The day I stopped reading newspapers: there was an article on the front of the science section of La Vanguardia, a local 'respectable' newspaper of Barcelona (Spain). The headline of the article was (paraphrasing) "Organ donor headless human bodies".

I am a biologist and a geneticist by training. So I read on with naive interest.

The article was about how researchers managed to inhibit an homeobox gene essential for head development in tadpoles, and that tadpoles developed to some stage and then died, lacking a head. Then the article when on to the wild speculation that such silly experiment could one day lead to headless human bodies generated as clones and for the purpose of being organ donors, avoiding ethical issues (right, the author was sleeping when he wrote that.)

With my background, I knew the claims to be bullshit at several levels, including the ethical. Then I made the link: are all other newspaper articles as thinly grounded as that one? So I stop trusting anything from any source of redacted news such as TVs, newspapers, and radios.

The day I gave up on TV news: Driving around flipping channels on my radio, I heard that O.J. Simpson was suspected of murder and detectives were trying to find him. "Hmm, great." I thought, "Here comes another Hollywood scandal." I listened a couple minutes, then switched to music.

I got home to find my husband sitting on the carpet, leaning his face toward the TV, mere inches away, and blurting, "O.J. Simpson is getting arrested!" There on the TV was live helicopter coverage of a van surrounded by several cop cars very calmly making their way on an LA freeway devoid of traffic. The scene looked rather like a head of state with security cortège, yet this was the chasing of a suspected criminal. A very odd sight, quite the photo op, even if the van occupant were not a sports and movie celebrity.

I looked at the TV and my husband, and then it hit me: the purpose of TV news is not to inform you but to glue your eyeballs to your TV. This hit me so hard that I ran into my office and spent the next twenty minutes sobbing!

I had the same eureka moment reading The Economist's science section. The articles are usually old info, superficial and misleading. Then I read an economist's blog post complaining about the same thing in their finance section. So I assumed the entire magazine was suspect and stopped my subscription.