[caseysoftware]

Copied from where I've said this elsewhere:

Almost 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.

It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions.

I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.

A few years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

[Nasrudith]

I gave up on TV news before I was even out of high school because I was fed up with the "milling" of incessantly covering to death a few topics with endless speculation and often dropping them before they resolved. That and youth as villain moral panics which were trivially bullshit like rainbow parties (even the coolest of kids claiming to have gotten blown by seven girls with different color lipsticks would get cries of bullshit by those who actually believe that someon has a "girlfriend in Canada", and "pharm parties" which consisted of filling mixing bowls with random cabinets full of pills.

Even the dumbasses who stick paper clips in electrical outlets because they think it would be funny or looking to get high wouldn't do that because it not only is obviously dangerous but not likely to get high. Smoking random literal area weeds would be more fun and less stupid.

[r00fus]

> I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.

This is an amazing thought experiment. I wonder if using this method, but extrapolating to multiple competing news sources could get remove bias both in recency as well as consistency.

[TeMPOraL]

I think the main conclusion of that thought experiment was that you're better off not watching the news in the first place. No point in trying to see if you could average out bias by watching multiple news sources; you've failed the moment you've started to watch any of them.