My mental health is noticeably better, and I would readily attribute this to not being tuned in to the ongoings of the globe that I have zero control over. Instead, I have been more focused on my local life and community.
But I regularly feel guilty about not being keyed in to the flirtations with/forays into authoritarianism in my country.
And no, that's not exclusive to Trump and what ICE has been up to, vanishing people into deportation camps. Climate change, the increasing frequency of pandemics, PFAS/forever chemicals, the list of stuff being swept under the rug instead of being acted against grows longer by the day.
If you want hard hitting public interest pieces then ProPublica [2] and Democracy Now! [3] are both far better choices. I can't say that they'll make you feel better about the wacky world we live in but at least they treat you like an adult.
[1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
Nowadays I get my daily news from a quick scan of the headlines on Google news, as well as Drudge (from Google search history - no bookmark!), but of course it's mostly sensationalist and partisan garbage, and only minimally informative about actual events/developments of interest. I only click through a very small number of headlines.
Mediabiasfactcheck rates Foreign Affairs, a publication of the council on foreign relations, as the least biased, with no mention of their owner's connection.
It'll take me about a day or two (per candidate) to get back up to speed when elections come around, so I can do my civic duty and vote. Beyond that I don't let it consume my life. I've got stuff to do, and not very much time left to do it.
It's like when you watch an ad for an insect repellent: if they show you all those disgusting insects, the ad disgusts you so much that you avoid the product. It's a phenomenon known in psychology.
Now the trend is the same with news and media.
I don't generally feel like there's much in the news that either discusses anything I care about. Or, to the extent that issues I care about are discussed, they come at it from such a strange angle that the discourse is mostly frustrating, or disappointing. (quick example, I heard a piece on NPR about how people are turning to LLMs for therapy. The commentator's solution? We NEED robust LLMs that are trained in psychology datasets and have the right guardrails for psychology.) For the rest of the HN crowd, imagine any news story from a mainstream outlet about issues of privacy or security. The commentary is completely worthless, except perhaps for informing you about where some of the general public may be on the issue.
In other words, for me personally, it's not sure that following politics has very much real utility value. I can just research a candidate when I go to vote. The only direct referendums I can vote on are town-level and have nothing to do with national matters. I donate to a few causes I like, and otherwise I have effectively zero say in how these things turn out. This means I'd be far better off reading a book, doing chores, or thinking about how I can improve the quality of my life than paying attention to the news whatsoever.
I have a number of friends that are addicted to Outrage Pron (almost all media -mainstream or fringe- qualifies). They -literally- spend almost every waking hour, doomscrolling. One of them occasionally forwards videos to me, that are clearly edited for angst, but he takes as gospel. AI will make that kind of stuff much, much worse.
I had a friend tell me "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention!" He thought it was a clever, brand new saying (Spoiler: It's not —I first heard it, in the 1970s).
I've found that I can get a lot done, when I pay attention to the things over which I have direct control.
When people are not well educated, they have more trouble than they should discerning real from fake, objectivity from bias, quality from trash. (Obviously there is some subjectivity here, but there is also some ground truth, and I'm talking about the latter.)
The result is that they're more likely to click, read, believe, and share pieces that are sensationalist and low in quality. Consequently, the media companies that write that kind of stuff get all the views and most of the revenue, which they use reinvest to grow and write more of what they're writing. This also incentivizes other media companies to go the same route, and the ones that don't remain largely irrelevant. It also normalizes sensationalist low-quality writing.
To wit: SimilarWeb says the Daily Mail gets 230 million views/month. ProPublica gets 3 million and Democracy Now gets 1.5 million.
I have no idea how a society gets itself out of this downward spiral, besides better educating its people. Or restricting its people's ability to decide what rises to the top (which ofc has its own obvious downsides).
I have so much trouble deciding on primary elections. There are often 5 primary candidates, and 10 seats to decide upon. And I've found no good tool to help evaluate their policy and record.
I want some sort of score board website that tracks their political and public behaviors towards various policies.
It’s text-only, no photos or videos. Updates only once or twice a day. No comments section or any other distractions.
That’s been my main change to my news diet. Deleting the NYTimes app and replacing it with that site has made me much happier.
I still read a lot of local news (San Francisco things that affect my life) but I just realize that national political news is not something I need to track 24/7
> Dave Van Zandt is a registered Non-Affiliated voter who values evidence-based reporting. Though not a journalist, Dave has maintained a lifelong interest in politics and media bias. He originally pursued a Communications degree in college before ultimately earning a degree in Physiology. Since then, he has worked in the healthcare industry (Occupational Rehabilitation) while continuing to study media, language, and bias independently.
