why haven't you stopped following the news?

there is more news to consume than ever. there are enough hot takes, alarming reports and opinion pieces that whatever your political beliefs you could easily spend the rest of your days having your views confirmed/challenged as you see fit

there are lots of reasons why following the news is bad for you. a good few are summarised here - https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli

so why haven't you stopped following the news?

i'm addicted to social media

The simplest response I can give is that, for me, ignoring the news (particularly at this point in time) feels irresponsible because it would allow me to ignore things our government is doing to the detriment of the citizenry, which would in turn allow me to refrain from thinking about the small things I can do to offset that damage. Sealing myself off feels increasingly amoral, at best, despite whatever agita I may suffer as a result of my self-induced Ludovico treatments.

As a straight white American dude, I'm in a prime position to do nothing but 'bate and engage in my state-mandated viewing of Celebrity Apprentice reruns for the foreseeable future, but that feels wrong somehow.

I find myself escaping the news via open world video games

stopping following the news would require far more effort than following it (with all that entails, from subscribing to seeing article quotes on boards). you'd have to cut yourself off from all social media and only consume fictional TV/movies.

this reminds me of a bit at the end of Negativland's Dispepsi. it's a radio call-in show or something and they ask the caller "Are you one that follows the ads?" and they say "Well I don't really follow the ads, it's just I heard it on the TV, and I heard it in a store, and a friend was talking about it, etc." we are constantly inundated with this stuff whether we seek it out or not.

Yeah, and if you aren't discerning in your consumption you wind up getting all of your information about Hillary Clinton giving birth to a demon pancake from the childeatingliberals.xxx story your step-uncle posted on your FB wall.

society would suggest that most people are not motivated to engage in social/political activity by the news. the news demotivates me to do things, and the things I do get involved with happen outside of the news, as activism generally does

I doubt that following the news makes people wiser or better-informed in engaging with real world events, and the structural factors which shape the news do not govern the real world in the same manner. I don't think the news has ever changed how I voted. the really big stuff is inescapable for anyone who isn't a hermit.

for all that obsessively consuming the news makes me feel despairing and depressed, not following it makes me feel even worse, and more vulnerable. i feel i need to know what's happening and not knowing is even more anxiety-inducing.

I'm just indirectly irradiating myself with second-hand takes on the news via ILX, a couple blogs, and my family, mostly. I'm not going to news sites themselves anymore much at all. We don't watch news on television at all, haven't for years and years.

I've more or less never watched the news on TV other than election returns on CNN. I've started disabling RTs on twitter from people who RT agitating units of breaking news because it's unhealthy for me. I skim the WaPo homepage sometimes. I read ILX. I check in on a couple local blogs. Mostly I figure my long-term viability as a person is more important than ingesting every scrap of heinous bullshit being cued up in the political arena.

so why haven't you stopped following the news?

i did, so far i'm digging it. i may never go back.

I largely have, bar social media and a bit of radio in the morning and evening. News shows are mainly patronizing bullshit in 2016

I use TV to watch Chris Hayes' show and local news. I still read my local paper because no one else is covering commission and school board meetings, and we all know that's where the most delicious right thing legislation has its origins.

we haven't had cable t.v. for years and then when i see the election/debate coverage on youtube i go ewwwww i remember those people....

they are the worst. except for pbs people. i still like them. unless they are david brooks.

and even though its been years its the same damn people. they never die or get replaced.

i thought the question was asking about whether you'd stopped following current affairs not specific bad news programmes on tv. none of you have stopped following the news!

well, i stopped following television news anyway.

and i'm much better off! i recommend it.

CNN will kill you. so bad.

no i definitely stopped following current events in all forms

oh we have our equivalents here. have spent the past 24 hours profoundly thankful for not watching Question Time last night. not even a clip of the worst bits this morning!

All TV news should be a dry and unadorned presentation of facts with maybe like some footnotes for sources on the bottom of the screen in order to dissuade those viewers who only want to engage with sensationalistic loud-talking heads who constantly stir up bullshit for the sake of ratings. Thusly all TV news that doesn't roughly resemble C-SPAN can die in a fire.

