Because being politically active at any thing but the most basic level requires knowledge of the issues and knowledge of the issues requires following the news. If you are not politically active you are supporting the status quo because you are not putting in any effort to change the status quo.

I don't think following the news is the only way to gain knowledge of the issues. Online discussion forums and books are two other options.

Or they could do actual research instead of reading the "news" - which largely amounts to professional blogging these days. Following the news does not make one more knowledgeable about politics or current events necessarily. Some of the most ill-informed people I know watch news regularly. There's no guarantee that news is accurate or balanced in it's reporting.

Right, when it comes voting time look at actions a candidate took and what they said they would do. Make your judgements from there and vote. That's all that matters. Everything else is like watching a drama.

But most people are politically active once a year (if that), not every 15 minutes.

And I'd also add that it's hardly even a well conceived process. Most people ideologically align themselves one way or the other and then vote that way, regardless of anything else.

For instance Chicago has been exclusively under one party's exclusive control for going on 90 years now. And so this party has had decades to carry out whatever grand vision they could ever imagine for the city. So we'd expect to see what this grand vision would culminate in. And we see a city with a broken school system, rampant crime, tremendous financial problems, horrible inequity, and that is just in general - broken.

Yet the people keep voting for the exact same party and general ideologies. It's just not logical, but it's how most people operate on most topics. They pick a conclusion they want to be true, and then find evidence to support it, instead of examining the evidence to come to the most reasonable conclusion. Perhaps in large part because the latter process often yields conclusion that we very much don't want to be true.

Politics aren’t the only way to change the status quo. In fact they’re not good at it at all. Uber and AirBnB changed the status quo far more than any politician in my lifetime.

Also, most people’s personal issues trump any macro issue by far. You can change your status quo. It’s almost impossible for an individual to change the status quo and definitely not through typical political engagement.

>Uber and AirBnB changed the status quo far more than any politician in my lifetime.

I am sorry, but that is just depressing if you believe something like that. The ACA is one thing that comes to mind. Improving healthcare for Americans would have a much bigger impact on people's lives than giving people who already own a home a way to make a little extra money.

The ideal of improving healthcare has little to do with how the ACA turned out.

> Politics aren’t the only way to change the status quo.

The status quo is a political arrangement. It's just a way of referring to the state of power's distribution across institutions and people. That's political.

There is literally, definitionally nothing apolitical that affects the status quo.

Changing the status quo is--inescapably, apodictically--political.

Uber and AirBnB are highly political institutions.

By this definition literally every interaction with the outside world is political. Is a definition that broad really useful?

When people talk about politics they’re almost always talking about interfacing with the government. Taking an Uber is definitely not a political statement in most people’s minds.

It may not be a political _statement_, but it has political _consequences_.

Ignoring nth-order consequences doesn't make them go away.

how else do you make an informed vote?

"News" in its most common form has little to do with being an informed citizen. The library would be a better bet.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Don't be snarky."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No it means you should analyse your motivations for doing so carefully. If all you do is read it to get angry at something, or dismiss the opinion of whoever is speaking, then why read/watch it at all?

I'd go further and say if you're doing it just so you can give a hot take on politics to someone nearby, or have your opinions validated by them then also stop doing that (it's hard) and be mindful that whoever they are may actually disagree with you but isn't interested in having their views criticised as a part of someone's entertainment schedule or to be lectured too.

Most articles are little better than click bait. Journalists writing about X usually aren’t trained in X and usually have little time to build expertise in X. They are by training writers, so for the most part they’re reduced to parroting the narratives peddled by this or that group or political party. It’s very rare I read a general news article within my areas of subject matter knowledge and think “oh, this writer really understands and has highlighted the important issues.” I have to assume the same is true for subject matter I’m not familiar with, like tax policy. In reality, for a lot of these subjects, nobody knows the answers, not even the “experts.” For those things, journalists have neither the space, time, or education to even do a good job raising the relevant issues, much less elucidating the answers.

This is a reductive and misleading summary of what journalists do. Every blogger on the Internet also writes, with varying degrees of training and success. What reporters do that bloggers don't is reporting --- surveying and cultivating sources, visiting places, making a zillion phone calls, working with fact checkers (itself a tedious job that has little to do with the craft of writing).

That's the job of a reporter. Not knowing everything, but being willing to do the legwork to find people with firsthand knowledge of things, and then relating what they have to say. That's why we call journalism "the first draft of history", and not the textbook of history.

Like every profession, journalism has limitations and is itself practiced with varying degrees of success. We're fond of Crichton's "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" on HN, but ignore the Djikstra Amnesia Effect, holding journalists to a standard we rarely achieve in our own profession, where our own errors routinely cause direct harm to people through ignorance and omissions.

I don’t disagree with your first paragraph. As to your second, I think that’s part of the problem: those people with first hand knowledge are often relaying a sound bite, a piece of packaged narrative. And the journalist doesn’t know enough to really add anything to that narrative. That may be a limitation of journalism, but I question whether given that limitation, journalism is a useful vehicle for educating the public about the highly complex issues that underpin our society.

(Someone on HN changed my mind recently by pointing out that, while judges sometimes invoke history, they are generally bad historians. It was a thought provoking assertion, because it’s not uncommon for judges to justify opinions by reference to economics or social science. But they have neither the training nor time and procedural flexibility to do a good job of such analysis. My conclusion was, therefore, that such analysis simply isn’t useful. I think journalism might suffer from the same problem.)

Sturgeon has something to say about journalism just as Crichton and Djikstra do. It is not my claim that all of it is good.

But then, there's also a 4th amnesia (so many amnesiae!), a reverse Gell-Mann, where we forget all the incontrovertibly good journalism; for instance, John Carreyrou brought Theranos down, despite any personal expertise with phlebotomy, just through the power of bird-dogging primary sources.

What does the alternative look like?

> surveying and cultivating sources, visiting places, making a zillion phone calls, working with fact checkers (itself a tedious job that has little to do with the craft of writing).

I highly doubt that the average article even in prestigious news organizations (e.g. NYT, NPR, The Atlantic) goes through that level or rigor, given how frequently they cite provably false information. The overwhelming majority of the news articles I read, even from preeminent news outlets, amounts to summarizing a story that a different outlet broke. Often with several layers of indirection. I've seen plenty of stories about things posted on social media, and the author of the news articles doesn't even bother to link to the primary source. The latter is especially pernicious, it signals to me that the authors wants me to take their words at face value and not facilitate me viewing the relevant information and forming my own opinion.

Watching the news didn't help them ...

If you were in Yemen would the news that the Saudis were bombing civilians change your actions?

If you were attempting a border crossing into the US with children, would the news influence your approach?

If I were in that situation, I would want all the relevant news possible, in any and all formats available. TV broadcasts of cease-fires are great news for someone who wants to get out, as are radio reports of major hot-spots, etc. Getting the relevant news can be the difference between life and death in these situations.

Don't the yuppies generally vote democrat and the democrats usually oppose these things while the very-not-yuppies tend to vote GOP and the GOP usually likes/is ambivalent about these things? Like, I get it, gotta grab a side in The Culture Wars, but we should at least be fair about it shouldn't we?

But you can just ignore the news and vote Democrat and get the same effect. It’s not like those yuppies were going to vote Republican until the NYT opened their eyes.