[BeetleB]

> What's the alternative that is reasonable?

Not reading news that doesn't have a significant impact on your life is entirely reasonable.

The guy who got arrested in the other state for hacking into the DOD? It's totally reasonable not to bother knowing about it.

> I think that Republicans push mistrust of the media to eliminate any sources of information besides their own representatives

Ha! I was a news junkie in the Bush/Obama era. Getting busy in life finally cured me of that scourge, but I learned a lot of lessons. Long before Trump came on the scene I was an advocate of "There's no middle ground with the news - either go all in (time consuming) or mostly all out" - and while I didn't shout "Fake news!", it was my sentiment - you really can't trust much, and learning what you can trust will take years of aggressively analyzing the news and how it works - time most people don't have.

It was disconcerting that the person who got people to distrust the news was Trump.

Anyway, in case people think I'm advocating never trusting news: It ain't so. As I think I said elsewhere - one can find quality articles and quality journalists. You just can't do it as a casual hobby.

[Braxton1980]

>Not reading news that doesn't have a significant impact on your life is entirely reasonable.

Our discussion was about trust in sources. The assumption is we need the information.

Also, this attitude allows suffering to occur as long as it doesn't affect the majority of the people.

The government can harm people that get its way and no one would care because it doesn't directly harm them

[BeetleB]

> The assumption is we need the information.

And my mission is to let people know they don't need 95% of the information they think they do.

But if they really need information about a particular topic/domain, they should put in the hours to find ways to verify what they read, and start ranking journalists by accuracy and integrity.

> Also, this attitude allows suffering to occur as long as it doesn't affect the majority of the people.

You're not wrong.

The flip side is that casual news reading allows quite a bit of suffering because people have a flawed model of the world due to their news perusals.

In fact, that's what this submission and many comments are pointing out. How much money is spent to fight terrorism (including invading countries to protect us from terrorists) vs heart disease prevention? Why do people believe the former is more worthy of spending money? If the news provided proportional coverage, we'd likely have spent a lot less money on the former.

There is no perfect middle ground.