I think more people should have this attitude (that you should not consume news):
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.html
I have talked to people who are genuinely distressed by things happening in the news and are afraid to miss something if they cut it out. But usually information in the news isn’t actionable even if it’s important.
@pganssle saying the news is mostly irrelevant is a much harder case to make in the USA. Nominally, our democracy relies on an informed and engaged populace and the news does point to which issues are currently of political interest. Even if the main part of your knowledge comes from slower research, the news keep you up to date.
@2ck I disagree here. The marginal voter is probably not informed particularly well by following the news.
Consider this: your vote is most likely to make an impact (and have a direct impact on you) in local elections, but very few people follow local politics.
Also, voting happens fairly infrequently — you don't need to poll for that information at a high frequency. Your time is much better spent reading history, economics and political science to build a framework for what good policies look like, and then reading a dispassionate summary of the candidates' positions and their previous actions just prior to voting.
@2ck Also, I think that politics is a team sport for the majority of people in the US. If you are a straight-ticket Republican / Democrat voter (which most people are), you are not going to accidentally miss something in the news that would flip your vote to the other side of the aisle — anything that makes a particular candidate so disdainful that committed partisans would flip allegiance for them would be such a big story that you'd hear about it anyway.
On the other hand, spending your time studying a diverse selection of "long view" sources is almost certainly more likely to change your mind about what part(ies) to support or not support, since it could cause an evolution in your thinking about what the best policies are.
@pganssle Democracy doesn't just work at elections. It is a day by day process involving maintenance of trust in democratic institutions and in society generally. That requires an understanding of what's going on currently so you can understand why people are doing what they're doing. That's news. Yes, it's important to have an understanding of history, and I agree that there's a lot of news that can be ignored, but that's hardly a reason to pan news generally. Rather, it's an argument for moderate one's intake.
