The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

I started my career as a reporter a decade ago. I can't tell you how many stories I filed that an editor twisted into something different to fit their narrative.

There were also stories I was directed away from because they would alienate our audience.

It's a narrative business.

The blending of comedy/entertainment with news, going back to the GWB era with the Daily Show is a good example of this problem. People consuming junk food thinking they are getting their vegetables.

Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.

The more I think about the state of news, the more I'm convinced that we need independent rankings of news sites and journalism. Something similar to a health inspection score. With considerations like:

- News needs to be verifiable. Direct links to data sources.

- News need to have history of modifications to their article.

- Factual errors will cause dings to their score.

- Revenue sources/tax forms need to be public to find conflicts of interest.

If a news site wants to sell it's soul to make ad money, that's fine, but I want to see some sort of "F" rating on that site. There's no incentive for news sites to make good news right now.

Edit: Or, linking to this article: a sort of "nutrition facts" label for news

I think most journalists these days are not much more than poorly informed and poorly paid professional sh*tposters/provocateurs who learned how to write an inverted pyramid in j-school. I can easily find poorly informed and attention-grabbing opinions from a number of places, including even here :).

Disclosure: I learnt to write an inverted pyramid in j-school but dropped out after a year, I didn't want to work in this industry. Also maybe I just wouldn't have been a good journalist.

An interesting book on this subject is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, it's where the term "Churnalism" was coined.

This is a pretty bad take.

For example, multiple studies have shown that in communities that aren't addressed by a robust local news outlet, local corruption goes up. Having a good newsroom _does_ improve an understanding of what your representatives are up to, and a lack of information _does_ allow them to get up to more behind our backs.

I think the biggest failure of this piece is to make all news equivalent. Yes, cable news is junk; yes, many of the corporate newsrooms that churn out hundreds of articles a day are junk. They use engagement as a metric for success rather than finding ways to align themselves with impact and creating an informed, empowered electorate. That last thing - an informed, empowered electorate - is what it's all about.

Real journalism that is diligently undertaken in the public interest does make a real difference. (Should we know whether Clarence Thomas was taking corrupt bribes? Yes. Should we know how climate change is progressing? Yes. Should we know if the police are killing innocent people? Yes. Should we know that the police at the Uvalde school shooting hung around for over an hour doing nothing? Yes.) Telling people not to pay attention to the world around them results in an electorate who cannot meaningfully vote on real issues.

For those of us who build software, we need to know the factors that impact the lives of the people we're serving. We need to know the trends in the marketplaces and communities where we show up. The news is good for that, too.

Turn off cable news; pay more attention to non-profit news; go for long-form written journalism. Stay informed.

It's absolutely true that we take a psychic hit for doing so. I'd say that's more to do with the world than it is the media overall. Perhaps we should spend more time trying to make it better?

I think there should be a middle ground where you dont have to completely remove yourself from the news, just the endless feeds and opinions. It does seem helpful to know what is going on with the world. Whether thats socially or just understanding other events. I fully agree there is a limit and most of what is out there is junk but not all of it.

I have been actively trying to build something to get away from the endless feeds of news.

Essentially a modern day newspaper. So you can read what is important and then be done for the day.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131

Bite-sized articles have their value. I don't know how many mobile tabs I have open, Chrome stops displaying the number when you reach 100. Most of the tabs contain a deep dive into a particular topic and it's not feasible to actually read every one of them.

However, every unread tab I close feels like a personal failure to keep up.

I can see the value of news articles and short videos like those from Fireship: It might be educational and/or entertaining, but if not, it hasn't been a serious time investment, so it doesn't matter anyway.

"News" is such a huge category though. I just try to be more selective to subjects which may have some effect on me. Bookmark some articles as potential trends. Bookmark some as potentially important reading. Put a budget on it.

One interesting idea I have been toying with is to use prediction markets as a filter. Like, ask myself if I can make a prediction based on this. Then go to a prediction market and actually put a bet on a prediction. Either find one which already exists, or make one. What I have found interesting is how the situation develops into me being wrong. And how hard it is to get above zero. If I can't gain by making predictions on a situation I'm somewhat interested in, then how might being in the red on less informed topics be messing with my thinking?

Probably not realistic, but I have been thinking about how I could make it work.

100%. Very insightful.

Follow the money.

