As a kid, it was drilled into my head that adults watch the news. They inform themselves on what’s happening around the world; it’s just something adults do.
When I turned 18, way back now, I thought myself an adult. And I thought, I have to read the news now and start being a well-adjusted member of society. I tried. For a few weeks I tried to find journals I could like, I tried caring about the most mundane things written by the most bored journalists.
I couldn’t do it. On the one hand, I couldn’t find a paper that I liked enough to stick with. They wrote about the most uninteresting thing, like Mick Romney’s 2012 campaign still having over a million dollars in assets (in a country that is not the USA). They all felt like they had an agenda and, at that time, I naively thought objectivity was not taking any sides – not helped by the fact that this is what I was brought up thinking from my parents who also watched the news, so that should tell you how ingrained bias is in them. And on the other hand, it was terribly bad for my mental health.
Facebook ran tests on their users, violating several codes of ethics (that they are not subject to, as a private company) and gave a sample upsetting news for a week, and others uplifting news. They found that upsetting news drive more engagement. That’s nothing new though, newspapers have known that for a long time. If you listened to them, the whole world is on the brink of nuclear warfare every few months, nothing nice ever happens, foreign countries are lands of barbarians and you will get murdered in your hometown anyway.
During the early days of the covid epidemic the WHO, in their guidelines, suggested what you’d expect: don’t touch your face, wash your hands, wear a mask, keep away from people… and they also suggested you take a break from reading up on covid, even though it wasn’t related directly to the virus. They know the power of suggestion, and they know the effect it has on people. It’s not a good place to be in mentally.
I still think about that sometimes. How terrible the “news” are. Can they even be considered news anymore? It’s funny if you think about it, how deeply we trust them to be saying the truth as if they had a duty, a law, to report. But really they’re private companies trying to turn a profit and survive in a world of cutthroat competition.
To this day I still don’t read the news, and it still shocks people sometimes that I am not “informed”. But to be perfectly honest, I think it’s part of the reason I’m generally happy or content. And if there’s something important enough that I should know about, someone will tell me about it anyway.
And then journalists ask why nobody takes their job seriously anymore.
As a kid, it was drilled into my head that adults watch the news. They inform themselves on what’s happening around the world; it’s just something adults do.
When I turned 18, way back now, I thought myself an adult. And I thought, I have to read the news now and start being a well-adjusted member of society. I tried. For a few weeks I tried to find journals I could like, I tried caring about the most mundane things written by the most bored journalists.
I couldn’t do it. On the one hand, I couldn’t find a paper that I liked enough to stick with. They wrote about the most uninteresting thing, like Mick Romney’s 2012 campaign still having over a million dollars in assets (in a country that is not the USA). They all felt like they had an agenda and, at that time, I naively thought objectivity was not taking any sides – not helped by the fact that this is what I was brought up thinking from my parents who also watched the news, so that should tell you how ingrained bias is in them. And on the other hand, it was terribly bad for my mental health.
Facebook ran tests on their users, violating several codes of ethics (that they are not subject to, as a private company) and gave a sample upsetting news for a week, and others uplifting news. They found that upsetting news drive more engagement. That’s nothing new though, newspapers have known that for a long time. If you listened to them, the whole world is on the brink of nuclear warfare every few months, nothing nice ever happens, foreign countries are lands of barbarians and you will get murdered in your hometown anyway.
During the early days of the covid epidemic the WHO, in their guidelines, suggested what you’d expect: don’t touch your face, wash your hands, wear a mask, keep away from people… and they also suggested you take a break from reading up on covid, even though it wasn’t related directly to the virus. They know the power of suggestion, and they know the effect it has on people. It’s not a good place to be in mentally.
I still think about that sometimes. How terrible the “news” are. Can they even be considered news anymore? It’s funny if you think about it, how deeply we trust them to be saying the truth as if they had a duty, a law, to report. But really they’re private companies trying to turn a profit and survive in a world of cutthroat competition.
To this day I still don’t read the news, and it still shocks people sometimes that I am not “informed”. But to be perfectly honest, I think it’s part of the reason I’m generally happy or content. And if there’s something important enough that I should know about, someone will tell me about it anyway.
And then journalists ask why nobody takes their job seriously anymore.