Pro tip from a lifelong life enthusiast: if its breaking news, wait one week - first-week speculation isn’t just unproductive, it’s often counterproductive.
Flick through last weeks newspaper if you need reassurance.
For most of the world, war between two countries in the middle east doesn't really have any direct impact, right? Liek, if I didn't know about it, nothing would change for me.
I feel like it can matter a lot to be able to make a reasonably reliable prediction about whether it's likely to go up or down tomorrow and by about how much, and thus whether and when to act on the potential need to ensure some sort of access to supply.
For me, that largely entails just not doing anything. I do own a car but rarely use it since my neighborhood is very walkable, and the tank is usually close to full. Even my lawn tools are electric. But if I relied on gasoline for a commute (for instance) then being able to make good guesses about getting hold of it is advantageous, in a way that is fungible and easily shared.
You say that as though they were two semiotically distinguishable activities. Futures trading is wholesale and what we talked about is retail, but they are the same general line of business and if you think no one would ever do it to try to avoid waiting all day for an empty pump, then check out how the 70s oil shock and supply crisis - the last time anyone ever dared "sanction" the U. S. and A. - played out here domestically.
If it is supply you are actually concerned about you buy a couple jerry cans that you keep full. Watching geopolitics to try to time anything still makes no sense.
Then you're only getting things important to viewership. Nobody's putting an economically critical trade deal on all the channels, or a genocide in Yemen. But Princess Diana dying, that's gonna get coverage.
> Especially as she's supposed to have died 28 years ago
If you don’t watch television news, flipping through the channels can be genuinely surprising. Because if it’s Princess Diana’s birthday, I almost guarantee one of them will be running a retrospective segment.
I really like the Economist as a source of weekly news.
Somehow I’ve ended up primarily reading their daily recap in the app. They already have a full article on this crash. That usually means it’ll be in the magazine next week.
They've always been upfront about their bias, in no way are they trying to hide it.
Way back when I was in college 20 years ago they ran a very funny article poking fun at all the PhD's doing "deconstruction" on The Economist. Like super post-modernist fluff. I could tell the writer had a great time responding to it.
Their punchline: "so there you have it - a newspaper to make you feel good about tomorrow by promoting capitalism today!"
I have gave up on E. once they supported GWB over Gore. I can barely understand over the top devotion to neoliberalism and deregulation. But the shortcomings of GWB were sticking out in the campaign, so closing the eyes and singing "la la liberalism" was way too much for me.
I had been a Economist subscriber for almost 20 years. But then gradually I realized that their reporting on some issues are extremely biased and they conveniently skip reporting some facts to match their intended narrative and lead the reader to distorted conclusions. So I would assume they would be doing the same with other topics as well. I did not renew my subscription.
What do you read? I’m an economist reader too for weekly news.
Would love other sources, but it’s hard to find anything with similar depth and a similar lack of sensational-ization found in most news.
Edit: Oh, and global reach. The economist covers earth in almost equal detail for every region. Not quite equal of course, but darn close compared to most outlets.
I think WSJ is a good complement to the Economist. They have good, unsensationalized coverage of the facts. I ignore their opinion columns as they don't seem very serious.
That hasn't been my experience at all outside the opinion section, which is precisely what you described.
The main section feels pretty anti Trump, actually. Not by choice but reality has an anti Trump bias ;)
They are also quite good at labeling their opinion sections clearly, which I think a lot of other papers aren't doing. Their news section is basically Reuter's.
WSJ is nearly tabloid quality. If you have self respect, read the FT; if you just want weekend reading, read the FT Weekend (it comes with the FT Weekend too, which is excellent long form journalism but not “news” per se).
That's just another Murdoch rag, I wouldn't wipe my arse with it. Better no news than his news. You aren't getting any sort of counterpoint you are getting whatever supports his world view.
You think the opinion pages are the only place he pushes his agenda? The very stories they report are selected to further the narrative he wants. That's why apologies and retractions are always tiny.
In my experience, WSJ just reports what happened and who said what in a very dry way.
