Otoh 99% (exaggeration for emphasis but not that far off if you think about it) of what happens in the “news” is totally irrelevant to you and your life beyond the initial outrage it provokes. You have virtually no impact on preventing or influencing the event and it has no impact on you whatsoever. War in Africa again? It’s sad to think about and outrageous how some scummy warlords terrorize the local population, but what’s the impact on your life? Tsunami in Asia? Terrible for all the death but no impact on your daily life. Corruption in Europe again? Revolting but... all these things just add to your overall unhappiness and stress but really have no bearing on your actual day to day life. So why even bother? Not too mention that nedia and news outlets can have a hidden agenda they’re pushing either because the entity that owns them wants to promote a particular view of the world or because they want people to look away from something else.
That's assuming you can trust the news to be impartial and unbiased which they rarely are, because most media is owned by a few oligarchs or entities who have a specific agenda to push.
As for voting, I find these tools that ask you questions and tell you which candidates/parties best match your beliefs to be enough to know how to cast my vote. Not that it really matters, as you've said but it still lets me do my civic duty without the years of stress and anxiety in-between elections and during the elected's mandate. I'll leave it up to other to get needlessly outraged by following the news.
I don't trust the news, but on FB and Twitter I can select my own sources. Doesn't mean I automatically trust them, but at least I can get a multitude of perspectives and background information that the news omits.
The society would be mich better off. I find your equation of "news is like voting" appauling. News has almost no informational value like covering Russel Brand when he was running around telling people not to vote.
We need more people voting and speaking to their representatives, and fewer people outraged about something some random brainless celebtrity said.
Why are so many people in this thread equating news with celebrity or outrage culture? News is about learning and understanding current events. If you don't understand current events, you can't be an educated voter. If you have a societal obligation to vote, you have a societal obligation to follow the news at the very least whenever there is an election in your area and those occur much more frequently than once every 2 or 4 years.
People equate news with celebrities and outrage because that's what 80% of airtime is dedicated to.
If you want to be educated voter, pick any journal or periodical like The Economist or The New European. Their journalism will actually cover an issue in some depth, from whatever is their biased perspective.
> pick any journal or periodical like The Economist or The New European
But those are news too. Why are we judging news based off the worst examples? If you have a problem with the news you are consuming, find some other source. Don't write off all news consumption as bad.
Now that it has become such a media item, how many shooters in the past few years do you believe had a partial motive in a near certainty they would achieve broad recognition in their otherwise meaningless and miserable lives? When you read the news and Wikipedia on the latest shooter, you’re contributing to future shooters in about the same magnitude as being a single voter.
In my opinion, it isn't about ignoring anything. It's about moderating our reaction to things such that "outrage" dissipates in the face of more reflective, sustained modes of thought. The 24/7 news cycle, which is often based on infotainment, doesn't allow time for contemplation of ideas, just emotions.
I am not from US , so please don't try to interpret my comment as some US politic stuff.
I do not watch or read news daily, so when I went in a vacation at the hotel I had nothing else better to do then open the TV. There was some big outrage that the president mumbled something racist(he was inside a car and people were lips reading) - again not in US. I realized what I was missing by not watching TV, I am ignoring all the useless drama. The other part of the news that is not politics is also mostly irrelevant crap.
The thing is that there is almost nothing we can do as individuals, elections are 4 years apart and sometimes people organize and manage to change the prime minister with big protests but that is when something so big happened that even I knew about it.
What could work much better is a weekly summary that ignores things that happened this week, so it will be like a filter for minor stuff and all the events reported would have been better digested and all involved parties would have had the time to respond.
There are some rare events that should not be ignored, and this are large enough that will surface, a local example is this incident that eventualy caused protests, some resignations but probably nothing actually major changed to improve safety(unfortunately we have a few horrible incidents related with fire) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colectiv_nightclub_fire
The opposite of that I do would be me having to read or watch 3 different reports on same maybe relevant stuff and decide what is my favorite interpretation.
Add on top of that the propaganda by US to start their wars by fabricating stuff, now when I read some report about 1 million people in camps in China I will always have a doubt the numbers and facts are real, or the interview with persons could be fabricated, so with news from far away is double pointless to be on top daily, is nothing you can do about it today so it can wait a week and you can never be sure it is not manipulation.
