn&#x27;t mean that&#x27;s what you should do.

This thinking is the basis for the <i>Independent</i> voter. The myth is that they&#x27;re some type of deliberate, open-minded voting demographic, in their wisdom they like to keep the door open to all possibility. The reality is that they just don&#x27;t follow the news and instead base their opinions on sound bites and article ledes. The sad consequence is that, as pockets of our society work to unravel the institutions that make this nation great using just the weakest veneer of misinformation, those of us who take the time to read what&#x27;s happening begin to realize that human-made ruin is largely avoidable. Only if more of us would pay attention.

Hey what&#x27;s happening in Ukraine? If you don&#x27;t follow news you probably won&#x27;t know. No news is good news right?

It depends, there are some news that actually worth your time. But you should be wary on what kind of news you are consuming.

At this point, I glance at the newspaper headlines when I go into the local supermarket, I find that&#x27;s enough.

Today the supposedly liberal NYT has a news article about Jews in Ukraine in order to whip up pro-war hysteria. (The implied premise that Putin is Hitler is too absurd to rebut. This is “Iraqi nurses kill Kuwaiti babies” for 2022.) And they’re the best mainstream news source. :-(<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;21&#x2F;world&#x2F;europe&#x2F;ukraine-jews-russia-evacuations.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;21&#x2F;world&#x2F;europe&#x2F;ukraine-jews...</a>

Canadian citizen in 2022: you give 40$ to the wrong cause and you are cut off from the banking system.

I cherish my printed Sunday paper. I avoid news that comes with a comment section (except for this site).

For non-tech news I only read from Reuters and AP, both are relatively neutral and objective.

I get it, and totally agree on &#x27;mental health&#x27; - but the message is misplaced.<p>Ignorance is bliss, and &#x27;eternal vigilance&#x27; is the thing necessary in order to keep our system going.<p>If we could all be &#x27;reasonably informed&#x27; - so many problems would be avoided.<p>&#x27;Good&#x27; countries fail from within, and Tyrants come to power on a wave of populism which is ultimately based on misinformation.<p>We really do need to pay attention, but the issue becomes much more difficult in an era wherein main stream outlets have jacked up their bias, where Twitter advocates saucy, false and vindictive statements, where the Internet has enabled every Yahoo (pun intended) to have a soapbox and provided very little facility to wade through the morass to find reasonable voices. Often the reasonable voices aren&#x27;t actually reasonable. A lot of intellectual voices over-state the issues. It&#x27;s really, really, hard.<p>Instead of &#x27;disassociating&#x27; entirely from the news, one could chose to &#x27;disassociate from any political ideal&#x27; and just read from a variety of sources, and less often. Sometimes the high brow places (i.e. FP or FT) have less audacious triggering. Some high quality outlets that have known biases are not a good place to spend a lot of time. Check the headlines from state propaganda. Read the English news from other countries occasionally - this is quite refreshing because the foreign perspective tends to entirely deconstruct the local rubbish back and forth by not giving it much credence.<p>Get out of a political headset and don&#x27;t over consume, but pay attention. It&#x27;s kind of like voting, it matters collectively.

Quitting the mainstream news is probably the best approach for most people, but I think critically paying attention to the news is also very illuminating and it&#x27;s something that I don&#x27;t think enough people do. Pay attention to how they advertise and monetize and operate.<p>Here&#x27;s just a few observations off the top of my head.<p>* Fox News and CNN often get compared as being the opposites of each other, but there&#x27;s one big difference in journalistic integrity that I can see. With Fox, you know who the straight news people are and who the opinion people are. With CNN, the line is blurred beyond any recognition.<p>* Particularly when it came to Trump, many news headlines during the last 6 years or so have been literal mind-reading about his mental state, thoughts, and goals, and I&#x27;m not even joking a little. If you start paying attention to this, you&#x27;ll notice that so much of the news literally involves mind-reading.<p>* Paying attention to the advertisements made during the news is also critical because all humans have bias. Every other ad is for some damn pill, cream, or suppository from Big Pharma. Any news report involving health should be viewed through this lens as news agencies know who butters their bread.

