I had to teach myself last year that you can be an informed voter and also not constantly not watch the news. With Ukraine I realized I was constantly in a rolling panic attack and I couldn’t get out of it. The news was sensationalized so much. (Not downplaying the events, but they also rolled out experts who talked about how likely nuclear annihilation was and I was not handling that well). I realized it was all to keep me glued to my screen and clicking, and that made me kind of disgusted with them. Here’s a war going on with actual people affected, and they’re worried about how many clicks they’re getting.

I stay informed, I know the issues, but that doesn’t mean I need to be subscribed to /c/news and have a constant feed. I vote in every election, and if there’s something I don’t know I look it up. But I don’t need it daily.

The middle ground (IMO) is local news that’s actionable. For me that means reading up on community meetings in my district, events involving local representatives, proposed zoning or street design changes, small-scale infrastructure projects, funding for schools and libraries, etc.

Ultimately these are things that will affect your quality of life much more directly than anything involving national politics, or whatever irrelevant topic cable news anchors want you to get whipped into a frenzy about.

Personally what I’ve found works for me is to focus on news that’s local to me, the more local the better. So I start with news about my municipality, then my province, then my country, and I try to keep it at that for the most part. Of course, world news slips through, especially American politics, but I try to keep it at bay as much as possible.

I honestly had a bit of a nervous breakdown around the start of the war in Ukraine, doomscrolling through articles and updates everyday. I realized I needed to dial back and tried to cut out all news, and that just ended up making me more anxious. Focusing on local news has been the Goldilocks zone for me. I’ll still consume stuff about world news occasionally, but it’s usually in a way that relates to my country, for example articles about Canada’s support of Israel on the world stage.

Some news sources are definitely more inflammatory than others. I’m also of the opinion that television news in general is a farce, to the extent that the best “journalists” on TV in recent memory have been comedians like Jon Stewart and John Oliver.

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This op/ed is heavy with claims and light on proof. Is it anything more than an advert for the author’s book? It seems reactionary for no reason.

A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge.

Yes. Humans are fragile and we need to make sure they are not in danger before we then – later – investigate the engineering components. Is there news out there that does not worry about the stability of bridges after such events? The same goes for earthquakes, floods, and the like. First we worry about survivability, and later we look at what engineering worked and which failed.

I also see no need for news to be consumed as unquestionable gospel. The state of U.S. politics has led me to believe that yes, in fact, there are people who DO take it that way, but I know enough people who question beyond the sound bites to think that the author here is overstating the idea that consuming news reduces critical thinking. I do, however, suspect that it is harder to concentrate on heavily linked article than ones that save references for the end.

Anyone try to click the link to the study on how ‘links are bad’ – the link is BAD. I got a 404 (perhaps it is a regional issue?). By cutting out the chunk, ‘magazine/’, I got a working link: https://www.wired.com/2010/05/ff-nicholas-carr/

Detaching yourself from the reality of what’s happening in the world is certainly one way of coping, but IMO unless you’re doing it to protect your mental health (in which case I highly recommend reducing your news consumption), it is just a form of isolationism at best, and an abdication of our shared human responsibility to protect and help each other at worst.

Let me reiterate: if you are seeing your mental health decline as a result of news consumption, you should reduce that consumption, or at least make changes to which news sources you consume.

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

I strongly disagree with the person in this article’s recommendation of detachment for the average person. This is akin to advocating for political non-participation, because how can you intelligently assess who is best to represent you in the world if you don’t know the state of the world?

We on the Left (rightfully) criticize people who cannot seem to care about an issue unless or until it personally affects them… well guess how they got there; not being informed about anything external to their own immediate lives.

It’s quite the privilege to be able to cut off externalities and be happy; many people do not have the luxury of being able to do that, because those externalities will intrude into their lives whether they like it or not, like Roe being overturned.

/rant

Since you asked for recommendations, I only really have one that worked for me, which was to cut off social media news (i.e. ditching Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit).

All 3 of those were news… combined with some of the worst takes on that news by the horrible people on those sites. I don’t need to hear a bunch of conservatives and white nationalists and misogynists and racists (apologies for the redundancy) give their takes on the news, especially because we know that they gain an outsize representation on social media due to ‘interaction’ being rewarded, good or bad.