My impression is that their news section provides a very anti Republican party view. Note that this is my impression, not the paper's stance. They don't really take any, apart from the opinion section, which I ignore. The opinion section has a massive pro republican bent.
> Lying by omission
I'll admit, I might have a blind spot here because I'm only reading 2 newspapers. That being said, I'm not sure of any stories reported by the other news outlets which were ignored/downplayed by WSJ.
> apologies and retractions
Happen when they happen. I remember a few per month. But since they're so dry, there's very little scope for major corrections. If they say, "this guy said that", there's very little to correct there. Occasionally, they mis-paraphrase someone and have to correct their report. Most sound like honest mistakes to me.
EDIT:
> You aren't getting any sort of counterpoint you are getting whatever supports his world view.
Fair enough, but you mostly don't get any points to counter in the first place. Only plain dry facts. I go to the Economist for opinions and counter opinions. (*side note, the Economist should publish more counter opinions IMO)
https://newlinesmag.com/ has been a favorite of mine lately if you wanna give that a try, it's got global coverage and there's always something interesting to read
I also read the Economist.
Other than that, Wall Street Journal is quite good at purely factual, unopinionated coverage. Note that their Opinion section is heavily biased towards the American right, but I mostly ignore it. It's clearly labeled as Opinion.
Between the Economist and WSJ, I get a good overview of opinions and facts.
I really enjoy the Monocle "Globalist" podcast which is well-produced, of global range, and a welcome departure from the npr/kqed bubble I was immersed in.
> Form your own opinion, based on multiple source plus your own judgement
I think the essence of these statements is less that you should literally listen to whatever distilled amount of world news your coworkers are talking about and take it as fact, but that if it's remotely necessary for you to even be aware of, let alone have an opinion about, it'll present itself somehow in real life. After that, if it qualifies as relevant to your life, then go about searching for more info, but a vast majority of anything you could hear or read about or watch probably doesn't qualify.
Government policy, sure, if you need to respond to or act on it somehow. Conflict in the middle east? Sure, if you or someone you know has ties there. But again you'll probably just hear about it because it's directly impactful, or you can monitor specifically for those updates using narrow channels.
The problem is, they often assume you already read the news and don’t say what happen just provide the analysis without context.
Heck, Spiegel does that with news on the same day. You get some background article without starting with the facts of what happened, as if everybody reads the news every two hours.
Unfortunately for everyone's brains, this turned out to basically not be true with COVID- only real news fans (or people with expertise in the relevant science, but there are way less of those) were remotely aware that offices probably weren't going to be closed for only two weeks[0]. If you followed the news closely you stocked up on toilet paper when there were runs on it in Hong Kong, before there were runs on it where you were, etc. But if you only got news from the office water-cooler you'd have been none the wiser.
This is one of those exceptions that prove the rule though, I think.
[0] I had this conversation with people multiple times so it must have been common
If nobody followed the news or social media, there wouldn’t have been runs on toilet paper to begin with, as there never was a shortage to begin with and it was all just mass hysteria.
It was never clear to me, but at least part of it was supposedly due to everyone pooping at home using consumer TP instead of at the office, using commercially packaged TP (two-ply, giant rolls for big dispensers). And that sudden shift started to empty shelves. If people had stocked up over a period of time, the empty-shelves situation that produced the fear probably wouldn't have happened.
Of course in practice there really was plenty of it to go around, dollar stores seemed to be the most flexible at navigating the supply chain derangement and if you didn't mind buying it by the roll, it was never really hard to find.
Also- you don't need to follow the news for there to be a panic, empty shelves will do that all on their own. Everyone deciding to stock up a little on everything was enough to deplete shelves, people walking in after saw empty shelves and stocked up more, etc. I don't think most people were following the "omg supply chain" news, they just saw depleted shelves.
I never really understood the importance of it anyway. People were locked in their home so they could just use the shower head if it came to it. Of course a real bidet would be better and cleaner but I don't think they exist in northern America or Northern Europe.