The most interesting fact here is someone was still watching TV news as recently as 2016.

&quot;Quit the news&quot; is <i>not</i> the answer.<p>Quit the 24-hour news cycle? Sure. Quit <i>doomscrolling</i> on Facebook or Twitter? Yeah, most definitely quite good for you.<p>But, &quot;quit the news&quot; as in &quot;remain uninformed&quot;? No way! The invention of the press enabled modern democracy, and no matter what you think of that, all the alternatives so far have pretty decisively turned out to be worse.<p>So, here&#x27;s my take: consume the news, but in moderation. And, like consuming alcohol in moderation (which I also wholeheartedly condone), I can&#x27;t tell you exactly <i>how</i> to do it, just that I&#x27;ve seen it done successfully.<p>For me, it&#x27;s a (dead-tree) subscription to The Economist. World events, long-form analysis, some light fare, all with a mild(ish) libertarian touch, delivered to my doormat every week.<p>A time-saver it is not: a single copy of the (weekly) newspaper takes at least eight hours to digest, often longer. But I don&#x27;t feel compelled to hit &#x27;refresh&#x27; (the newspaper is what it is for the next week), and there is no way to embarrass myself by hitting &#x27;reply&#x27;: a Letter To The Editor takes some careful consideration, which is great.

And this is from 2016... how much more salient did this point get since then...

I remember in 5th grade we were taught ‘current events’. We learned about newspapers, that the ‘most important news’ was in the right hand column, where the index was in a newspaper, where the editorials were, its various parts… I remember thinking with a child’s naïveté that news was irrelevant to the ‘real’ goal of getting good grades and looking ‘cool’. Looking back on it I see it for what was part of the ‘capitalist reeducation camp’ - a way to produce good soldiers who would know how to continue indoctrinating themselves. It certainly gave individuals the tools to share a common ground , to feel like we were ‘all on the same team’ because we saw the world the same way. It formalized herd behavior and reduced our cognitive load because ‘facts’ and opinions were provided to us - ready made. At the cost of our individuality and our ability to come to terms with the real emotions resulting from our daily actions and encounters in our local space.

One caveat. Local news on TV can still be decent. It depends on the specific area though (big cities tend to drop a lot smaller stories). It can help you find out about stuff going on in your area that you wouldn&#x27;t otherwise know about (unless your area also has a small newspaper).

Started doing this a couple years ago. Completely agree with the author.

This includes being subscribed to r&#x2F;worldnews and r&#x2F;politics.

We should get paid to read ‘their’ news instead of paying ‘them’

Checking the news should be boring: apnews.com<p>The only news site you need.

Sad that most people are only realizing this 6 years later.

I quit new 4 years ago when the Australian Right Wing extremist government was reelected after a properganda campagine by Rupert Murdoch. I said i wouldnt watch the news until the next election.<p>Come next election, i will never watch TV&#x2F;the news, again. There is no need for it. I solicit news from my friends when i feel like i want to consume it (hardly ever). I instead spend time out in my community and neighbourhood doing what i can to improve the direct situation around me for which i have control.<p>If you spend your evening reviewing all the death and destruction and uncertaintity around the world, you will live a very lonely life.<p>I travelled the world pre-covid and nothing gives a worse picture of what the world really is then &quot;the news&quot;

Replace News by Twitter, it&#x27;s works perfectly to

I only read twitter feed for news and it&#x27;s great!

Succinctly put, Gell-Mann amnesia is the best reason to scale back on news.<p>Everyone has their bailiwick of expertise. Mine happens to be northeast Asian matters, having lived there decades after growing up in the US, speaking and reading the three main languages (albeit to different degrees of proficiency), and teaching university Asian history classes, half in English, half in the local language.<p>The problem is that only very, very rarely did I ever read or hear something in the English-language news about China, Japan, or Korea that I found enlightening or even mostly fair. It was all superficial pablum, often highly misleading.<p>So, I can only conclude the same might be said for other topics about which I am generally clueless.

I replaced „the news“ with hacker news. Much better.

