When I was about five or six years old it became apparent that my state of mind was being affected by TV news. Ethiopian famine, AIDs, ferry disasters, iron curtain collapsing, and so on. My folks weren’t (and aren’t) really into by The News (we never had a national paper in the house), but as @marckee noted above, with so few channels, TV bulletins were kinda unavoidable (unless you actively turned the TV off). Anyway, it wasn’t a depression thing, just raw confusion and upset at the way the information was being presented, with my young mind being unable to process it in terms of any sort of context. Upshot: TV news was actively avoided for the next few years and my worries subsided.
Aged 16, during lunch at my first weekend supermarket job, I started getting into the habit of buying a paper. Having no parental precedent, The Express seemed like a reasonable mid-market starting point. Took me a week to clock its awfulness (their daft crusade against alcopops was a main bone of contention, as I recall) and gravitated towards broadsheets on rotation. Remember The European? Into the 2000s it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to buy two or three papers. That abated as the internet and mobiles properly took off, but I still avidly followed The News through various online sources and watched C4 news nearly every day.
Two decades later, and my ability to give credence to just about any mainstream reporting or any news at all on the telly is shot to pieces. Over those two decades I’d already started to see the cycles and patterns and narratives form and repeat themselves. I suppose along the way, stuff like Brass Eye, No Logo/Adbusters (yeah, I know…) and Adam Curtis had done plenty to chip away at my faith in mainstream reporting, too. The coverage of the Scottish referendum was the nail in the coffin.
The past two years have been a tapering off while I’ve watched the Brexit referendum (a carbon copy of the laziness of the ScotRef reporting) and Trump’s ascent (and the aftermath of both) unfold. Neither are new. They’re just ramped-up versions of previous bullshit. And as the plastics thread shows, the real globally world-altering news can’t get a look in.
I still get email roundups from a select few sources to get a feel for what’s going on, but spend next to no time digesting it. Having said that, there’s obviously still loads of stuff worth reading - e.g. that Liberation summary that @anon30627475 linked to in the Iran thread was unexpectedly informative (albeit cloaked in a specific political leaning, but none the worse for that); and Holyrood magazine is quite good as it’s essentially a trade journal, so not really reliant on clickbait crap.
Gonna spend more time reading magazines like Delayed Gratification in the hope of staying abreast of current affairs in a calmer, more measured (healthier?) way. And here, of course (with my echo chamber detector set to max, naturally)!
In terms of whether these are good/bad or helpful/unhelpful media consumption choices, I’m not really convinced there’s a real link to whether you’re a good person or helping. There’s plenty of ways to be ‘part of the solution’ without needing to give time over to watching/reading The News.
tl;dr - No hot takes here, pal. Just some unedited thoughts spewed out on a lazy Friday afternoon. Take 'em or leave 'em.
