Comment by smoe
8 hours ago
15 years after making the decision, while working for a major news outlet, to no longer read “the news,” I can pretty confidently say: if something is important enough for you to know, it will reach you eventually anyway.
Consuming news has little to do with being informed. Quite the opposite, at times.
6 or 7 years here, no news or socials. I keep telling people the same thing, you find out about the important stuff real quick regardless. The rest is noise and rage bait.
I have seen people who don't follow news confidently say fairly absurd things. They tend to assume things are kind of like they were those 15 years ago and don't want to believe a party of or a country or a situation could have change in the meantime.
It is fairly maddening when you know what they say is completely inconsistent with what was happening.
I wonder, do those people you talk about also happen to avoid the other forms of journalism, such as investigative reporting, analysis, essays, documentaries, books, and long-form features in general?
Those are the things among many others that actually make you informed about the world, in my opinion, not the news feed.
I grew up in a family that read almost exclusively partisan media like The Washington Times, The News Herald, and later Fox News. Now it's NewsMax.
Worse than knowing nothing, they know only party talking points.