I used to be a huge news junky. After a while I realized it's all designed as entertainment to drive ad revenue. Gave it up and I've been happier ever since.

A decade ago I switched from my local morning news to a French show. Instead of violence, traffic accidents, and soccer, the French show talked about recipes, books, travelling, etc. It didn't really try to be a news show, just something light to start off the day.

Nowadays I prefer silence during breakfast.

I don't read news but I read too much twitter. I curated my following base carefully so now almost everything on the timeline is interesting/insightful/funny. Problem is it's still junk food and of little long term value. I really need to step away for a while.

I haven't watched the news for my entire adult life (almost 20 years). Why would I? I have countless other things I could do with my time and I have no idea why I'd allocate some of that to daily news. I skim over headlines and read articles that look interesting but only in heavily curated places like this very website.

People I know who do consume news interestingly only bother telling me about super shocking stuff that I don't need to know, e.g. "someone got murdered", "a celebrity said so and so" etc. They rarely tell me stuff I might need to know like "income tax is changing next year".

I have struggled with the negative aspects of news as well and personally think there is a middle route over cutting it out.

I built attabit.com to summarize the news for friends, family, and myself to remove as much sensationalism, bias, and 'junk food' as possible.

The site has been having all kinds of problems today with the claude 3.5 sonnet outage but outside of that, its become the main news source of high level news for me and a lot of my friends and family.

It lets you know what's happening without getting sucked into it. If you check it out, let me know what you think?

I agree that social media is largely junk, especially getting news from social media. Personally, I have just eliminated any _real time_ source of news. I control (instead of an algorithm controlled by corporate policy) what I want to catch up on.

Want to catch up on Olympic event medal status for my home country? Sub to the email newsletter.

Want to follow politics in your state? Sub to the email newsletter at local and state orgs.

Want to follow updates in tech industry in general or a specific subfield (ie, nanotechnology, or the latest hype?). Sub to the email newsletter.

With this method, I can choose when to catch up on these topics. Sure, I might be 1-2 days out of sync compared to the news junkie. But with this method I can at least guarantee a variety of sources come out and get a much better view of the issue. Rather than the often sensationalized version presented at _real time_.

One very hilarious instance of where real time junkies got it very wrong: JD Vance, the VP choice for GOP, was allegedly sexually involved with a couch. Original author of post cited a random page in JD Vance’s autobiography in tweet. What was clearly supposed to be a joke, but turned very viral.

“Influencers”, comedians, and I think even some mainstream news outlets ran with it.

I don’t recall _when_ it was debunked, but had to have been within 24 hours of that tweet.

It always has been. It always will be. But you have a choice to stop eating this junk food and turn to fine dining (non-profit info sources) or home cooking (books and own research). https://offstream.news/longread/2017/04/4/the-post-truth-and...

To me it always seemed that reading a good, weekly news paper would help. The lack of real time news would make it focus on broader trends and I would not be distracted with the breaking news that is not important. For a while it seemed the Economist was close. But they have breaking news, what happened today and they publish articles that appear in the weekly edition already during the week.

Is there something better out there?

I would call it a paradox of interconnectedness. We can write, photograph or broadcast about an immediate event and have that instantly shared with a huge audience online. The stories that bubble up and make it to the top attract a disproportionate amount of our attention and blur our perception of the surrounding reality.

The comparison with junk food is an apt one.

It seems like for every human desire or appetite or source of value, there exists a quick hit, instantly gratifying satisfaction that is bad for long-term health. And there also exists a slowly-acquired, initially difficult or unpleasant, eventually-rewarding satisfaction that is good for long-term health.

Wouldn't a healthy society encourage its members to pursue the more stable, initially uncomfortable, initially difficult, but long-term good option on as many axes as possible?

We should seek out and eat nutritious, wholesome food rather than eat junk food non-stop every day. We should read books and articles rather than consume infotainment and social media. We should go to the gym rather than sitting on the couch and doing nothing. We should commit to real relationships instead of participating in infinite hookup culture. We should find real social circles to belong to and become loyal to them instead of embracing abstract political tribalism that tickles the "belonging" nerve but leaves us with no one who personally knows or cares about us when we're in actual need. We should buy things when we need them and when they're a good value rather than spending impulsively as a therapeutic exercise. The list goes on and on.

