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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 Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 14 2016, @02:57PM
That was my practice as well for a long time. I would read sources like Huffington Post and Drudge side-by-side. This election ended the reading of Huffington Post and its confederates, for me. The heights of self-delusion and propaganda they were going to to cram Hillary down everyone's throats, in direct contradiction of the principles they purport to support, was sickening. I know some others felt the same way I did, because I checked in with those sites just after the election to gauge their reaction and there were folks saying, "This is the result of rigging the primary game for a candidate like Hillary." I checked in again late last week to see if the initial shock had passed, if any of them had come back down to earth, and nope, they hadn't. They're spinning off into an ever more irrelevant and delusional tangential parallel universe.
I can read Drudge comfortably, though, because I don't expect those readers to agree with me. Their sacred cows and hobby horses are as plain as the nose on their face. It's easy to look past that and try to understand what their motivations are. Yes, some of them are motivated by evil. But most aren't, and are simply misconstrued as such by their detractors. It's more likely they're more comfortable with the discursive milieu on offer there, even though what they're talking about is essentially the same thing that their fellow citizens on the other side of the discursive divide are worried about.
Washington DC delenda est.