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by xboxnolifes 1083 days ago
Exactly. Nobody should be watching 24/7 news, but you also probably shouldn't be avoiding every news publication ever.

10 minutes a day skimming your news sources of choice for topics relevant to you combined with hearing things from your friends/family/coworkers goes a long way.
1 comments
kortilla 1083 days ago
10 mins a day is still way too much. It’s 99.99% absofuckinguseless.

I say this as someone who read it for decades. It’s all caricatures of the truth designed to push some other narrative.

Every single time I thought I was informed and chatted with someone who had even a small notional bit of first hand information, it became immediately apparent how I was both extremely ignorant and how my false sense of knowledge made it worse.

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bigger_inside 1082 days ago
Exactly. I'm a researcher, and there are maybe two or three things I know a lot about, and some things where I understand, structurally, how they function.

Literally everything on the news about these things is horrible. It either dumbs something down to the point where it supports aggressive misunderstandings, or highlights an element that serves to support some public (misguided) preconception, or it deletes structural context to the point where the thing said isn't per se wrong, but without that context, it's certain to be misunderstood.

I made the mistake to let myself be interviewed once (on more of a "lighthearted" subject, nothing controversial). The journalists twisted my words to make them conform to some feelgood complete misconception, reflecting the things "people like to read about themselves" and how we, in our late modern hyperindividualist societies, imagine the world works: it's all about you in the end! Nope.

The news is a commercial enterprise; its purpose, classically, is to sell your stereotypes back to you. Today, in polarized society, it's there to sell one segment's stereotypes back to that segment while maximally riling up other segments, thus creating engagement through battle. And no, "Publicly funded" ones aren't any better at it, they operate in the same space.

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xboxnolifes 1082 days ago
10 minutes is roughly 5 minutes of skimming through everything and 5 minutes reading the single thing that you might care about. It's definitely not too much. Some days you can even skip the last 5 minutes if nothing that you care about has happened.
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kortilla 1082 days ago
It’s not the time lost that provided negative value. It was the false sense of “being informed”.
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