Item — HN Reader

> I'm sad because I no longer an doing my civic duty to stay informed and have an educated opinion

To me, and I know not everyone agrees, but I feel nearly all forms of news media (particularly the ones you listed) are way too biased and have agendas to consider the information you consume from them helping you "stay informed and have an educated opinion".

Rather, they're opinion is forming your opinion.

I think it's nearly impossible to stay truly informed these days, unfortunately. I've seen some comments in this thread talk about consuming only boring facts, and I think this is our best bet.

Because most of the time, the truth is boring.

So if you find yourself being negatively impacted, ask yourself if you're hearing unbiased facts, or if you're actually just hearing opinionated agenda.

I also think this is a large root of "the otherside being so stupid". Except it happens to all sides.

1 comments

> To me, and I know not everyone agrees, but I feel nearly all forms of news media (particularly the ones you listed) are way too biased and have agendas to consider the information you consume from them helping you "stay informed and have an educated opinion".

Strong agree. The goal is to make money by keeping your eyeballs on the ads. And they keep you coming back with all this shocking stuff.

What I would like, and probably with the GP would like, was a news source that just stuck to the facts. It could be consumed in a very short time, and if you wanted to know more, you can go find it.

Such a news source is bound to fail in the face of the grab-your-eyeballs news sources. It's just going to be boring because it doesn't hit your brain in the same way.

One thing I noticed when I switched to Mastodon was that it was actually kind of "dull", for lack of a better word. I follow tons of hashtags I'm interested in, and the feed has good stuff in it. But after scrolling for 10 minutes, I kind of feel like doing something else.

I still use Mastodon. That's how I'like my news to be, as well. The closest I found is wikipedia, like some people have said, and the raw news feeds from news syndicates (I'm not sure if anyone hosts these anymore).

Another thing to make news less insane is to just go to the local news. In my town of 100,000, it's news that actually impacts me, isn't sensationalistic, and is low traffic. I have a deep link to get there that just bypasses the front page of the news site. Also their comment section is horrible, so I've turned off JavaScript for it.