Stop reading/watching news

Stop reading/watching news.

Already on it senpai. Shit depresses me

I don't even watch television anymore

>watches computer
>watches phone
>watces watch

Madame Bovary, the first realist novel with the first sparse prose, would never had existed if Flaubert had never read the news.

DUDE A BEARD MADE OF PUBES LMAO

>news then
>same as news now

We live in a society where a statistically significant portion are proud of the fact that their primary news source is the Daily Show.

.As defined, news is not news, it is going to a restaurant and having the waiter order for you based on his preferences, and whether or not he thinks you're fat. "You look like you need to eat more fat." Well, I am going logging later...

>We get confused because we think we're hearing about big stories that can't be ignored, e.g. Egypt riots, so we think we're learning about what's happening in the world. But that "news" was decision treed out to you. Why Egypt and not Tunisia? Or, why Libya now and not Egypt now? etc. Those are subtle. I'm sure you can come up with your own examples.

>Most educated people worry about bias in their news, is it left or right or safe or what angle are the sponsors pushing? But those are small potato(e)s, Danny Q. There is no overarching bias, at all, there is no "goal" or "message" or "worldview" that the "media" is pushing. It's a set of right-now, what benefits us? decisions about what to broadcast, what's going to play well with the 18-25? that we take in as our view of the world. That's what you get when you have to compete against everything connected to electricity. They are purveyors of junk food, incredulous: "wait, you mean we made these potato chips, and you're eating them exclusively???"

>Here's a basic example, picked at random, from ten minutes ago: on Fox News home page, the lead story is, "McDonalds Hiring Day Goes Horribly Wrong." Is it news? Useful? No. You understand it's sensationalist "black people are idiots" Fox news propaganda. But you understand that because you hate Fox News. If you didn't hate it, what would you have learned today?

>Those stories are chosen, out of the quadrillions of events much more important than both, not because of political or ideological bias but because they know that's what you want. If you're watching it, it's for you.

>Two things result: you learned something out of context that has no value; you did not learn something else.

>The mistake most people make is they think they can go somewhere else for their news. There is nowhere else. They all operate under the same immediate benefit journalistic model.

>This is inescapable. Short of being there, the best you can do is to take in what you see and read-- there are no news sources free of this-- and ask yourself the most fundamental question of media, "what does the author want to be true?"

Pube beards are the patrician's choice

I haven't gotten around to Flaubert, but how often did he read the news? Did it take up a chunk of his day and thus a chunk of his life?