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I see. I suppose that's just my own view, then. Sure, you can reduce your media consumption to what it was in the past, such that you get what used to be a healthy and even useful level of information. However, I do not believe that a low amount is healthy nor useful anymore. Media is not trustworthy anymore, it's not honest, it does not cover issues that I consider to be important, it does not transmit information in a useful manner. I think it has gotten so bad that it's literally worse than nothing. What you say about being able to adjust for bias, is true. But any work we consume will rub off on us, it will change how we think, how we use language, what we focus on, and how we view the world. Social movements are nonsense (their success is only possible when they're not needed. Feminism can only succeed in socities which discriminate against men. If a movement gets public support, then the public cannot also be against that movement, it's a contradition) This is true for countless of issues. How are people not noticing that nothing makes any sense? Have you never read an old book written by somebody actually intelligent, and felt yourself slowly waking up and regaining the ability to think? So that once you return to the garbage you consumed previously, you immediately see through everything wrong with it? We're tricked into entertaining wrong questions, and focusing on issues which don't exist. We try to win arguments, but don't even notice that the very definitions and oppositions are flawed.
Neutral news is only impossible for us, the consumers. It's not that they couldn't just report facts if they wanted to, for them it would be easy. But it's not where the money is, and it seems like everything just flows in the direction of money now, and that individual people have very little control over anything. Like money is a force of nature. It also feels like "quality" is losing to "quantity" more and more in ROI. Something kept this at bay in the past, probably taste and high standards
The first question is how trustworthy it ever was. I’m not convinced it’s worse now than it was, in fact the sheer diversity of sources available does a pretty good job of keeping the press honest because if the majority of the news slants left, it’s now trivially easy to start one that corrects the bias. And once you add in press from other countries to the mix, we probably have news at least as accurate as any other point in history.
But second, the point is to consume less news, and perhaps be more choosy about it. Because at the end of the day, outside of very prominent elites, our actual influence over events is minimal and more than likely counterproductive. It’s not necessary to follow news to the point of insanity (there have already been two murders attributed to the victory of Donald Trump and his effect on liberals’ minds) if the best you can hope for is to maybe sometimes getting a jolt of dopamine because some conservative stuck it to a liberal (or vice versa). The juice isn’t worth the squeeze, especially as it gets harder and harder to tell the difference between outright propaganda designed to make you hate an out group and news that just so happens to make the ourgroup look bad. Why is it necessary to be reading hours of news? Does it help you live better? From r my money, I just scan the headlines of Google News, and while I’m sure I’m not super informed, I’m not missing anything much. I’m also in a much more sane headspace than the people drinking from the information firehouse and placing more importance on a given news story than it actually deserves.
I’ll make exceptions if the issue n question affects me, someone I actually care about, or is a cause I’m involved in. But 99% of the news isn’t that at all. It’s international news that doesn’t affect me and that I can’t do anything about. It’s court intrigues that are entertaining but not important. Or sometimes it’s important stuff. The important stuff you’ll definitely hear about one way or another. People will talk about it,
I generally agree with everything you wrote, but I wouldn't limit myself to just trustworthiness. I think there's a sort of "brainrot" quality to modern news which is independent of truthfulness. A lot of articles are "watch this silly video" or "guy does whacky thing". That's news exploiting other psychological needs, which is a bad direction to go in, because you end up with people optimizing only for the thing which triggers rewards in the brain, without the substance. Instead of news which are also interesting, we're getting interesting things which aren't news. This is like selling lootboxes without the videogames, or sugar without the food, or fanservice without the story.
By the way, I seem to remember journalists being people who put their lives on the line in order to fight against corruption (that it was almost an admirable job to have). It seems like the news are now owned by those who are corrupt, though, causing a disconnect with the average viewer. One of the causes is that the scope (size/range) of news media is too big. Decentralized news for every local area is superior to everyone reading the exact same set of global news. And to large companies, we're just numbers on a spreadsheet, so the human element is lost. This is a another kind of disconnect, and honest news alone cannot make up for it (objectivity and empathy are different after all) Anyway, a small sphere of concern is essential to psychological health, most of the mental health problems lately can be attributed to people who worry about far-away things while neglecting what's near to them (like themselves and their family, factors which are actually within their ability to influence or control).
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