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Recently, I stopped reading the news.
I guess that’s not strictly true. Tumblr and conversations with friends occasionally tell me about news events of interest to my social group (apparently California is having a very bad drought?), I still have a feedly to keep track of the bloggers I really would feel sad about not reading, and I have yet to learn the trick of not clicking on Facebook articles which I know are going to upset me. But for most of my life I either read a newspaper or an online news aggregator every day, and a few months ago I… stopped.
And I think this is an excellent life choice which I wish to recommend to everyone.
If you ask people why they read political news, a lot of times they say “because I want to be an educated and informed citizen!” But if you look at the actual political news, it clearly doesn’t seem to be optimizing for informed citizenhood. Do I really need to know the Five Craziest Conservative Reactions to the Pushback on Indiana’s LGBT Discrimination Law (four nonpoliticians and one senator from a state I don’t live in)? Is my life improved by knowing that the Big Gay Hate Machine Closes Christian Pizza Parlor, given that I neither live in Indiana nor have any interest in going to that particular pizza parlor?
If you were coming up with a plan for becoming an informed citizen, you would read serious books full of statistics written by experts, taking care to explore all sides of the issue. You would probably want to figure out which issues you find most important and how to weight them: in my case, probably foreign aid, anti-war activism, and open borders globally, and The Rent Being Too Damn High locally. And then you would take fifteen minutes to research which candidates agree with you on those issues. The Five Craziest Conservative Reactions To The Big Gay Hate Machine would mostly be notable by their absence.
But political news isn’t just a misuse of your time; it’s actually harmful.
The news has something called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Think about how terrible the news reporting is on any subject you know well: perhaps computers, mental health, or biology. That is roughly as bad as you should assume the news reporting is on any subject.
Of course, there’s some nuance here. The primary problem is that news reporters aren’t experts on the topic they’re reporting on. Anyone who hasn’t taken a biology class since they were fifteen would probably do an equally poor job of reporting on the latest biological discovery. So you can expect news stories to be fairly accurate about any topic where they have someone who is supposed to report about that exact topic. Washington politics? Fairly accurate. Science reporting? About as accurate as you would expect it to be if you told someone “now you have to learn all of social and hard science.”
Furthermore, the news fucks with your availability heuristic. Normally, if you can think of a lot of examples of something, you think it is more likely to happen. This is pretty reasonable; if many of your friends have been harassed by someone on the train, you might think that harassment on the train happens a lot, even if you have never been harassed yourself. Unfortunately, the news enjoys taking examples of things that legitimately don’t happen that often and blowing them up so everyone thinks they happen all the time.
The world has been getting less dangerous, but people perceive it as more dangerous, in part because the 24-hour news cycle is continually covering how often people get attacked or murdered. Terrorism is relatively rare, but every time someone commits a terrorist action, we have to hear about it constantly for the next two weeks. Even my beautiful newsless bubble won’t protect me from having to learn about whatever mass murder just happened!
Similarly, news tends to be fairly partisan. If you read liberal news sources, all the death threats sent to liberals will be covered in slavering detail; if you read conservative news sources, all the death threats sent to conservatives will be covered in slavering detail. If you read liberal news sources, every conservative gaffe will be covered; if you read conservative news sources, every liberal gaffe will be covered. And since you can think of lots of examples of the outgroup being evil and stupid, and much fewer examples of the ingroup being evil and stupid, you naturally conclude that your outgroup is uniquely terrible. This is not an aid to good reasoning.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with reading the news if you happen to find it entertaining. My favorite TV show is a serial killer show, which is probably as bad for my availability heuristic as the equivalent number of hours of cable news. But if you’re reading it to be an informed citizen, it is probably making you less well-informed. Read a book instead.
Thing of Things 
My procedure is to check Google News a couple times per day, and if something looks important or interesting enough that I’d benefit from having the full context for it, click on a link from a reasonably authoritative-looking source. If it’s a story that’s likely to be ideologically loaded then I click on a few different sources. This works pretty well for me (I have a general idea of what’s being reported on at any given time, without falling into a rabbit hole) and I think it does make me a somewhat more informed citizen.