It's also common in Asia (at least South East) they can survive without toilet paper :) The Japanese even have entire water jet massage toilets, they do it like a king.
Or if you don't want to use water, you could use serviettes, tissues. Even newspaper.
That's why I didn't understand the fuss about it. Sure it's annoying if you run out but not the end of the world especially when you're at home where there's always a shower to hand. I don't understand that people were so obsessed with toilet paper.
What would be much more important is food, water (in my city the tap water is terrible so I don't drink it), medication etc.
I would put it at 1% here. They are extremely rare. Bidet attachments have become relatively popular here over the past decade though. It's been life changing (or maybe butt changing). It's amazing how pretentious Americans can be while having such a gross habit.
Yeah, the deep irony of the GP comment is that, had all of these supposedly knowledgable people just read the original report from the WHO (~early 2020), they'd have realized many things about the virus (such as the extremely skewed age distribution of the seriously ill) that would have greatly mitigated the overall panic. It literally took years for the chattering class in medicine to understand basic information that was available at the beginning of the pandemic.
COVID was a perfect case study of mass hysteria, and how you can't even trust "the experts" in these situations, because the "experts" you hear from early on are also generally the ones who are the most willing to spout pure speculation for attention. Humans are gonna human, and a background in science doesn't change that fact.
A million Americans did die of it, the lost QALYs was... a lot. A lot of people died who had more than a decade, actuarially. That's a big deal.
But it doesn't matter for what I'm saying: paying too much attention to the news about a weird new virus from China would have clued a person in that something big might be coming, on whatever dimension you care to measure it.
But would that have been actionable information for the average person? What would you have done differently on the first day, given perfect information?
The Covid pandemic lasted much longer than would have been reasonable to prepare for via hoarding of supplies etc.
In my view, that was the entire problem: Much of the world overreacted in the short term (hard lockdowns including fining people going for a walk by themselves etc.) and underreacted in the long term (limiting avoidable large indoor gatherings such as most office work, air filters etc.)
Many governments did as much as people would tolerate for as long as they could (which meant, for some, doing nothing at all), rather than focusing on doing effective things they could actually keep up as long as required.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, but I really hope that’s a lesson many learned from it.
That was pure panic. I live in the gulf coast. Anytime there is a minor chance we are getting hit by a hurricane people panic buy and suddenly there isn't any water on the shelves anymore. You'll see average folks with 20 cases of water being shoved in their massive SUVs for a family of 3.
Sure. However, I bought a large pack of toilet paper when I saw headlines about hoarding in HK, before the shelves began to dwindle here, and thus dodged the whole thing. That it was basically panic is neither here nor there: paying too close attention to far-off news did actually pay off in a tiny way.
TP shortages in Hong Kong were rational, based on an expectation of bulk shipping issues. Stocking up in North America based on shortages in Hong Kong was idiotic. If there are shortages of TP in Hong Kong that means there would be a surplus of TP in North America, since North America is where the pulp for most TP is made.
Sure, probably. It still helped me dodge the panic that set in a couple weeks later though. Sometimes midwit thought works. I wasn't stocking a Scrooge McDuck room full of the stuff. I think it was when I saw stories of hoarding spread to Australia that I realized that maybe this it was going to have legs, rationally or not.
Like so many addictive habits, while you’re in it day to day, it feels so… important… and when you’re out… it doesn’t even make sense that complete truth could be fully knowable in the moment.
Most consequential decisions are made, or built up to, over a long time. Sure, somebody has to call moment-to-moment balls and strikes, but if that’s not literally you, your weight in the world might be better applied in slower, quieter, subtler places.
Am I morbidly curious about a plane crash? How could I not be? But the NTSB didn’t earn the credibility they have by parachuting in day-of and shooting from the hip. If anything, their processes provide discipline against first impressions blinding them to true causes.
To the contrary, I find analysis very helpful when it's of the "is this important; is this unusual; how does it fit in with previous expectations" variety. Raw headlines and factual day-to-day reporting are often kind of bad at that.
