[kiawe_fire]

Additionally, the news does not present fact-centered, honest information about your government.

It’s sensationalized, biased, partisan, and framed in an inflammatory manner to make you angry or ignite passion to make you vote a certain way.

It shapes people’s votes because, just like a politician’s own advertisement, that’s the goal.

Regardless of what your choice of news source is or your political party of choice, likely half of the outrageous issues being shouted by the news right now are irrelevant or blown out of proportion.

I’m also increasingly finding that the most important piece of any democracy, isn’t who you vote in, but your willingness to stand by your fellow citizens (including those who voted the other way) in holding the person that you voted in accountable for their results or lack thereof.

And that requires a certain amount of empathy, intellectual honesty, and willingness to reject confirmation bias, that the news, as it exists, simply will not give you.

[robocat]

One of the key parts of democracy is being able to vote people out. Think of any authoritarian country, and how much the people would love to get rid of some arsehole at the top. The US has managed to vote out presidents that have wanted to become dictators!

[goodbyesf]

> One of the key parts of democracy is being able to vote people out.

The problem is you can vote people out. But the same two parties remain.

> Think of any authoritarian country, and how much the people would love to get rid of some arsehole at the top.

'Authoritarian' countries exist because most of the people support it. And when most of the people are against it, authoritarian countries change.

> The US has managed to vote out presidents that have wanted to become dictators!

Which presidents wanted to be dictators? If someone wanted to be a dictator, they wouldn't run to be president in the first place.

[eropple]

> The problem is you can vote people out. But the same two parties remain.

Calling them "the same parties" is close to hiding the ball. Those parties have shifted and diverged in multiple directions over their history. See the Civil Rights era for an obvious one--or the rapid separation of both current parties, today. The generally-socdem push of the left wing of the Democratic Party is working to change policy and position. (The reactionary push of the right wing of the Republican Party is working even more dramatically.)

> Which presidents wanted to be dictators? If someone wanted to be a dictator, they wouldn't run to be president in the first place.

This doesn't make any sense at all. Why would they not run? Plenty of authoritarians all over the world and throughout history have come to power through democratic means!

As for "which President", Donald Trump comes to mind for very obvious reasons around attempting to retain power through extralegal means. Whether he has the functioning cognitive capacity to understand what a dictatorship is an open question, but it does not change that he attempted to retain executive control via force and fiat.

[Zetice]

It's funny sometimes seeing what people reveal about themselves unintentionally when they rail against something; if the news is all of those bad things for you, then you're not working very hard to understand it.

"News" is literally just "what's happening around me". There's no bias in that. It's just a set of facts. News media outlets can be biased/partisan/etc. but bias doesn't just fall out of the sky to hold us hostage. You can account for it.

[brigadier132]

No its not whats happening around me. Its shocking things people who want me to look at ads choose to show me from all over the world

[Zetice]

That's news media, not news. The media reports the news, in ways you may dislike, but the actual content they're sharing with you is rooted in literal events that took place.

[brigadier132]

Well fine, you win the argument over semantics. Everyone here is referring to news media using the term news. Now that we've come to this understanding that what we mean by news is news media then my point stands.

[Zetice]

No, they aren’t. They’re discussing whether or not knowing things is worth it, which is completely different.

Your point doesn’t make sense once you realize there’s a difference between news and news media.

[kiawe_fire]

The problem is, the original article itself doesn’t really differentiate. It DOES call out longer form pieces like books or magazines as better alternatives (suggesting the article is primarily referring to news media) but also implies not jumping on the latest story and waiting for those that outlast the news cycle (which would suggest the article is also about “knowing things” in so much as we don’t need to know all things immediately all the time).

I don’t think anyone is making the reductionist argument that “knowing things isn’t worth it”.

But our time and attention is finite, and the things the news media is directing our time and attention toward learning is arguably not valuable.

I would also challenge the notion that news media is nothing but a gateway to raw news with bias that we can account for. Most people don’t account for it, most media outlets don’t account for it, and it may not even be possible for it to truly be accounted for.

News media can and does report incomplete facts that can change an entire perception of an issue. They can and do report non facts as well. Apologies and corrections are rare and buried, usually bookended by the next wrong things to be reported.

If we (a) define news media and news as separate entities entirely, and (b) define news as “something that happened”, then it even furthers the argument that news media itself is unworthy of time and attention, even in seeking news as raw facts. Because news media does such a poor job of reporting facts, the facts end up too mangled to be usable.

At this point the question becomes “can the bias actually be accounted for” (IMO, it cannot be), and if not, “how do we get facts outside of the news media”.

Which is still tangentially related to the original article in so much as we’re still discussing which news (facts) matter and where do you get them from… but in almost no case is the answer “the news media”.