On the other hand, I started subscribing to a left-leaning geek/political blog in early 2011 because I felt like I wasn’t a sufficiently informed citizen and reading their stuff made me feel engaged. A year ago I stopped checking my RSS reader, which meant I was no longer getting updates from them. But until recently updates from their forum would still appear in my inbox, and once in awhile I’d look at them, and they were exactly the kind of toxic culture-war mess described in this post and I am much better off without them.
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I have to say I agree with pretty much all of this. Of course the issue is that the alternatives to getting your information from “the news” don’t any better, just bad in different ways. The biggest issue, online at least, is that by getting your information from self selected social groups you open yourself up to a whole lot of confirmation and selection bias.
You can see this pretty clearly on the more open social networks (I’m thinking primarily of Tumblr and Twitter here), where people often build very skewed concepts of their outgroup.
The only conclusion that I’ve come to is that being well informed is really, really hard. And if that’s your goal you’ve got to constantly be exposing yourself to new stuff, while thinking critically about all of it and staying forever on guard for all sorts of biases that will creep up on you.
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I agree with all of this, especially the part where academic books are a better resource. Being informed on the latest events just isn’t going to make me change my pollitical views much. Broader trends are far more important. And on the occaisions that something happens that’s worth discussing, it usually shows up on reddit or Rationalist Tumblr where I can get more insightful analysis. The whole minute-by-minute update thing is pretty much useless for anyone who doesn’t enjoy it. When have you honestly said “Wow, if I had read that two months late my views on it would be completely different?”
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Hmm. But there is value in having a source if up-to-date news — preferably not totally filtered by your friend group. Unless there isn’t?
And you can’t get that from books. (Again, unless you can?)
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This has been mentioned, but part of the ideal of news is to have something relatively not pre-filtered to suit your biases. News isn’t especially great at this, but is there evidence it’s worse than the alternatives if you don’t have an active compunction to seek out contrarian sources or stay widely read in fairly politically informed bubbles?
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I stopped reading the news because my CPN told me to a while ago.
But I’m noticing that I get “the news as filtered through tumblr” which is probably worse in a number of ways.
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I definitely agree with this. There have been times in my life when I haven’t read the news, and those have been the times my head has felt the clearest. Reading a bunch of articles creates an information overload effect in a way that reading a book just doesn’t.
Plus, “Read a book instead” seems to be good advice in almost any context.
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This is what they’re cpunting on. Making your hesf hurt to make uou stop. You think they’re not in this yogeyher? Yrust me. They ate. Its more subtle tjan you’d like to believe. But its there.
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Back in the eighties, I had a subscription to the New York Times. I used to let the papers pile up and read them on the weekend. Somehow, even letting just a few days lapse, made everything seem less urgent and frantic.
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Huh! It hadn’t occurred to me that people read news for political reasons!
(I read news because I want to know what’s going on in the world. Basically like a wider version of why I read some social media feeds – I want to know what’s going on in the community/with people I know. And similarly, I want to know what’s going on in the world. As a result of which, for instance, I get annoyed at long new articles, and tend to wish there was, like, a ‘what happened this week’ digest I could read or something.)
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There is such a digest at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events . I never really started reading it, because I don’t care about current events as mentioned there. I guess you could put me in the “political reasons” corner of news interest.
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This is where you’re making a mistake Ozy. The key is to tead between the lines to correlate with otjer articles you read. To ecpect the truth from one or two is a fallacy. But you can discern the motives from multiple sources and tjen you get closer to the truth. Not the full yruth you unferstand. Just closer to it. Tead yhe news Ozy. Teaf yhe news and ask everyone around you to do the same.
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Or I can read books, which do the same thing, except with a wider and more long-term view, written by experts in the field, and without the availability-heuristic-fucking-up crime reporting.
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True. But the books jave a serious lag yime between now and then. They all contribute to the truth but to be currebt one must also be current
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Which is why i said read beyween the lines ozy. All information is really power and empowering. Did you see d’souza and obama 2016? This os a look back tjat predicts the future. Closer than you think. And i am not a right wing wing nut. The manipulation is unfathomable. Read everything to make your viewpoint.
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Ozy. You and your readers are really smart. Don’t fall onto the dream sleep. Stay informed. Stay current. Read it all. Well researched as well as blog comments it all goes together. Really
It does. May seem not so much but together it is.
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Stupid smart phoned with mini keyboards. Forgive the spelling not the point.