You could spend the time you'd have spent reading the news instead reading actual books on history, poli sci and political philosophy, ethics, economics, et c., and then figure out who the right person to vote for is and what the right votes on various issues are in like 30 minutes of search-n-skim per election.
This pattern would result in a far better-informed voter than one who diligently follows the news all the time but doesn't read many books. The amount of news you need to read to make informed decisions at the ballot box is usually tiny, if you have the background to understand the news—and if you don't, consuming more news won't help much with that. Meanwhile, it takes a ton of close book-reading before you start to see diminishing returns on that front.
I have a BA in history and a MPA in public administration. I have already done a ton of that work: research, academic analysis/writing, and understanding. I agree these things are INCREDIBLY important to have a great foundational understanding of how the world works/worked; however, understanding current events is JUST AS IMPORTANT.
But; I'm done arguing w/you as it's clear your opinion will remain unchanged regardless of any evidence or opinion to the contrary.
Even if news reading informs an electorate, there's no need to be informed constantly when I only have limited opportunities to vote.
When an election happens, I can do a search of news on the candidates, and for discussions of the other issues put to the voters. In the meantime, by avoiding news, I can save a lot of distress about news that I can't change and doesn't have an immediate effect on me. (Nobody in this thread, including me, is great at avoiding news, me included... really important events tend to bubble up anyway, and all of us clicked into a discussion of an event that's probably not personally relevant)
It'd be different if a cat delivered tomorrow's paper to my door; I might not like it, but I'd have a duty to read that paper and try to make right what once went wrong.
My girlfriend says she doesn't trust the media, but she has to follow it to know what they're lying to us about. I've pointed out that the problem goes deeper than just whether they tell truth or lies. They don't just tell you what to think; they tell you what you're even supposed to be thinking about, and by omission what you shouldn't be thinking about. You can take the opposite position on every issue to the one they're pushing, but you're still letting them frame the window of what you are and aren't thinking and forming opinions about.
The only way to take that control away from them is to cut the primary "news" sources out of your life entirely. I still hear about important events from people around me, and I can see what people are hyperventilating about at forums like this, which is more than enough to know what the media is hyping each day and why.
That's the funny thing, I'm not out of the loop. When friends bring up current issues that matter, I'm generally better informed than they are, but I'm clueless if they bring up the latest controversial TV show or whatever is today's outrage narrative that will be replaced by the next outrage narrative tomorrow.
It turns out that by letting the people around me sort of curate the "news," and reading thinkers who write about bigger topics rather than what's in the headlines, I wind up with a pretty good filtered news feed.
> How do you decide to vote if you completey go out of the loop?
I tend to stay pretty well informed without watching cable news or constantly reading political gossip on social media. When I hear things like "the Supreme Court issued an opinion today..." I go read the opinion. When I hear "Trump signed an executive order saying..." I go read the executive order. When I'm talking with people about inflation, I go look up the BLS data among other things. If people are talking about what's actually happening on the ground some place, I will end up having to find some reports reporting things and ultimately have to weigh the fact they're choosing where to point their cameras to my understanding of what is actually true.
Some of these things are hard, like the "big beautiful bill" is 1,116 pages long. I'll jump to the things people around me are talking about, like work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP, and read those sections. I might go look up some direct commentary from trusted sources about it for deeper analysis, and probably try and find some real statistics to compare.
We have so much actual real data and original sources to go read, I don't need someone else to tell me what they think of it for me to have an opinion.
I totally get that, and agree to a degree. For me personally though, the news industry has become entertainment - TV news is hyperbolic, 24 hour breaking news for every story, newspapers (at least here in the UK) are little more than a propaganda outlet for the views of the billionaire owner where every story is designed to make people angry and point the blame at someone, usually immigrants. For years I listened to BBC Radio 4's Today Programme every single morning, until I realised that none of what they were telling me was actually news. You'd be amazed at how many stories started with the words "Ministers are today expected to announce..." - this isn't news, it hasn't happened yet. This is government PR. If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend Flat Earth News by Nick Davies [0] - it's incredibly eye opening. Reading it now, 11 years later, is even more eye opening - everything he writes about in there is now magnified ten fold.
Going cold turkey from the "news" doesn't make me any less informed about what is happening in the world, if anything it has made me more informed as I'm no longer just a vessel filling my brain with whatever some billionaire wants me to believe.
That "BREAKING NEWS" fuss is kinda a US specific thing though.
In Holland we just watch the news at 6 or 8pm (at least for those who still do that) which is very factual. Or we read nu.nl or nos.nl which don't really have screaming clickbaity headlines unless some shit really hit a fan. Which is really rare. I prefer nos.nl because nu.nl has too much celebrity news for me.
But we don't have any of that weird "Watch this NOW or get left behind!!" FOMO bait I see when I tune up CNN.
It probably helps that NOS is publicly funded so they have no incentive to maximise "engagement". Their job is just to report the news in a clean way.
I'm in the UK and while nowhere near as mad as US news channels, it's definitely been heading in that direction for a while. Even the BBC, our publicly funded station is like it now thanks to several years of the far right campaigning to get the BBC's funding taken away. Tune in to BBC news now and you're highly likely to see stories on "issues" that 90% of the population has no interest or opinion on, but some swivel-eyed, right wing fringe nutjobs have managed to push into mainstream news.
Not to be rude, but why should we care what you believe?
If there were a problem with holes being dug in the city people are not exacerbating the problem if they choose to just not dig holes.
Not everyone needs to be informed an act on whatever it is that others think is important. This belief really forms the backbone of the current, "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality.
Whatever the cause is, it's entirely possible to just treat people decently without caring about who or what they are. That's where we should be encouraging people to get to, not demanding they jump into action.
Same. I have never really followed the news. Everyone always seems to be upset by something in the news. Meanwhile I'm happy as a clam all the time and just have all my time to focus on myself and doing what I want and like.
I wonder what you mean by that. What is so bad that happens if you don't watch the news for a day or a few days? A colleague might mention something you didn't know yet? I'm sure they'd be happy to fill you in.
Most of the news we see has no actual effect on our lives anyway. Like this crash. It's terrible but other than feeling bad for them (which doesn't help them) it doesn't affect my life in any way. If I find out about it at a later time that's fine. Probably when admiral cloudberg makes one of her masterpieces about it. I read the news anyway as a matter of interest and "nothing better to do" but to me it's mostly a time sink. I only read about 1% of the articles in the main feed.
I often go on retreats with friends and I hardly use my phone and the TV never goes on for even a second :) It's really nice to unplug. I can recommend having an unplug day once in a while for starters.
Your attempt at an irritated jab is just the doomscroll addiction talking.
Even for people that read news out of necessity, it can be curtailed down to only the relevant topics and the dryer outlets. I am one of those people, and the need to stay up to date doesn't justify the junkfood.
years ago i wanted to make a site where you could log promises/predictions made in news media and then get a reminder to come back and check if it actually happened. This would be useful for all the doom and gloom headlines and predictions, especially economic ones.
I stopped reading/watching/listening to the news about 2 years ago and I am blissfully unaware of what is going on in the world. I read hacker news every once in a while and even comment on some of the stories shown here but I select very strictly the topics I interact with.
News organizations these days are all pushing an agenda. Whether it is pro [insert-topic-of-choice-here] or against [insert-topic-of-choice-here] and that irks me when they represent themselves as impartial and unbiased.
If I want to read some propaganda, I know where to find it.
I understand but in the past you probably did not have much of a choice. You read the newspaper your parents read or you listened to the same radio programs and watch the same TV channels so the bias was not necessarily apparent.
Nowadays, we know exactly which outlets are leaning right or left, there is clearly no doubt about.
Furthermore, I would argue that the news outlets squandered the last bit of credibility they had during the COVID period when they silenced views that were not deemed acceptable at the time.
Finally a lot of news outlets are in some parts funded by the very same governments that they are supposed to be reporting on and keep in check. How can you do your job properly without any bias if the person you are about to write about/criticize is the one who signs your paycheck?
