I think this is an amazing idea! The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc haha I haven't found an article that sounds interesting in a few scrolls.
I mean, it's great because it's accurate. Half of the "news" we're fed is sensationalized so we'll click on it and it's really nothing but it gets us riled up about something that is effectively meaningless to us. This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news lol
I think the issue here is that we've been fed a high-sensationalism diet, so our brains are acclimated to in-your-face headlines. Perhaps if we detoxed our brains a bit (by using this app exclusively for a week or two), we would be able to recalibrate our expectations for what seems "interesting".
This is sort of like how you recalibrate your tongue to a low-salt diet if you stop eating salty food for a few weeks.
Hm, maybe from some news outlets. I think the main issue for big news outlets isn't outright falsehoods, it's the coverage bias. You really can't get a full sense of what's going on if you don't make an effort to get news from divergent sources because each outlet covers the news that fits its preferred narrative.
If we got a full-scale media blitz with pictures every time someone died in a car crash, people would take unnecessary car-related deaths much more seriously. 100 people a day are dying in the USA right now
There's so much fucked up stuff like that going on in the world, and people have no idea about it since it never hits the news
Driving with a dangerous combination of speed and distractedness/aggression/lack of skill is unnecessary. People all think they're driving safely even when they're not, because their dumb monkey brains get lulled into a false sense of security by years of coincidentally not crashing.
IMO the status quo is not remotely acceptable, and it's completely insane that we get so disproportionately pissed off whenever an immigrant or a police officer kills someone and completely ignore all the times car drivers kill people.
On anything that matters, all sources just copy AP or each other, and maybe splice in some random tweets. Once you're looking at a topic where the news source is providing some kind of opinion, it's a clear sign you're dealing with some thoroughly irrelevant bullshit non-issue, and closing the tab is the best thing you could do now.
I'm referring to sources whose target audiences differ greatly. For example, if you read NYT and NPR, those are not divergent sources. NPR and Fox News, or Reason and either NPR or Fox News are divergent. I don't personally read Fox News myself, but use them as an example here because they are well known for their coverage bias.
For more recommendations, check out the Read Across the Aisle app, [1] which I created to help battle groupthink and the resulting misunderstandings and incivility.
Ah, the sweet aroma of coverage bias, isn't it just the spice of the journalistic world? The quest to avoid blatant falsehoods is relatively straightforward, much like a game of whack-a-mole. Identify the blabbermouths, the rumor-mongers, the peddlers of deceit, and voila! You've successfully exiled them from your daily news diet. A glorious accomplishment, indeed!
However, when it comes to bias, things get somewhat...messy. It's like trying to play chess on a board that keeps shifting under your fingers. An insidious infiltrator, bias sneakily weaves itself into the fabric of reporting, subtly influencing what gets attention and what doesn't. We're all detectives in this narrative, sifting through data, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.
News, like science, isn't a perfect process. What's chosen for investigation often matters as much as the ensuing results. News sources, then, become our guides in this complex labyrinth, and their credibility can make or break our understanding of the world. The elusive "objective narrative" might be a mirage, but some news oases are certainly closer to the wellspring of reality than others.
Now, consider the ill-advised adventurer who thinks they're diversifying their media intake by adding a dash of conspiracy theory and a sprinkle of sensationalism. Suddenly, they're questioning whether 5G is responsible for a global pandemic. A fascinating thought, no doubt, but one that's more suited for a science fiction novel, perhaps?
Practicality is key. If you're a trans individual or a parent of a trans child in Florida, news headlines like "Florida's Draconian Measures Against Trans Kids" are crucial for your well-being. If, however, you're more interested in the intricate dance of global finances, a business-centric outlet would be your go-to.
Media mammoths like The Washington Post and The New York Times attempt to cater to this myriad of needs, breaking down their content into neatly packaged sections like sports, economy, politics, culture, and so on. Yet, their own peculiar biases can sometimes stain the narrative (ahem, New York Times and your unfortunate penchant for trans panic stories).
In short, my dear friend, finding balance in news consumption is less like a serene ballet and more like a lively tango. You're constantly adjusting, recalibrating, and challenging your understanding of the world. Bias will always be there, lingering in the shadows. The trick is not to eliminate it, but to dance with it.
> This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news
Maybe the pre-clickbait era version of you would have found more of these articles interesting? So maybe it's not that you don't care about the news, but your "base level" of what's interesting is different due to being used to clickbait.