I'm concerned that the currently-most-common set of societal norms across pretty much every Western culture I'm aware of seems to encourage the opposite of all that. And I think it's gotten that way, not least at any rate, because sad, scared, addicted, unhappy, immature, overstimulated, overmedicated, physically and spiritually unhealthy humans are simply easier for corporations to make money off of than the alternative. Which suggests that this situation didn't just happen by accident—there's pressure coming from influential people and groups to make it this way. And that means there's systemic resistance to be expected when trying to swim against that current, whether for oneself or, for e.g., for one's kids.

Similar to this post, which I believe I saw here a decade ago: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

I agree with the article that there is a lot of low-quality "journalism" out there, designed to outrage or entertain rather than inform.

However, that does not mean that all journalism should be disregarded. I read the Washington Post and listen to NPR (regardless of how you feel about their cultural programming, their news organization is excellent.) Citizens in a free society have a duty to be informed about the issues facing that society. I reject the idea that there aren't readily available high quality sources of information about the world. Are any of them perfect? Clearly, no. But ignoring them because they're not perfect strikes me as nihilistic.

There's one quote from the article that alarmed me:

> The news is overwhelmingly about things you cannot possibly influence

In democracies, we do have elections...

Poor Chuck. I read this and think he needs more _older adults_ in his life. Kidding/not kidding. Chuck’s argument lumps social media with “the news”

>“The news (and social media use) is indicative of a poor information diet.”

When I was young my grandfather would listen to KCBS news radio in the morning and KTVU 10 o’clock news in the evening. That’s it. My dad read the local Argus newspaper. That’s it.

As a youth I didn’t, but the impression was made.

Now I listen to WNYC (NPR) radio in the morning when I get up. That’s it.

News doesn’t have to be what they offer—24/7/365–but a habit of keeping yourself informed about local, regional, national and world events. I prefer one dose in the morning (“should I go back to bed?”)

My opinion in reaction to an opinion piece.

I had a high school English/Literature teacher who used to dismiss the class by saying "Go play in the street, children!" They also said "Don't watch anything that tells you how to feel."

Anyway, I feel like the human species has arrived at a time when we have the internet, without having a great way to deal with everyone's feelings.

Some news media orgs make junk food, some news media orgs make information poison - they make it harder to understand what is going on in the world.

"It's always in the last place you look" - if you already know how you FEEL about something, you don't have to think about it in information or factual terms at all. You don't have to keep looking.

This is right on the money. I never really used social media, and I started disregarding mainstream news about 8 years ago, relapsing every once in a while when I’m boored only to be reminded the only things reported makes me feel horrible.

All it takes to ditch the news is being on the inside of a breaking story, and realizing how much information being spewed out is just plain incorrect... then the next few articles you read, you realize it's not just your article they warped for clicks, but all of them.

When newspapers were the primary news consumption, it was a bit better - journalists had a few hours to collect facts before publishing. Now there's zero time so they will publish anything. Empty calories.

I stopped reading the news because of this. When 90% of the articles on the BBC are irrelevant to me and have titles like "Taylor Swift Vienna concerts cancelled after attack threat", "The 'absurd' real-life sting operation that inspired a movie", or "Behave yourselves, China tells its Olympic fans", I lose all interest.

The news has become like intellectual sugar, written more for page views than for merely informing, and I find that exceptionally irritating. Writing so-called "catchy headlines" and an overwhelming bias towards bad news has made me sick with all news organizations.

Of course, I am sure some people like it. Probably most. I am in the minority for most things, but I simply hate it.

Journalism has always been a rather shady business. "Remember the Maine."

Also, most of what you hear or read is just a reflection of who is spending money to get press. For example, Taylor Swift, AI companies and the Olympics all have a formula to turn press coverage into cash, so it should be no surprise that they are constantly in the news.

It's difficult for me to completely deprive myself of the news agenda of the world. But sometimes I do a sort of detox for a month from world news and focus more on articles in scientific journals, for example. My friend likes to go to the forest for a week every six months where he has no connection at all to the outside world

Welcome to Hacker News!

Compared to all the garbage on social media, professional articles by actual journalists don’t make us dumber I think, even if they serve a narrative. Something about reading an actual article makes us think and reason in a way that a tweet or, worse, a thread of tweets just doesn’t.

I like the system in UK and Germany where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news.

I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.

"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's."

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Bed of Procrustes"

I think reading weekly news instead of daily news helps you stay in the loop, but cuts out a lot of information junk.