I haven't stopped following it period but, as I muttered a couple of times on FB, the fact that social media became a 24-hour news channel without respite, in essence, drove me around the bend. I concentrate as I can now on local news/local news sources for immediate reasons and continue mulling over the big picture in very small doses, while withdrawing from social media almost entirely.

I have stopped following Ned Raggett for my sanity.

Kidding! I'd follow him anywhere!

I long ago stopped watching television news, apart from very infrequent dips into PBS. And by "long ago" I mean decades ago. I wish to hell my local newspaper hadn't devolved into the Swamp Thing since it changed ownership about 4 years ago, but it did and it is scarcely worth my attention any more.

Crazy as it might be, my current most-trusted news aggregator is ILX. There are smart and attentive people here who do a damn good job of keeping me informed. ty ilx.

old lunch i would def watch that dull news.

i've long ignored tv news but this year's cycle of "watch this CNN anchor tear this surrogate apart!" made me swear it off for good.

i do PBS newshour more or less nightly, nyt daily, the nation, new yorker, an array of other websites and magazines
i should likely shell out for wapo, huh?
i don't ever ever watch cable news, fuck that cesspool
it's HARD to follow the news right now, but thus has it ever been i suppose

I haven't listened to Radio 4 since the election and actively avoid situations where I might hear THAT VOICE but I do read things online (mostly UK politics/society) and I still watch C4 news.

i don't ever ever watch cable news, fuck that cesspool

yea it is awful. just being in a bar or restaurant or my folks' house w/ it on is miserable

NPR radio news is uneven, but hasn't gone entirely to hell. The BBC is mostly shite nowadays.

I am terribly tired of the PBS Newshour's penchant for treating every political story as an opportunity to interview someone from the Heritage Foundation or a deputy undersecretary of state from the Bush administration, accompanied by a professor from some mid-level university's poli-sci department. This formula is so depressingly cautious and narrow the participants may as well all be wearing badges saying The Official and Approved Version of The Truth.

I stopped following the news after the election. No news, no newspaper, no twitter, no buzzfeed, no celeb gossip. I haven't even watched snl becuase it can be too topical. I get nytimes alerts on my phone so when wwiii starts I'll know about it and I won't be tempted to sneak a peek of the news. The news right now makes me sick and anxious and angry and I don't feel like putting myself through that out of some fuzzy sense of civic obligation. On the plus side I'm reading books like a mofo

I wish I could give up following the news for the reasons other people have discussed already (it takes up a lot of time, it makes me miserable, I don't think it actually benefits me or the world in general in any way), but I've never been able to do it. I think a lot of it is vanity - I want to be well-informed and I feel guilty about my ignorance (and there's so much news out there these days that I can always feel guilty about not getting through more of it - this is me, basically: http://www.theonion.com/article/the-economist-to-halt-production-for-month-to-let--20090)

I generally listen to a few hours of the extremely dedicated to impartiality R4 News programs every day. It probably would be better to use that time with a good history book or Dandy or something, but it is a long term habit. After a brief period where I thought change might be possible on the domestic front I have gone back to fuckitall mode. No point getting depressed over forces you have no ability to influence is my current gloomy mind-set.

I'd have to quit my job as a journalist to even remotely be able to stop following the news, but even then I probably wouldn't. I have become more selective though, and that mainly means cutting down on reading Twitter, where the noise and all the bloody opinions are just in your face all the time. I've never seen one single fake news thing in my FB (ty filter bubble and dece friends, sorry fam who's friend req I never responded to) or nonsense like that. Most of my day still revolves around news, but I'm trying to tweak what's on offer to make for a saner diet.

hate too news

Crazy as it might be, my current most-trusted news aggregator is ILX.

yeah this, and sometimes actual real FB links to actual newspapers

I should probably drop out entirely though, the arguments in the OP's link are convincing.

