How to Find Quality News.
It’s pointless for me to make a video about how awful the media and how division situation is. That would just be more complaining. We know the problems. The question is what to do about it so you’re not completely in a bubble.
Sure, there’s a lot of fake news out there. There is a lot of biased and motivated reporting. But is this a new thing? It certainly seems that way.
But in some ways, the news has always been somewhat fake. News has always been crafted “stories”. You can remember editors saying in movies, “that’s not a story, go back and get me a story”. it’s that more narratives are being created due to more pieces of information (exponential). , whether this is intentional or not. Even the wires have to frame their blurbs. “Objectivity” is nested in value.
At the bottom of it, the way a narrative is constructed has everything to do with value as much as facts. e news was a cleaner narrative before (because less variables) but still a narrative. Obviously, media in the past was a bastion of truth compared to today, still I would not wax too nostalgic about past broadcasts…however we are in a unique situation in this day and age. Scott Adam’s Loserthink gives us coherent summary of how the problem we’re facing now developed:
The technological change that broke the news business was our ability to measure audience reaction to every headline and every variation of every story. Once you can reliably measure the income potential of different approaches to the news, the people who manage the news have to do what works best for profitability or else they are abandoning their responsibilities to shareholders. On top of that, executive compensation is determined by profit performance. From the moment technology allowed us to know which kinds of content influenced viewership the most, the old business model of the news industry was dead media walking. From that point through today, the business model of the press changed from presenting information to manipulating brains.
And he also does a great job of describing how this works as far as you’re concerned:
The business models of the press and social media act in concert to keep you in your mental prison, like some sort of indentured servant working on a click farm. As long as you are clicking on the media’s content, that’s all they need from you. And they know you’ll click with more passion if they can keep you spinning around in your biased bubble.
Besides the addiction model, described here, there are other challenges to getting a real picture of what’s going on., One is that we know now statistics, surveys and even science itself sometimes, maybe often is biased and there’s a lot of ways that can happen, many of them unconscious. That too always been the case. Newton did not share his findings for decades due to the religious implication. The objectives of science are nested in value, and when not aligning with that value has repercussions such as cancellation, the incentive to tailor findings to a narrative are amplifies. Also, we know that as time changes, so do social values, so the axioms of what is to be valued and what is to be denounced changes over time, and these changes certainly affect science.
News reporting and now news entertainment, if you will, is of MoQ’s social level of evolution. As with anything on the social level, you will rarely find simplicity or long-term consistency, and if so, only briefly. Again today, all those value-oriented factors are greatly amplified, and through the lens of MoQ, you could say that the news situation is too dynamic. In fact, much of what’s happening on the social/intellectual exchange is too dynamic. The internet has given us too many ever variables called facts that are constantly transforming and multiplying and shaking up both levels and further complicating their interactions. It’s like time lapse. This means that the old method of carefully analyzing discrete pieces of information has become combinatorily explosive and untenable.
Therefore, I suggest a way for a regular person to make sense of anything is to shift away from rational analysis and to a more intuitive mode.
You can’t rationally decide what has value based on how true it seems. All the narratives will seem true – that’s the point. The real truth is the most valuable narrative for the context. Meaning, it will best marry what you observe and what you know and what you trust. It will feel congruent, as the great psychologist Carl Rogers described embodied truth. Because this will not be the same for everyone, our social level has historically come up with a rough consensus in order to operate. But nowadays, that consensus is only partially useful. We almost have to find a consensus in our own head.
So how to pick the best narrative? The time saving way is to look at the story from two sources on opposing sides, then synthesize the two narratives. This will result in something balanced, but probably superficial…since both sides reduce reporting of issues to emotionally salient talking points, but it’s better than nothing. The better way is to sample widely from a variety of news sources…preferably smaller ones, and allow the best facts to present themselves to you. Try not to do it rationally, do it intuitively. When the best facts present themselves. What facts stand out to you as of Quality. Once you have these, then you can put them together rationally.
There are a few psychological issues to consider:
Obviously, everyone is going to come into this with their own set of preconditions, so your conclusion after going through these processes aren’t’ going to be exactly the same as anyone else’s more than likely. Uncertainty, lack of consensus, there’s going to be quite a bit of that in this day and age. So, need to have a little bit of resistance to wanting to fit in which is hard. We like to fit in. So if you do this, you’re probably not going to agree with your friends since you’re coming up with your own conclusions, which means you’re going to have to explain how you came up to this conclusion, and there’s more than a chance that as soon as you reveal you’ve used anything from the other side, you’ll be dismissed. That’s how it is, so you have to be brave.
Another one, and this is a big one, is you’re going to have to change your mindset to slow gratification This means going way beyond the charge you get when your fave channel confirms your opinion with simplistic emotionally salient entertainment. . That means, getting a charge when you’re sampling broadly begins to yield some coherence. It’s like giving up booze, you have to find something else that’s equally meaningful.
Also, It’s hard work. This kind of has to be, because you can’t blithely sit back and watch Fox or CNN and again be entertained and justified in your opinion…your assigned opinion, as Scott Adams says, assigned to you by relying too heavily on one side of the story. Psychologically, there are two dangers here. One is that you get overwhelmed at the work this takes, the other is that you’ll go down an internet rabbit hole. You can get obsessed looking for the ghost of truth. I think too little or too much research is both bad for you for different reasons.
Now this is important: you must try, to the best of your ability, to keep your ego out of it, as well as preconceived notions. You have to come at this from a stance of Peace of Mind. If you don’t do from a stance of Peace of Mind, an open neutral space, you know, the heron wafting for fish, it probably isn’t going to work. So this is a big challenge, but I think it’s worth it if you want to take the plunge and catch those fishes.