A reader asks,
What sources do you use to gather “news”? I have become quite cynical and skeptical of most major news outlets. I am certain that one must consider multiple sources of news to gather a general understanding of what is going on. I am just interested as to where you gather your news from.
In general, I think that competition for attention favors “outrage of the day” stories and disadvantages important stories that do not feed the outrage machine. I try to lean against.
1. My print news source is the Wall Street Journal.
2. I dropped my subscription to the Washington Post. I sort of miss the editorial section, which has some balance to it. But the front section is devoted to undoing the 2016 election. No doubt this caters to the tastes of many of the Post‘s readers, but it does not make for reliable prioritization of stories or for balanced coverage within those stories. Also, the Sunday Outlook section has too many pieces that look like undergraduate essays written to please the sociology professor. Instead, the Journal‘s Saturday Review section often has interesting material.
3. I check Google News once or twice a day, just to see the headlines. Interestingly, they almost never show me headlines from the Journal, but they always show me headlines from the Post. So I don’t
4. Blogs are less shrill and more useful for following news than other social media. But the blog ecosystem functioned better when there were trackbacks, the Google newsreader and Google blogsearch. And no Twitter. As it is, I use Feedly to check blogs. Even though I am not interested in the outrage-of-the-day stuff, it often gets enough blog coverage to keep me from missing out entirely. As an aside, I believe that some of the stories that outrage people on the right, such as college campus hijinks, are not covered in the mainstream media very much.
5. I never turn on a TV. I would not be able to pick out of a police lineup any of the reporters or pundits whose names I see mentioned on blogs, much less anyone who is less well known.
6. All I do on Twitter is echo my blog posts there. Not sure I should even do that.
7. I check Facebook once or twice a week. But I really want Facebook to show me personal items from my friends, not so-called news. I only click on a news-type story if it seems really interesting and different from what I might see anywhere else. That does not happen very often.
Update: Jordan Greenhall, one of my current favorites, says,
I have recently fully unplugged from social media because social media is almost completely toxic, which is to say that when I go into any social media environment I find myself decreasingly capable of making good choices and increasingly willing to make bad choices, because it has that effect. Now, this is an interesting problem because we’ve got billions of people who are now connected on social media.
And by the way I don’t just mean social media; think also broadcast media… if I read an article in the New York Times there’s a 99% chance that I’m worse off rather than better off. Books, particularly old books, by the way, are things that we can still rely on because they take so long to write and to read. They have this cool concept… that has to do with a differential time element—so books are slower than other things.
Regarding #4, which blogs to you subscribe to in your Feedly account?
Nice post, Arnold. Do you ever consider that perhaps much of the news you follow might end up being minutiae that is a waste of time to follow in the first place? There’s a pretty obvious tug from almost all news sources to encourage us to consume more and more. How do you decide how much to consume?
I’ve concluded that a huge portion of the news I consume is a waste. A good experiment would be to track what you read for a while and then in a year go back and look at what we read and thought was important. I’m almost certain it would seem totally irrelevant.
Arnold- Thank you very much for answering my question. I think your response has pushed me to consider what is “news” to me. I use to place more weight on being informed about the times. I remember lines being thrown at me in college, ” be informed on what is going on in the world.” What I am learning, what is going on in the world is what has always gone on in the world, periods of chaos and pain. Also acts and displays of beauty and kindness. “News” outlets seem to focus in on the chaos and pain in order to grab attention and increase following. “News” outlets, on some level, also strive to shape opinions about the world we live in through interpreting events through their own biases ( biases of their average followers). In my effort to be reasonable and a truth seeker, I think my job is to be aware of my biases and seek to understand their biases. I also think I need to redefine what “news” is to me. Maybe a better definition of “news” for me is something that directly effects me and something that I can have some level of influence on. For example, “news” to me is that my daughter is struggling with 3rd grade math and needs my help. “News” to me is my neighbor needs help.
Mass shootings are terrible news and they do have some effect on me no doubt. But how can I exert influence on the problem of mass shootings ? To me it starts with the people I come into contact with every day.
Back to main question ” news” as most would define.. I did re up my WSJ online subscription yesterday. I am on twitter quiet a bit and I also check google news feed. Hopefully that is enough to keep me up on the times..
Arnold thanks again for your response.
