Re:Things You Notice When You Quit the News
by hrxn on Sunday December 11, 2016 @10:59PM
(#13155414)
> [..] There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic.
In my opinion, in some cases like this, the lengthy thousands word articles are often much worse.
Re:Things You Notice When You Quit the News
by jomohke on Monday December 12, 2016 @12:21AM
(#13155758)
Can you give an example? I suspect you're referring to the same short-term ones the author is deriding, not the journalistic kind that take time to research and prepare.
Re:Things You Notice When You Quit the News
by hrxn on Monday December 12, 2016 @06:19AM
(#13157267)
Not a specific one, I meant more generally.
My point is that length alone isn't a reliable indicator for (journalistic) quality.
It is, to some extend. Long articles, with obvious effort for research etc., are more likely to be better than short pieces that for the most part are just commentary, on average at least.
But this is not a causational relationship. I've read long essays where you could easily tell the tremendous amount of work put into them, but then I did some research on my own and found out that the premisses are extremely dubious. And so the whole thing just collapses..
> Not watching CNN won't prevent other CNN-watchers from talking to you.
I think a conversation with a CNN-watcher is more interesting when you yourself have read slower sources than if you have both spent your time watching live broadcasts or reading live articles. You'll find you both have different kinds of points to bring to the conversation.
I've found a large difference between the daily (or 24-hour) sources and weekly/monthly publications. The latter are more removed from the day to day events, and so tend to spend more time on the issue itself and wider trends, and less on personality clashes or rare, once-off outlier events (which by definition, you don't need to be worried about^[1]). Relying mainly on them, you'll have heard less about what has happened in the last 24 hours, but likely know more about the major events and wider trends of the past year. The daily sources are particularly bad at portraying those wider trends: they will show a violent crime every night regardless of whether a hundred or only ten occurred.
[1]. The truly significant outlier events will still be covered by the slower news cycle and in normal daily conversations. There's no risk of not knowing that a 9/11 happened. I haven't found that it matters if I don't know about the latest disaster immediately: to the contrary, a conversation can be stronger when the other person explains in their own words what has happened, and I can ask questions with genuine interest.
Note that he's not advocating being oblivious to the world. See the third paragraph:
> To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole. There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic.