Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
tj-teej · 2020-05-26
· Original
thread
At the end of the day people do need to be informed. Saying "stop watching the news" is like telling someone who's overweight to "stop eating".
As I see it the problem is the junk-news. It presents as news but there's little substance, it doesn't make you more informed, it makes you angry, upset, and most-importantly (to the new station), engaged.
Matt Taibbi's new book, Hate Inc does a great job of illustrating how the "junk news" (and he doesn't just go after the Right) industry is rotting our brains:
https://www.amazon.com/Hate-Inc-Todays-Despise-Another/dp/19...
I just built an app to control my own addiction (addictionlocker.com) and have thought a lot about this recently.
My two cents: the media has gotten good at giving us what we want, and what we want is conflict. If bad news and fighting weren't what we wanted they wouldn't publish it. By engaging with it, we tell it what we want, and they just deliver more of it. Extrapolated ad absurdum; YouTube and Facebook's algorithms serve you what you're interested in, otherwise you'd get bored and go somewhere else. The rest of the media just got good at doing this too...