&gt; You’ll find that your abstinence did not result in any worse cabinet appointments than were already being made, and that disaster relief efforts carried on without your involvement, just as they always do. As it turns out, your hobby of monitoring the “state of the world” did not actually affect the world.<p>Obvious counterpoint: Trump, who appointed awful judges and secretaries, and denied disaster relief aid, was sworn in to office a month after this was published

My family didn&#x27;t have a TV while I grew up. We had one once, it broke, and my father decided we didn&#x27;t need another.<p>As a child this seemed unreasonable and unfair, right up there with not having pizza as often as I wanted, or other similar not-actually-traumatizing problems. Then I became aware of how much time my peers spent staring at TVs, filling their mental spheres with the ephemeral details of forgettable TV entertainment. And none of them were reading anything.<p>I was very happy we didn&#x27;t have one.<p>Later in life I got a TV to watch rental movies. That was great.<p>Then I tried cable for two years and lived with the dreck for a while. Everything was clearly designed to communicate to stupid people! Even the history and science programs are ridiculously dumbed down.<p>But the worst by far was the &quot;news&quot;. The faux partisan battles that turned into real partisan battles with two (not always equally) incoherent sides. The same people banding together on each side (there are almost always exactly two sides!) of every issue.<p>BUT worse than the news was the advertising. People are so used to it they don&#x27;t see it for what it blatantly is. Completely bizarre communication techniques doing only one thing: Brainwashing! Repetition of nonsense phrases, ridiculously happy&#x2F;sad people, products shown in painfully contrived situations, ...<p>The problem with news and advertising isn&#x27;t just that they are misleading, or that they are dumbed down, or that they are designed to be emotionally addictive.<p>The worst problem is that exposing ourselves to constantly repetitive irrationality creates thinking grooves in our minds. It dumbs us down both in terms of how we think, but even worse, all the higher forms of thinking we never develop, that we are channelled away from.<p>I quit cable after two years. That was enough for a lifetime lesson. Movies, quality TV series, there are actually enjoyable inspiring things to watch.<p>But I live a life almost completely devoid of any commercials, and no video news, talks shows, etc., at all.<p>And by reading I am far more &quot;informed&quot; and more importantly, have a greater, constantly growing &quot;understanding&quot; of people, power, the practical (people) side of economics, etc.<p>--<p>I don&#x27;t think it is a coincidence that the massive societal and personal problems associated with video news and a partially egregious scrapbooking web site are both associated with content produced to coerce us to watch advertising we would otherwise never choose to expose ourselves too.<p>It is all a toxic brew. Avoid all advertising in you life. You will avoid 99% of the junk and be a much better version of yourself.<p>I have threatened to drop a friendship when a friend kept sending me stupid baiting political memes. He finally understood me: It is not that it was specifically stupid or wrong, it is that I don&#x27;t tolerate mental poison like that. Not even from a friend.

I think this problem must be ancient. As Mark Twain said, “If you don’t read the news, you’re uninformed. If you do read the news, you’re misinformed.”<p>As far as I can tell the only balance is to read the news with deep skepticism, more as a way to know “what people are talking about” than what really happened.

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed, if you do read it, you’re misinformed.”<p>— Denzel Washington,

you will click the headline and you will like it

The revolution will not be televised.<p>This is because all the mainstream news sources, even those that appear to be in opposition, are working in tandem. CNN, Fox, BBC, RT, Al Jazeera, etc and papers WaPo, NYT, Guardian, Daily Mail, etc are all providing positions on the same narrative. Using this sources - as if they are stating truth - seems crazy to me. They are all propaganda.<p>The apparent variety of left or right wing perspective gives the illusion of there being something there, that you have a balanced opinion on. This is by design. Its _all_ propaganda. Its soap opera for the middle classes. It does not relate to the live you experience.<p>The backdrop to it is that people live such virtual lives, sitting at screens, not engaged with nature and real-life, the virtual has become a de facto reality.

CNN did not cover immigration even in 2016? I was under the impression it became a tool only after the disgraced chief.