Travis Styer
I was thinking of your WashPost analysis two days ago when the first 10 stories all had Trump in the title.
I have a huge set of feeds in NewsBlur, it’s the best of the feed readers if you want the text. Feedly seemed to push too much of the content through. While some of that is news and blogs, I also use that to keep up on technical fields, where I can get feeds of papers published in one of my areas of interest.
I too wonder what is the optimal amount of news, at least for Prof. Arnold. and for all of us.
A friend recently provided a witty remark:
“If you don’t pay enough attention, you are under informed;
if you pay too much attention, you are over-newsed.”
= – = – = – =
I once heard Deirdre McCloskey say that from the perspective of an economic historian working on the agricultural puzzle of open fields, World War I was “almost a current event.” This was a few decades ago. Perhaps that anecdote is off topic, but it was such a jarring comment it stuck with me.
= – = – = – =
The big problem for most of us is…what is our objective? What is news for?
Having said that, in my experience teaching it has often seemed to me that the worst students typically consume no news (except perhaps on TV) while the best ones (in the old days) came to class with a folded up New York Times along with their books. In that sense “to be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain always a child, as some famous ancient said. Not paying attention to the news leaves one ignorant even of what is happening currently. One is always a child.
What the direction of causality is–that gets complicated.
If I were advising a student who wanted to become better educated but had to leave school tomorrow and never come back to a classroom ever, I would recommend subscribing to the London _Economist_ and trying to read at least a third of it, every week, following one’s interests and fancies Doctor Johnson style. After some years it adds up. and the old copies don’t take up much space and are still lively reading.
I have seen native Chinese on a university shuttle bus reading _the Economist_ and following along with a sound file simultaneously. First, they master our language…
The Wall Street Journal provides a good counterweight to the New York Times party line, for example during things such as the Baltimore riots of a few years ago. I keep meaning to read it more, but opportunity cost and paywall…
Regarding what Prof. Arnold says of WaPo, a friend of mine who has spent a few years in France remarked that the French public has a cheerfully cynical view of newspapers, that the French assume all their newspapers have clear partisan axes to grind, attacking their foes and ignoring the damning facts about their own side.
In terms of WSJ…How are they handling the coming China trade war and are they reporting Iowa & Minnesota farmers are turning up to 11 on soybean Chinese tariffs? (I don’t blame them.)
Search your sources like a forensic accountant. Who dunnit!
My news sources are simple:
1. NPR (KQED) while I get ready in the morning and in the car.
2. Local paper (San Jose Mercury News) headlines and opinion pages skimmed during breakfast.
3. The back sections of The Economist while I’m waiting for takeout. Not really news: just delayed reporting of things I don’t hear about elsewhere.
4. Intentional blogs read in my in-between time: Reason, EconLog, askblog, Cafe Hayek — only the first one being a “news” source, the rest also being delayed analysis. No push or notification feed.
No social media whatsoever, yet I appear to be very well informed. Odd, that.
I recommend that you
Stop watching the news
Because the news contrives to frighten you
To make you feel small and alone
To make you feel that your mind isn’t your own
Also…to provide a spectacle.
As Prof. Arnold says, we must treat our devices, to some extent, as adversaries. TV is definitely an adversary. It’s not even my device, it’s someone broadcasting trying to amuse me or capture my attention. Occasionally it informs.
TV news thrives on the “extendable” event. As newscasters say: “We’ll take you now”…to the live hostage situation. And we’ve got the mother on the phone, and the football coach from 20 years ago. The security expert Gavin de Becker mentions extendability in his book _The gift of fear_. The Columbine shooting, people have told me from their subjective memory of the news event, was extendable. It wasn’t reported as as an event that was over. The media treated it as a live event for as long as possible.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in _The black swan_ said during the Lebanese Civil War everyone in Beirut was at some point transfixed by the drama of a child trapped in a well–in Texas.
Unfortunately you may be selecting according to your own biases. It is hard to avoid and often easier to prefer the extreme on your own side pointing out the extreme on other side than to engage with opinions you don’t like, even if only in slant. Ask yourself where you agree with those you disagree rather than where you disagree with those you agree if you want to learn something. That is more difficult than ever when opinions decline to propaganda, free of substance, and full of tribal calls.