After I freaked out during the last couple elections, I basically stopped most news. It’s pretty unclear what I could do with it anyway. The theoretical benefit was mostly around politics, but the vast masses just do it as a team sport, so my being “informed” by the news isn’t helping hold politicians accountable or affecting elections. Outside of politics, except for the information about COVID during the pandemic, most specifically the vaccines, I have a hard time thinking of any useful information.

Even local news usually isn’t too relevant. I guess the “avoid this intersection because of power out to lights, flooding, icing or whatever” could be helpful, but usually I don’t get it till it’s later on anyway.

This article is a great example of the struggles of living in our highly constructed world. It has been thousands of years since the mathematically average human lived a natural lifestyle and the rest of us trying to make big interconnected settlements work have been blundering it because what a big society needs is for us to constantly work against many aspects of our nature. No one can just live by their instincts and expect everything to work out, and anyone encouraging people not to think are literally trying to take advantage of what people tend to do when they forgo rationally considering key decisions.

It is very uncomfortable and distressing to hear about major disasters my government is responsible for, and it would be much more natural and fulfilling to me if all I needed to know was how to master my local environment with the rest of my band, but we have historical examples of atrocities being allowed for long periods of time due to nothing more than popular carelessness. If more people had the moral courage to expose themselves to the realities of our government and their own beliefs, I can’t imagine Hillary, Trump, or Biden would have come anywhere close to winning their respective primaries over the past so many years. These elections took place as a consequence of trusting that there were no ulterior motives for any information offered by the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News by most who cared to vote and the rest simply closing themselves off from the process. Just carelessness. Simply hearing about the information spread by these outlets second-hand is probably even worse since it will be filtered through an individual’s interpretation of it. The solution can’t be to try to close oneself off from the outside world.

Uncritical reading of the product of highly compromised information companies is a bad thing, as this article discusses. The solution is not willful ignorance, but the more difficult and less comfortable path which is ultimately more beneficial to oneself and their society. Continue to read the news and in addition, be critical of it. Understand that the news starts with a reporter and then goes through a process of edits influenced by the editors’ biases, the advertisers’ desires, and the orientation toward maximizing profit. Reading foreign news coverage of the same events filtered through an often totally different set of biases can make the important information itself more clear. Just as important as what the major news sources are covering are important events they aren’t covering which tend to get picked up by independent outlets with fewer restrictions. The American media blackout of the Standing Rock protest was particularly notable. I have always wondered how that event may have turned out if it were given more coverage than page 7 of the AP one time.

It almost certainly is better for our mental health to block out unpleasant information. We weren’t built for this society we have. We have a lot of work to do before we can approximate a natural lifestyle in our constructed society. There are powerful forces creating an information environment to manufacture our consent, and ignoring that they are doing that will not fix anything.

I try to not read it personally

I pay very little to no attention to the news at all and could honestly care less. And I feel as if I am better for it because I am not concerned about every little thing. Big news stories I will hear about through the grapevine, but the little things just pass me by and that’s okay.

i don’t drive often, maybe once or twice a week, and the car always has NPR on. other than that, i’ll skim headlines, but don’t tend to read them unless it’s something positive or local.

i do read up on the candidates nearing election day.

🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

For the last several months I reduced my news intake and unfollowed a lot of stress-inducing accounts on social media. I have been happier and more relaxed. Can recommend.

If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong

Is that a thing about neurotypicals, or just people without any selfcontrol?

I know I can compensate all the rhetorics, because I can spot most of the techniques by name, never get “pulled in” by the news, extract only the facts (if there are any), then contrast them with other sources, before “making my mind” about anything. I’m not afraid of saying “beats me, I don’t know enough”, until I do learn enough to build a consistent picture without holes or contradictions (doesn’t mean I’m always right, just coherent). Most times when I look at news, I end up taking away maybe a single sentence, which almost never is the one being highlighted.

There is also picking which news sources to care about. Right now I only know about two sources that are somewhat impartial: one of them is the weather channel, and the other a news meta-debate where they like inviting people with opposite points of view, without letting it turn into a cage match.

As for the rest of the article… it’s just describing the techniques used to produce what I like to call “news for toddlers”: fake human interest, full of rhetorical resources, cut down into tidbits easy to chew and swallow, aimed at eliciting an emotional response rather than a rational one (BTW, they’re the same techniques used by trolls).

You shouldn’t care about “that kind” of news. There are other kinds, like scientific breakthroughs, investigative reports, or news meta-analyses, that you might want to care about. Or whether to take an umbrella tomorrow.