That being said I’m still looking for some good weekly news(papers) in English.

Would love some recommendations.

I recommend picking up "NYTimes complete front pages" from ~1850-2000. You can see for yourself how the news was so much more intelligent in the 1800's.

What happened?

In 1909, 1976, and 1998, Congress greatly expanded copyright. Instead, they should have done the opposite, and abolished it. It's mathematically dumb, and is the root cause of our toxic information environment.

I stopped reading the news, having been someone who thought it was morally "right" to be "informed".

I feel much better since I quit. I still end up hearing about things, through talking to people etc, and I will still read articles on stuff that was important enough to still be written about weeks after the event.

But daily news is just 99% not worth reading.

A theory has been proposed for the structure of MSM news, called the "propaganda model," which can provide a framework for scientific investigation of ownership bias in news.

1988- PROPAGANDA MODEL

https://chomsky.info/consent01/

//The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns. The domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.//

1989- MANUFACTURING CONSENT

https://chomsky.info/19890315/

//The fact of the matter is, Ronald Reagan had a hands-off policy. In fact, Ronald Reagan probably didn’t even know what the policies were. The fact of the matter is, for the last- I mean the media had to put on a big pretense about this, but most of the population knew, that for the last eight years the country hasn’t had a chief executive. I think that’s a step forward in manufacture of consent, and in fact it’s maybe a sign of the future of political democracy. I think the United States made a leap into the future in the last eight years. If you could get to the point where voting is simply a matter of selecting purely symbolic figures, then you would have gone a long way towards marginalizing the public. And that pretty well happened. You had somebody who probably didn’t know what the policies were. His job was to read the lines written for him by the rich- what he’s been doing for the last thirty or forty years. And he seems to enjoy it and he gets well paid for it, and everybody seems happy, but to vote for Ronald Reagan is like voting for the Queen of England.//

THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB IS YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB

//Let me return to the prediction of the propaganda model that I mentioned...//

//...However well confirmed it may be, it’s not going to be part of the discussion, it’s going to be outside the spectrum of discussion, it’s very validity guarantees that for the reasons that I mentioned. And that conclusion, again, is quite well confirmed, and one can assume with reasonable confidence that that will continue to be the case.//

2009- TWENTY YEARS LATER

https://chomsky.info/200911__/

// ... Ownership Advertising Sourcing Flak Anti-communism

EH/NC: What you refer to as the Propaganda Model’s ‘five filters’ requires some clarification. (a) Ownership and (b) advertising belong to straightforward institutional analysis — these are the kinds of institutional arrangements that predominate among US media firms and elsewhere. (c) Sourcing and (d) flak are two well-established processes to which any elite-serving media will adapt, whether we are talking about the elite US or British media or the elite media under Stalin and Hitler. On the other hand, (e) anti-communism, as a major theme of media production during the twentieth century, was reflective of the prevailing system of belief in the Western states, and has evolved with the collapse of the Soviet bloc since the first edition of Manufacturing Consent. In a crucial sense, and extending from the most minor comic books and cartoons all the way up to the highest academic discussions of the so-called Cold War (i.e. the system of propaganda known as the ‘Cold War’), anti-communism was a staple that provided content, narratives, heroes and villains. Since 1989, this staple has morphed into an array of substitutes. But the structural role that anti-communism and its successors have played, namely, the provision of an Enemy or the Face of Evil, remains as relevant as ever. //

So all together we have a theory of ownership and selection bias in news.

And the web is nothing if not a study of structures for attention-seeking by media.

Between agenda-setting and attention mgmt, what else do you need to understand about the structure of MSM news?

The obvious question is: what structure of news is required to further free and coherent public participation in policy?

Okay, this is interesting as I am myself now on day five of an intentional news fasting and it is amazing. So, I'm going to take some effort here; mainly for the purpose of active reflection.

===

> Reducing my intake of what is essentially junk information has significantly reduced anxiety and worry in my day to day life, and has freed up more of my time to pursue other interests and deeper reading.

Confirmed.

> My view is that "the news" primarily exists to keep consumers entertained rather than keeping citizens informed, ...

No, it exists primarily for two reasons:

1) Making a financial profit.

2) Political control over citizens.

The entertainment and dopaminergic aspects of it are simply means to those ends.

> most commonly in the form of advertisements, but also in the form of news that's constantly competing for our attention

Advertisement and news are often indistinguishable.

