I find news to be needless and odious. I try to avoid it and only run my hands in the oceans of filth every once in a great while. Mostly I watch Colbert Report and The Daily Show and I keep my finger poised on the Fast Forward button, I skip all the commercials and if a segment is becoming too obnoxious then I simply skip it. If the guest is annoying or unpleasant then I just hit stop and delete the program.
What in the news cycle would affect me? Local news is just about crimes, national news is about scandals, shock-pieces, or governmental waste. If there were news items to pay attention to I will find them and read up on them on my own by the people I follow on Twitter. They curate the news for me for free and I pick and choose what I look into. When I want to know more about something I check Wikipedia, which might as well be an authoritative source for information since it’s as biased and corrupt as all the other sources. I approach much things in a zero trust model. I’ll read a news item but I don’t believe it until it affects me personally, and since very little will affect me personally, I rarely if ever believe anything at all. I used to parrot what I read trying to impress people with what I picked up, but over years of dealing with know-it-alls and generally unpleasant-to-talk-to people I’ve given up. I know a lot but I don’t try to raise my voice and correct people who describe things any longer, it’s just not worth the conflict. I’ve gotten quite good at identifying bullshit and smiling as I watch the purveyor waddle away thinking that they have convinced me how great their steaming pile of bullshit is.
I find that watching too much news is simply bad for your mental and physical health. Too much of this noise is bad for your mind, it clouds your thinking and enables you to be a lazy oaf, unwilling to do any thinking on your own when some babbling putz goes on a rampage. Too many people allow too much in their lives to executively overwrite their common sense, if they even had it at all to begin with.
The difference between noise and signal is vitally important. Much of what you hear in “popular media” is noise and not signal. If you consume too much noise then you will be what you consume and will become noise yourself. Whenever I’m exposed to such noise I can feel it beating me down and generally making me miserable. I seek to avoid suffering, so that is to avoid noise, and finally to avoid news.
