Yes, I agree.
My personal technique for dealing with this is try to look at multiple online news sources, not just one. I'll look at one from each side of the political spectrum and try to triangulate what a reasonable person should think.
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I built Read Across The Aisle to help people do this. It's totally free, with no tracking or PII monetization — just a side project I decided to launch. It also includes free WSJ access, thanks to a generous partnership they offered us.
This seems to require a browser plugin. There is no Firefox plugin, so I'm not sure how you're going to get as many users as you hoped.
We're on Chrome and Brave, and iOS. Firefox will happen eventually, but since this is a free side project we can't develop for every platform.
Think about what? A system that doesn't care about you? A reasonable person should think for himself and not on the basis of soulless news columns.
What are you saying, that people should read no news sources at all? That's absurd. You need to know actual information if you're going to make an informed choice.
Are you absolutely sure that making an informed choice is a useful thing? Speaking politically, the correlation between spending more and achieving political office is very high.
Getting your information from friends and family is not going to be worse than sourcing it from talking heads in a studio or newspaper editors. Anyone who, eg, gets their political information from me is going to get information sourced largely from reading parliamentary documents. How is that going to be worse than what they get from the media? There are politically interested people in every community to pick up the slack.
A radical view, but politics would be better off without mass, coordinated outrage. Compromise and thought should be the order of the day.
The reason the correlation between spending and winning is high is because people donate to politicians they think can win. If advertising spend could buy elections Mitt Romney or Michael Bloomberg would be president and politicians would usually be rich before they got elected, not as a consequence of getting elected.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3042867
> the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1
> Because campaign spending correlates strongly with election results, observers of American politics frequently lament that money seems to buy votes. However, the apparent effect of spending on votes is severely inflated by omitted variable bias: The best candidates also happen to be the best fundraisers. Acting strategically, campaign donors direct their funds toward the “best” candidates, who would be more likely to win even in a moneyless world. These donor behaviors spuriously amplify the correlation between spending and votes. As evidence for this argument, I show that (non-strategic) self-financed spending has no statistical effect on election results, whereas (strategic) externally-financed spending does.
Mitt Romney or Michael Bloomberg
John Kerry's net worth far exceeds Romney, too.
Forgive me for speaking imprecisely. The message I wanted to convey was that you can’t just buy votes with advertising or lobbying.
John Kerry is also an excellent example of how money won’t buy the presidency, thank you.
> Getting your information from friends and family is not going to be worse than sourcing it from talking heads in a studio or newspaper editors
Of course it is. Especially these days, your friend is just as likely to have gotten the news they're giving you from a Facebook meme page than from anything with on the record quotes from officials involved.
> There are politically interested people in every community to pick up the Slack
Yes there are. Journalists! That's what a journalist is. They're interested, they research, they present their findings. If you are reading parliamentary papers and reporting the contents to your friends, you are a journalist.
Just deferring to individuals in the community you know is a nice idea but it doesn't cover it. For instance, who was looking into Theranos other than journalists at WSJ? Best I can tell, no one was. Their reporting on the company was invaluable.
an informed choice about what? the news is full of things you can't have an impact on. focus on things you can impact, like your own life and the people around you.
An informed choice about, oh, I don't know... voting? Whether they support the actions of their local politician? What they should protest? What causes they should support? These are foundational elements of how democracy functions, it would be nice for them to work well.
This is deeply intellectually disingenuous and a bit masturbatory even. News isn't only events you can or cannot effect, it is context setting, value creating and signal driving.
The idea that your local culture is superior to foreign also is problematic, not in a normative way, but in that it almost certainly limits new ideas and general diversity.
The solution is more likely that information is hard to parse and more information is harder. The thing not mentioned in this that I think is the most critical part of the "change" is that historically fringe and minority ideas were kept in check because of basic principals of attention economy. If 10 people believed things, there was most often a limit as to how many those 10 would reach. Now fringe ideas can speak to MANY people, and can be dynamiclly adjusted to catch.
Previously the only real organization that had huge reach was the government and we built a Rube Goldberg machine to insure that one voice didnt dominate. Facebook, Twitter and Google are all bigger than all governments and there is no checks and balances other than one dudes whims in each case. Im all for free market, but this information delivering system is too large, too unregulated and probably for better and worse is going to deliver a deeply different world than we all grew up in. That new world seems more reactive.