SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday December 13 2016, @06:15PM
BBC DW and RT is adequate. Day to day nothing much happens so its not that hard to skim the big three. Today for example, Aleppo is a rotting oozing sore on the planet, that's about all that qualifies as news. Its hard to even say that is news, unfortunately.
Never trust a countries propaganda piece to report accurately on itself or a spat with another country. So don't waste time on RT or DW if the Russians and the Germans are arguing about natgas trade deals again, but the BBC optimistically will be pretty good. BBC usually has a good rep but they had terrible agit-prop about brexit, scotland independence, anything on the topic of the UK itself is very questionable WRT BBC. Both RT and DW like to shit on Poland, which I guess isn't all that historically surprising, but the Beeb to the rescue...
Also pay attention to the infotainment fluff or filler... RT is balanced and somewhat fair, DW is left leaning but occasionally balanced, BBC is as progressive and leftie as the DNC puppets in the USA like the NYT, the leftward bias is extremely strong with the BBC with respect to the infotainment fluff. Some of the attitude WRT fake news fluff bleeds over into the real news, turning it fake. The BBC is far more likely to publish fake news than RT or DW, for example.
Also it pays to kind of keep a record... has, say, the WashPost ever predicted anything correctly about, say, Trump? Oh, no, you say? They're always consistently wrong? Well you can extract "news" from them by simply reading everything backwards. So if the WashPo goes insane agitprop slant about Trump appointing a Homer Simpson-esque character to the nuclear division of the DOE then you can rest assured he did a great job and everything gonna be OK.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Tuesday December 13 2016, @11:02PM
It used to be that you could read both the Washington Times and the Washington Post and by combining them get something like news. But both have gone so batshit crazy lately that there isn't any point.
I mostly read their sports pages.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14 2016, @11:50PM
I'd like to say that, if you read BBC articles where they've allowed comments, just skip those comments. It's 99% pure drivel. You wouldn't believe how bad it is. Comments on the Guardian are usually good, though. Varied, opinionated, informative even sometimes.