100% agree, doing this wholesale would probably help my (and likely others) mental states as a whole! Imagine desensationalizing product sites and ads and the like, we might actually be able to bring down that threshold so it can stop ever increasing. The irony here is I feel like what I wrote here is sensationalized lol I do truly think it could be helpful I just think a lot of us are "broken" as far as that's concerned from the exhausting nature of everything these days always vying for our attention.
Sensationalism typically involves the use of exciting or shocking stories or language at the expense of accuracy, in order to provoke public interest or excitement. Your text, while expressing strong feelings about the topic, doesn't exaggerate or misrepresent the facts for dramatic effect. You're discussing your thoughts and feelings about the potential positive impact of desensationalizing advertisements, which is a subjective opinion rather than a sensationalized claim.
> The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc
That's a feature, not a bug. The 'news' is 90% useless, if not descrutive, information. Ask yourself: what percentage of the news is optimal to maintain your worldly wisdom? I'd guess about 1%. So getting it down to 10% is half way there, on a logarithmic scale.
I'd bring it down to 0%. Thomas Jefferson explained why as well as any could [1]:
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To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. it is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. the real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time: whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will &c &c. but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. he who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Thomas Jefferson, 1807
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The most interesting thing is that this would have sounded quite hyperbolic but 10 years ago, and probably near to completely unreasonable 30 years ago. Yet now? It sounds completely reasonable. Like so many things in history show, the era we're entering into is not some wild uncharted domain, as it sometimes feels. Rather the era we all lived and grew up in was the weird one. Now we're simply returning to 'normalcy.'
> The most interesting thing is that this would have sounded quite hyperbolic but 10 years ago, and probably near to completely unreasonable 30 years ago. Yet now it sounds, at the minimum, completely reasonable.
Ironically, it was more reasonable 10 years ago, and even more reasonable 30 years ago. The difference is that the alignment between the ideological and institutional biases throughout the media (in the US) was more uniform 10 years ago, and even moreso 30 years ago, so if you ran into lies (including lies of story selection and detail omission, as well as the more direct falsehoods), they’d be more likely to be the same lies from every source, leaving no reason to question them.
Can you offer any examples? In modern times I'd appeal to something like the lies surrounding the death of Officer Sicknick [1] as an example of exactly what you are describing. The entire story that he was murdered, let alone in the precise and brutal fashion described, could have been trivially falsified by any journalist doing the most basic things every journalist does: speak to the family, call the coroner, look at police records, and so on endlessly. Seemingly none did, which rather blunts Hanlon's razor.
That razor goes from blunted to decimated once one also looks to the media response once those lies were definitively revealed. Instead of seeking explanation, and reckoning, over a death being exploited and politicized with the most cynical of lies, the media simply moved onto a new lie about the story (that he was killed by pepper spray) before ultimately just burying it. I'd contrast this against something like Iraq in that one could, at least plausibly, claim ignorance on part of the media. I'd also note that there was some serious push-back from the media once the lies were revealed, and also much less homogeny even in the interim.
Yes, this has a lot of potential. If the news orgs won't de-sensationalize because of incentives, we can do it for them. It would be a great browser plugin, and you can define the URL's you want to de-sensationalize.
The other issue is - and your quoted "news" hints at it - a significant amount of what we're fed isn't news at all. Yes, it's something that happened. That doesn't make it news.
So while this app might remove the hyperbole what about the things and details that are being ignored? How do we fill the gaps so we're getting a more complete context?
> The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc haha I haven't found an article that sounds interesting in a few scrolls.
I tried doing the same thing as OP with chatgpt and came to the same realization so I stopped.
This is why I am just as skeptical of criticism of the media.
Everyone wants to consume their work, but they need people to pay for it so that they can keep working, but people won’t consume their work unless it’s sensational.
> but people won’t consume their work unless it’s sensational.
I think this is only true because we allow unlimited sensationalism. It's just like any other junk intake (candy, social media, gamification, etc) - it's easy, it has an immediate reward, and it's not valuable. But out bodies and brains were conditioned by evolution to only care about the first 2, so junk news is just hacking our brains (or exploiting our vulnerabilities).
To be blunt, we've turned something that should serve us into a parasite. We need to have awareness of this and put create standards and/or regulations. When the playing field is level and (almost) nobody is writing clickbait, our brains will return to normal.
I mean, it's great because it's accurate. Half of the "news" we're fed is sensationalized so we'll click on it and it's really nothing but it gets us riled up about something that is effectively meaningless to us. This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news lol
Thank you though, this is awesome!