I Distrust the News
And I'm a news junkie
I spend hours a day reading news websites.
My morning routine is to look at CNN, MSNBC, CBC, BBC, Washington Post, AP, ABC, FOX
Then a few hours later I repeat.
And then I repeat again.
This is entertainment for me now - I like it better than fiction. It was different when I was a kid. Then at the start of each day the school would play a news summary over the PA. Back then that was way high tech. An it was called 'current events". It was trying to present information about the world. It was not trying to attract listeners to ads. These days the news is all about attracting eyeballs to ads.
FOX is the only news site I visit that actually lies and even there it's not that often. I'm interested in the Ukraine War, I'm horrified and fascinated. But the fog of war is real. I see the pictures of bombed cities. I know that a lot of that information is propaganda. It may be accurate as far as it goes but it's selected to tell a certain sort of story.
A lot of the content on news sites is commentary on the reported information. The commentary is important. It provides context and interpretation. The commentary is put forward confidently - as if it's THE TRUTH.
And a lot of the commentary confidently predicts the future. Remember when everyone was saying that Trump had no chance of winning the Presidency? Hey - I was one.
But the biggest reason I mistrust the news is that its information so restricted yet acts as though its all the information in the world . There is a lot happening in the world that never gets reported. Information about local happenings is hard to find. The other day there was a huge march protesting missing women and I couldn't find any mention of it.
Gathering news is expensive. The internet kind of put the kibosh to local news gathering by sucking up eyeballs and therefore ad revenue. I used to deliver newspapers. They were big bulky things stuffed with all kinds of ads that took way more space than the news. I once worked in a TV newsroom for a local TV station. I enjoyed reading the teletype machine that was spelling out a continuous stream of information; most of which was never used. Later I made up ads for a paper that had now news at all. It was all ads.
I see a progression there. My experience of the news went from "current events" to "attractor of eyeballs".
The news sites I find to be the most reliable are basically sponsored by the state, like CBC or BBC. I think it's because they don't have ads and don't have the same need to attract eyeballs. But they aren't as entertaining. It's the American networks that are (maybe) documenting the collapse of American democracy. It's hard to look away.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.