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This story might be helpful to those tearing their hair out about the news lately:
I grew up believing that following the news makes you a better citizen. Eight years after having quit, that idea now seems ridiculous—that consuming a particularly unimaginative information product on a daily basis somehow makes you thoughtful and informed in a way that benefits society.
But I still encounter people who balk at the possibility of a smart, engaged adult quitting the daily news.
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A few things you might notice, if you take a break:1) You feel better
A common symptom of quitting the news is an improvement in mood. News junkies will say it's because you've stuck your head in the sand.
But that assumes the news is the equivalent of having your head out in the fresh, clear air. They don't realize that what you can glean about the world from the news isn't even close to a representative sample of what is happening in the world.
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2) You were never actually accomplishing anything by watching the newsIf you ask someone what they accomplish by watching the news, you'll hear vague notions like, "It's our civic duty to stay informed!" or "I need to know what's going on in the world," or "We can't just ignore these issues," none of which answer the question.
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A month after you've quit the news, it's hard to name anything useful that's been lost. It becomes clear that those years of news-watching amounted to virtually nothing in terms of improvement to your quality of life, lasting knowledge, or your ability to help others. And that's to say nothing of the opportunity cost. Imagine if you spent that time learning a language, or reading books and essays about some of the issues they mention on the news.
Read on for the rest of the list.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 14 2016, @02:51PM
The trouble with that thinking is that "progressive" (or "conservative", or "libertarian", or any other political label) has no bearing on the question of whether the information in question is either accurate or useful. And yes, that goes just as much for your own political affiliation as anybody else's: Progressives should be questioning the HuffPo or MSNBC just as much as they question the Wall Street Journal and Fox News.
A good example of this: Lots of news organizations have spent the last week reporting on how the intel agencies know, just know, that the Russians were behind the DNC hack. But the only technical evidence they've provided for that is a phishing email, an attack so simple that anybody could pull it off, with a defense so well-known (multi-factor authentication) that it should never have worked. Which means it could have been done just as easily by some random dude angry at Hillary Clinton because she started a civil war in their country as by Vlad Putin and friends.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.