> I think any news junkie reading this will immediately go on the defensive.

I'm a news junkie in recovery.

> In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore. The 24 hour news cycle is something to be ignored.

Harari is a very uninteresting journalist writing shallow and irrelevant books. And those borderline pun based sound bites are indicative of it. There is no meaningful "power" in knowing what to ignore.

> resulting in "alternate" sources of information being either absurd conspiracy theories or "takes" of mainstream news on social media.

I do not agree. "Alternate" sources are the only sources of some of the news I care about. Some are maybe overly conspiracy theoretical but our governments and industries are conspirative. Regular news sources are almost worthless beyond providing a very high-level idea about what happened.

> Stories themselves are often slanted to please advertisers and company shareholders.

Or governments. And that is in and of itself highly conspirative.

> a small number of companies control 90% of the media - not just "the news". That's 90% of what we read, watch, and listen to.

And that's why people flock to "alternative" media ...

> A common argument against cutting out the news is that "ignorance is bliss", suggesting that those who do not consume the news are ignorant.

Isn't that more an argument for ignorance with regard to news?

> Let that sink in.

And that's why even X is relevant here. Cause where else will I be informed about who was stabbed again by a refugee somewhere in Germany if not there - and this is something I _DO_ care about. But also one major reason why I refuse to further bother with it as I lack the power to change anything about it.

> Rather it makes one less informed of the world and distracts you from what's going on in your own physical life and your own neighborhood, while instilling a very negative view of the world that's divorced from reality.

Yes. There is only so much attention you can give and if you waste it on what happens in Israel, Westjordanland, Ukraine or Venezuela then you have no attention left to what happens with yourself, your family, your neighborhood, your town. But those are usually not as exciting.

> Information junkies often have the most extreme views (on both sides of the US political spectrum) with a strong "us vs them" mindset where "them"

That matches my personal experience. Reading about all the terrible things happening all day long will put you into a constant mode of alarm and panic for which you have to find a release.

> That said, what difference does it make if I hear about the story hours after it happens?

Several times I've been lusting for live news on some exciting event on Twitter - hitting the F5 like in a fever. Last example probably was the assassination attempt on Trump. This always wrecks my entire day. My attention is glued to this object of excitement and my dopamine is going through the roof numbing my motivation management for anything else.

> we are today and governments and corporations are still getting away with murder and exploitation.

Yes, because they'll just produce news which is going to divert the attention somewhere else if it gets too hot. And the usual news agencies (all of them) are catering to their advertisers and certain political parties.

> Who is more ignorant of the world ... ?

I don't care about whether someone maybe considers me ignorant. The author shouldn't worry about that either. I care about my time and especially my mental health.

> Sharing your outrage of said article on social media makes it feel like you're doing something; that you're taking action, that you're doing gods work by spreading the word and keeping others informed of what's really going on.

Noticed this as well. But then again many of such people also search for ways to do something practical like going on demonstrations.

> ... but it leads us to make probabilistic errors with actual risks we face in real life.

Yes, but for many people school-shootings are not just exciting out of personal fear but also due to human compassion and empathy. For example my risk of getting stabbed by some crazy guy is negligible but I'm sick of reading about it, knowing somebody lost their life because we failed to deport someone who was a criminal long before.

> The truth is that we're far more likely to die in an auto accident or heart disease than we are from being shot or dying in a plane crash ...

Yes, but it's not like the former two examples aren't also used to feed people news. The entire Corona panic was based on a minimally raised risk of dying from it. And in some countries reporting on car crashes and other fatalities by displaying all the gory details is a relevant news segment.

> I'm not advocating a nihilistic worldview and if you think I'm being too cynical, I actually believe I'm being optimistic.

I'd advocate realism and fatalism. Nihilism is nonsense as life is valuable and all nihilists share this perspective while hiding it behind a mask of indifference. And cynicism is often simply a symptom of chronic depression - which isn't desirable either.

> Do you want news reporters setting the public agenda for what's important?

Well, they don't ... politicians and billionaires set the agenda.

===

I'm powerless with regard to each and everything that makes the news. So, why bother if all it does is consume time and make me miserable. That's my perspective.

Having said that ... I would prefer to have one reliable news source which I can consume for one hour once a week. That would be fantastic. But I just don't trust any newspaper anymore.

This style of title seems purposively written to preach to the choir.