Regarding the original sentiment though, uninformed vs misinformed...
Isn't this basically just good old signal processing? We either don't have enough signal, or we're saturated with noise. Economic feedback loops keep the news noise at a saturated level; we don't seem to be able to collectively agree or incentivize having a spot of information spectrum that has a decent discernible signal.
The "free" press is no more free than it was 300 years ago. Then it was owned by despotic interests. Today, it is owned by need to make money.
And I've just seen that you CAN get The Guardian Weekly digital subscription here, free if you've got a print subscription? Though obviously I'm wondering why the Guardian don't advertise this?
Yeah that's weird. The Guardian has a global catchment area. It's no longer a Manchester or UK paper. A lot of foreign readers wouldn't subscribe to a print sub because it's not worth the hassle.
I'd also feel bad getting some dead trees filled with chemicals and flown across the pond then someone driving it out to me, all that environmental impact when I could just download it.
Reading one source of news only, especially one with such marked bias, is bound to leave you with a limited worldview. Consult instead a variety of sources.
Considering the amount of cash and/or subsidies that Le Monde has received in the last 30 years from the French government, you may as well read the Pravda. Nobody bites the hand that feeds them.
Basically the French new outlets are some of the most subsidized on the planet.
Just to give you some quick figures, in 2010, the French government gave news outlets 1.8B euros in subsidies and in 2012 another 1.2B euros. There is no mention of the subsidies in the years after that but there is no reason to think that these would have shrunk significantly.
That's not even mentioning the special tax breaks that journalists get and the fact that most news outlets are staffed by union members.
Knowing that most unions are leaning left politically, it is fair to say that the coverage of the news by these outlets will be tainted by their political ideology. It's just human nature.
All of this to say that in light of all this, it is best to treat any French news outlet as basically an arm of the government that will never go against the interests of the their real owners, the politicians, unions and the billionaires.
Le Monde is but one of these outlets but nevertheless they take the money just like the other ones.
I want news about France, from abroad. I take what I can get.
I also have the Washington Post, The Economist, Nikkei, BBC, NYT, etc. and I'm sure you have plenty to say about them.
At the end, the goal is to have as many different sources and make your own opinions from their analysis.
Not necessarily. In Holland our NOS is publicly funded which is just defined by law. A minister can't just change that.
If anything they get complaints of being left leaning sometimes. While our government is (well, was, it just collapsed) a hard-line radical right wing one similar to Trump.
I used to do that too, but the Rittenhouse incident was the final straw for me. I remember reading in the magazine that he "shot into the crowd", but by that point I had already watched the video analysis on the New York Times's YouTube channel which showed that he only shot at people who attacked him. That was what the jury agreed with as well.
In the end, I think the most accurate place to get your news from is a history book.
I don't know if that's meant to be a joke or serious, but I would disagree.
Most daily news is quite factual, assuming a reputable source. It doesn't require detective work the way plane crashes do.
And when it is incorrect or misleading, a week usually won't make a difference. It takes months or years or decades for the truth to come out, often in a book by a journalist or historian who frames it as a "tell-all", or a Pulitzer Prize-nominated series of newspapers articles, etc.
Is there an online version of “last week’s newspaper”? More specifically, that primarily contains reporting about somewhat “matured” topics, as opposed to still developing news.
It’s not online, but Delayed Gratification is a quarterly news magazine that reports on the news of the _previous_ quarter with an up-to-date perspective. It’s British but covers world news.
I agree with that wholeheartedly. The problem is that people want to discuss today's news now. Explaining them this and not being able to engage in the conversation isn't a great way to connect with people unfortunately.
I suppose one way (now that you've brought this up, which is totally valid), is to openly state that this is what we know right now, and that often changes in a week.
And that could itself be a tangent in the conversation, alternate theories. (Or might be a frustrating one if nobody is receptive)
Mine has been crazy - sunny, then rained, now overcast and all while being unseasonably humid. I should have mowed the lawn while it was sunny earlier but missed the window to get it done.
Flick through last weeks newspaper if you need reassurance.