this thread is light on positive reasons to follow the news

so is this the new (haughty) "oh, i don't watch television"?

because of technology, i have a very strong ability to cultivate what i see and hear for my own benefit, and i do, but i think it's necessary to assume that most people _do not_ and _will not_ actively cultivate healthy and reliable sources of information. this whole trend of elevating ourselves at individuals seems to come actively at the expense of society as a whole. i don't think it's enough to disconnect and say "oh, well, not my problem".

what I read & the effect it has on me is completely my problem, but there is no use for the amount of information available

I think we're in an age of rampant disinformation, but I still think it's worth following the news or trying to dissect the credibility of it. I agree with others who look to ILX on the news front.

i actually find it strangely comforting to read really good, well-crafted news articles, written in that staid and calm NYT style that ppl love to knock. it feels like a healthier way for me to process traumatic events than sitting through any cable news show or trying to piece together information from the usual blizzard of social media stuff. also helps, i find, to force yourself to actually read an entire single article from beginning to end, without skimming or getting distracted, and then doing something else for a while; part of the anxiety of "paying attention to news" for me is the constant feeling that i'm missing out on something, that there's always something else you "have" to read.

instead of going to bed last night i watched this whole thing. so entertaining! they don't make roundtables like this anymore.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?7046-1/whos-journalist-talk-show-sensationalism

my friend's dad is the n.y. daily news editor at that table and he's hilarious. right out of a jimmy stewart movie. my favorite era of the n.y. daily news too. i read it every day. when he edited it.

jd otm in all points there imo

I find myself escaping the news via open world video games

Yuuuup, just bought Watch Dogs 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition last weekend

I dropped NPR and the Daily Show about summer '07 or so when I couldn't take the tone of the former and the latter reminding me of all the assholes in the world actively working at making the place worse.

I cancelled my newspaper subscription a year ago and don't miss, hardly follow news apart from what I gather from ILX and FB, and if there was an option to filter all politics related news from my FB feed I would use it

don't miss it*

I am terribly tired of the PBS Newshour's penchant for treating every political story as an opportunity to interview someone from the Heritage Foundation or a deputy undersecretary of state from the Bush administration, accompanied by a professor from some mid-level university's poli-sci department. This formula is so depressingly cautious and narrow the participants may as well all be wearing badges saying The Official and Approved Version of The Truth.

going to try to quit all rolling news/newspaper sites etc. for 2017, just have the lrb. I will try to forget about westminster

lol U can't just tune out the news cause you don't like what's happening, either you care or you don't. sure news is more 'morbid fascination at the trainwreck our societies are hurtling towards' now than before, but it's not like a tv show where you can just go "ah, not a fan of the direction they're taking it with this Trump chap. shame, i really liked where it was going with the whole Obama subplot. what else is on?" like it's some prestige drama

US politics tends to become extremely salient to the low-news consumption masses every four years, then it might as well be paint on a wall once the election`s wrapped up and it comes time to actually write up budgets and pass laws. will be interesting to see if Trump antics can maintain interest. would likely be exhausting for most ppl

xp when u say u cant there im interested to hear that backed up have u any sources

i don't think following the news is Just entertainment for those who do it, and i meant "can't" to the degree that there's some higher principle behind staying informed. obvs anyone can do whatever they want

\(-o-)/

care about what

i don't think following the news necessarily means you are staying informed, with the exception that you are staying informed on what the news is saying of course.

also there def seems to be an entertainment value gleaned from recent performative "signing up for a NYT subscription to make a difference" flattering yourself consumption.

recent

RECENT HE SAYS

i only follow the news via ilx

Anne Rice
1 hr ·

Good Morning, People of the Page. For the first time in my life, I'm understanding why people watch Animal Planet and cooking channels. I can't watch the news anymore. I wonder how many others have turned away from the news. I'm turning more inward into my own creative world, of course. I always do that.

I set the TV to the Food Network weeks ago. Rather a relief. Even if Guy Fieri is on screen.