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That one really had me thinking. It seemed a bit systematic that you’d only ever shift keystrokes to the exact right by exactly one key… I suspected a new leet-like thing, but okay, I hate smartphone keyboards too
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I just spent the last five minutes trying to decipher the secret code.
… shut up, they said “read between the lines”!
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I’ve come to believe that “knowing what’s going on in the world” is overrated. Keep up with the news for a month, then avoid all news for a month, and I’d wager neither have the slightest impact on your actual day-to-day life, but make a huge difference in your mental and emotional stress.
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And btw. I do believe in a longer time virw. Tje short term humanist viee is eqially stupid due to the variables. But yaken together over time is history
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Ahain. Sorry the spelling. Zie vs he zer versus her eyc its a new language of smattphone keyboatdd.
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Jesus. Or allah. I don’t cate. You get the point
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Even on a smartphone you can re-read what you’ve written before posting it and correct eventual errors. Sure it’s a hassle, but more so than writing 5 posts apologising for the errors in the previous one?
That’s not taking the piss, by the way, but a genuine question. I have friends who write messed up texts due to smartphone keyboards, but they don’t care that it’s unintelligible and don’t apologise for it.
If you care enough to apologise repeatedly, why not correct it before sending?
sorry for being completely off topic
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I use the app MessagEase on my android phone and you might find that easier to use in the long run than the qwerty keyboard.
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Thanks Daniel. I’ll have to give that a go. Never heard of that app.
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This isn’t really an argument against keeping up with local news, as opposed to national or international news.
Also, keeping up with the news may not be relevant to being an informed citizen, but it probably is relevant to being an *active* citizen. If you want to influence the political system in ways beyond voting every couple of years, simply having a command of the academic literature is not going to get you anywhere — that isn’t the language the system speaks, and if you want to be persuasive, you have to be able to communicate.
That being said, you’re still better off creating your own curated feed than reading clickbaity things that pop up on your Facebook.
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Say whaaaaaaat. Nihilistic at best
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Was that another typo? I have no idea what you are trying to say.
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At the risk of going off-topic, I think people in general pay too little attention to municipal matters that directly impact their daily lives and too much attention to national matters that don’t affect them very much.
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Unsubscribe from frequent posters. Sometimes people share articles, in which case you can just hide posts by news sources, but when people actually paste links, attach pictures, and write comments, there’s no choice but to hide all the posts, along with personal ones. It’s a shame, but it’s net positive over trying to ignore a cry in an echo chamber.
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Oh, I noticed the topical reference. Are you posting all new blog entries from now on?
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Reruns ended about two months ago.
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You shift very quickly from “Don’t read the news” to “Don’t read political news”. You also use rather polemical websites for your examples. I don’t need those articles, but I do quite like a write-up of last night’s game, headlines that let me know things like “there was a really bad earthquake in Nepal” or “Putin is trying to expand”, and articles about major local issues ranging from when construction will begin on the new bikepath to where the new stadium is going to be built and what accompanying changes to infrastructure are being planned to accommodate it. I don’t see any kind of argument against this kind of use other than that it is accompanied by problems like the over-availability of news about violent deaths(otoh, news about local violent deaths is nice when the victim may be a classmate you don’t know well, so that too serves a purpose)
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the most frustrating thing is the the bias news will often NOT EVEN CORRECTLY COVER THE OPPOSITION’S FAILURES.
Like fox news will have “obama is muslim” crap but not when he is trying to do creepy terrorism related things. Also sometimes there is a story that is ONLY covered by one side, so it’s impossible to cross reference to check how much is true.
Like, I am not actively avoiding news but I am not seeking it out either. If I see something I care about I’ll look for more sources, if I can’t find well, who knows if it’s even true.
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The news is just humanity’s love for gossip with delusions of grandeur.
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Until last August, I lived in Baltimore. My sister still lives there and I visit her regularly. I’m still engaged on a contractor basis with a company there. I know people who live there, on all levels of the socio-economic spectrum. The reporting on the riots has made me wonder about the value of even basic reporting. I no longer trust the reporting from Ferguson, MO, which I accepted as being basically true at the time.
I’ve been debating about giving up my subscription to the New York Times which I’ve relied on for news for decades. I do think reporting over the years has gotten worse, however.
You make a very good point here.
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