I regularly and deliberately go on vacation from the news. The manifold benefits of limiting one’s bullshit consumption are simply too huge to ignore. I haven’t heard of many people doing the same thing. Until now! Clarie Wolfe just posted a link to Mr Money Moustache titled The Low Information Diet. It’s an old post but spot on. Some quotes:
“I’m going to suggest that unless you work directly in the news media industry yourself, you too should be paying absolutely no attention to the news. This is an unusual stance in this country, where the 24-hour news cycle has become common and 100 million office workers flop down in front of the television nightly to catch up on the day’s events. Political dramas, stock markets fluctuations, sports, local tragedies, weather, and of course an update on what is new in bikinis and celebrity gossip.”
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“The news also completely fucks up the layperson’s perception of risk. The very fact that bad events are rare these days, makes them newsworthy.”
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“…it’s not just the news that is the enemy. It’s all forms of irrelevant information…”
Read it all here.
Sorry, what? I wasn’t paying attention…
I agree, and do the same thing from time to time. TV is a wasteland and I love the fact all newspapers are in trouble.
I mourn for newspapers but they’re just zombies and empty husks by now. The sooner they’re out of their misery the better. I used to read a newspaper nearly every day. A newspaper and coffee in the morning was a treasured and civilizing ritual. Alas I got sick of hearing bullshit written by the subliterate. I gave up on newspapers and started writing my own bullshit. It seems to have worked.
I had the same ritual, except it was the Sunday Oregonian only (I never had so much use for news that I wanted it daily). But my wife got the picture and cancelled our subscription when I started referring to it as “today’s pack of lies”. Funny thing was, my Dad spent his whole life in the newspaper business (distribution, not the editorial side).
I have a few good newspaper stories for you; here’s one.
I used to be a letter-to-editor writer, and had pretty good success getting letters printed. I mostly focused on countering anti-gun propaganda, and on trashing government schools. Anyway, I started noticing that what got printed seemed dumbed down a bit. OK, at first I thought they had edited it to fit it into the available space, and their editing was clumsy. But then I wrote two letters, one after the other, and took special care to have them concise and correct, and sent them off. When I read them they were dumbed down as before (grammar errors, etc.). I counted how many words there were in the printed editions, and found that they were actually LONGER than what I had submitted. It had actually taken them some effort to make an advocate of gun rights sound like a moron. Well, I didn’t write the Oregonian any more letters after that…
I refer to them as the Ministry of Propaganda these days. They can rot in Hell as far as I’m concerned.
I get all of my news from The Curmudgeon. And Fark. Can’t forget Fark.
I really DO have to try to keep up with my Packers!!!! As for the rest of it, life has intervened and I simply don’t have the time.