This is untrue, in most parts of America at least; there are more levels of government that affect you than national ones and I find that folks who make this claim generally aren't aware how to effect change or are unwilling to expend the effort.

You can get pretty far just by talking to people.

Well you are partially right but also I live in a major metropolitan area. I don't think politics is an area where I can really effect change and I have so much going on with my life that I am also unwilling to expend the effort.

I find discouraging others from fully engaging in the civic process much more disappointing than choosing not to fully engage oneself, to be honest.

It’s sensationalized, biased, partisan, and framed in an inflammatory manner to make you angry or ignite passion to make you vote a certain way.

It shapes people’s votes because, just like a politician’s own advertisement, that’s the goal.

Regardless of what your choice of news source is or your political party of choice, likely half of the outrageous issues being shouted by the news right now are irrelevant or blown out of proportion.

I’m also increasingly finding that the most important piece of any democracy, isn’t who you vote in, but your willingness to stand by your fellow citizens (including those who voted the other way) in holding the person that you voted in accountable for their results or lack thereof.

And that requires a certain amount of empathy, intellectual honesty, and willingness to reject confirmation bias, that the news, as it exists, simply will not give you.

The problem is you can vote people out. But the same two parties remain.

> Think of any authoritarian country, and how much the people would love to get rid of some arsehole at the top.

'Authoritarian' countries exist because most of the people support it. And when most of the people are against it, authoritarian countries change.

> The US has managed to vote out presidents that have wanted to become dictators!

Which presidents wanted to be dictators? If someone wanted to be a dictator, they wouldn't run to be president in the first place.

Calling them "the same parties" is close to hiding the ball. Those parties have shifted and diverged in multiple directions over their history. See the Civil Rights era for an obvious one--or the rapid separation of both current parties, today. The generally-socdem push of the left wing of the Democratic Party is working to change policy and position. (The reactionary push of the right wing of the Republican Party is working even more dramatically.)

> Which presidents wanted to be dictators? If someone wanted to be a dictator, they wouldn't run to be president in the first place.

This doesn't make any sense at all. Why would they not run? Plenty of authoritarians all over the world and throughout history have come to power through democratic means!

As for "which President", Donald Trump comes to mind for very obvious reasons around attempting to retain power through extralegal means. Whether he has the functioning cognitive capacity to understand what a dictatorship is an open question, but it does not change that he attempted to retain executive control via force and fiat.

"News" is literally just "what's happening around me". There's no bias in that. It's just a set of facts. News media outlets can be biased/partisan/etc. but bias doesn't just fall out of the sky to hold us hostage. You can account for it.

Your point doesn’t make sense once you realize there’s a difference between news and news media.

I don’t think anyone is making the reductionist argument that “knowing things isn’t worth it”.

But our time and attention is finite, and the things the news media is directing our time and attention toward learning is arguably not valuable.

I would also challenge the notion that news media is nothing but a gateway to raw news with bias that we can account for. Most people don’t account for it, most media outlets don’t account for it, and it may not even be possible for it to truly be accounted for.

News media can and does report incomplete facts that can change an entire perception of an issue. They can and do report non facts as well. Apologies and corrections are rare and buried, usually bookended by the next wrong things to be reported.

If we (a) define news media and news as separate entities entirely, and (b) define news as “something that happened”, then it even furthers the argument that news media itself is unworthy of time and attention, even in seeking news as raw facts. Because news media does such a poor job of reporting facts, the facts end up too mangled to be usable.

At this point the question becomes “can the bias actually be accounted for” (IMO, it cannot be), and if not, “how do we get facts outside of the news media”.

Which is still tangentially related to the original article in so much as we’re still discussing which news (facts) matter and where do you get them from… but in almost no case is the answer “the news media”.

Each part of the process, from investigating and gathering facts, writing, and presentation, presents an opportunity for bias to be introduced, be it implicitly or explicitly.

Maybe, perhaps, news media?

This kind of action does have an effect, and the effect is significant when many people do it.

Much like how participation matters during elections.

Election day is the least significant day in politics. It is merely the hiring process, and who you hire doesn't matter all that much (within reason). Your actual job as the employer starts after you have selected an employee. The onus is on you to direct and guide the employee you selected. If you don't know what is needed for your organization on an ongoing basis, how can you serve as their boss?

Or, of course, you can pray that you chose a mind reader and ignoring them will lead to satisfactory results. However, I think all employers will tell you that if you disappear into the night and leave employees to their own devices, you won't be impressed with the results.

> Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.

Being the boss in general leaves you pretty impotent, frankly. This is as true in government as it is in enterprise. Employees aren't robots. It takes an incredible amount of work to keep the workers aligned on the vision, and against competing leadership interests.

But it is not impossible to overcome. In fact, the wealthy among us who feel they don't have time to be the boss directly will hire other parties (a.k.a. lobbyists) to guide the workers for them. If the employees cannot be tamed, that practice would not take place. Of course, like everything in life, if you are not so well off you're going to have to do the work yourself.

Nobody ever said that democracy was easy. There is good reason why some people in the world stand by other political systems – because they don't want to put in the hard, hard work of democracy. But if democracy is the system you and your fellow neighbours have chosen, it is the one you have to accept, hard work and all.

Because you leave yourself more susceptible to recency bias, and the prevailing media narrative on election day rather than continually evaluating the actions politicians take in real-time with proper context, evaluating the raw facts for yourself.

If you know why you need it on election day, you know why you need it the rest of the time, because voting is only a small part of effective democratic engagement (and even if it was the whole of it, its inconvenient to have to cram and process a couple years of information with necessary context the day of the election.)

> you have a few options a few times a year.

You have a lot more options and a lot more effect other times: democratic engagement outside of elections is a big part of what decides what the choices are in elections.

What you get in the news is a performance, either carefully crafted or off the cuff crazy.

The only way to "shape a perception of government" is to check how your representatives actually voted for different issues. Talk is talk, votes are fact.