The guy you're talking about (from Wikipedia):
> Van Zandt was born in 1953 in Montgomery, New Jersey, and raised in New Jersey along with his three siblings. He graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology. In 1981, he earned a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, where he served as managing editor for the Yale Law Journal. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the London School of Economics.
Unless Dave leads a double life as both a physical therapist and treasurer of the bar foundation these are two different people.
In the near term I've found that asking an LLM with search/deep research to summarize news helps. Obviously zero shielding from bias, but at least its concise & all in one place
There is also kagi and newsminimalist for out of the box semi-filtered:
The News, like any other media, is in the business of producing content and being watched/read/listened to, as much as possible. Not in the business of keeping me informed about what's going on in the world (that's relevant to me).
I don't want to bury my head in the sand. I do read/watch/listen to some of it. Usually weeklies, like The Economist, and I have a daily digest newsletter that dedupes and sends me local news from the day before. Between that and what I hear on the grapevine / from my friends, I trust that I am informed enough.
I don't want to get my news from social media.
They will destroy their own lives if all they worry about is the bigger stuff. There is no clear path from what an individual can practically do, to addressing those bigger things either.
For example, politically - anyone trying to do the actual effective thing in this situation is going to be thrown in jail, often with praise and finger wagging by the nominal folks in charge of those who it would be benefitting.
And since everyone would rather yell and scream back and forth at each other rather than actually do anything that matters, what else is going to happen?
That goes for pretty much every one of these hot button topics. People can only control what they can actually control, and at some point, those things are in bad enough shape that they require 100% of a persons attention. Or more.
This is 'California politics' by the way - and it's spread everywhere. Nothing is good, everything is bad, no one can do anything that actually benefits them, etc, etc.
Ofc NPR may not be reliable, or even exist, soon due to Trump's retaliatory budget cuts. But meanwhile, nicw to have. Thanks again.
The good news is I spend significantly less time doomscrolling (down, on average I’d say, over 90%). My anxiety levels are largely gone, and when they do spool up I’m equipped with the tools to interrupt or stop them.
The downside to this has been an increased reliance on my news intake by others who have abandoned it wholesale or only consume opinion pieces like the “nightly news”. It’s a markedly different kind of anxiety, because now I also have to be ready to teach these other people about things they really should be building habits for themselves - but if I bail out, they just rely on ChatGPT instead to explain complex topics while remaining bereft of nuance and historical contexts.
The current landscape sucks, because everyone is chasing bullshit KPIs (engagement metrics, attention economy, advertising revenue, etc) instead of just delivering high-quality journalism at rates the common man can’t afford to pass up (i.e., affordable). I do not blame people from noping out, but I remain angry that everyone basically abandoned RSS feeds and digestible news in lieu of clickbait, algorithms, and walled gardens.
1) I thought most people got their “news” from social media (x, BlueSky, TikTok). TikTok esp does not really give link backs as well.
2) was this part of the “flood the zone” strategy, to get people to just be overwhelmed and not pay attention?
But even if that wasn't the case how can you research candidate positions without knowing the political context you want them to represent you within? And even then frankly they've all proved themselves to be spineless liars who say anything to get elected and onto the graft money train so who gives a shit. So then you're left just electing people based on character ethics optics. I really don't know what the answer is, but the nationalization of everything seems extremely disenfranchising. Every little thing becomes a referendum about some national topic and hyperpolarized purity test. Just Ugh. Throw everyone out.
This really highlights that the threat of authoritarianism is really only a threat to certain people, which frankly is why authoritarianism happens.
Because if authoritarianism were an issue for you, you'd be reading the news. If POTUS were threatening to send troops into your streets to arrest people who look like you, that'd be something you'd want to be aware of yes? If he had a policy to detain people who look like you, and if he doesn't like your tattoos he'll send you to a foreign torture prison, you'd probably be very keen on paying attention to that kind of thing.
But since he's not threating you and yours specifically, you have the luxury of tuning out for your mental health while all that goes on. Until of course he comes for your ethnicity/religion/politics/profession. Although, I guess you won't know until that happens because you won't be reading the news.
Yeah, you know what I think I would have better mental health too if I could just tune out the daily missives from the abyss, but I need to stay on top of what words I'm not allowed to say at my job or else the government will target us for research defunding. Words like "equity" and anything that starts with the prefix "trans".
Perhaps fewer and fewer people believe let alone like to have your patter as their internal monologue.
Which amounts to an agreement to have your extremist / alarmist voice forever in their heads lest climate change leads to the H word. I think that I have that about right, if your post is to be believed.
I recommend Wikipedia frontpage, maybe Wikinews. It has to come from a nonprofit at this point.
The explicit goal of dezinformatsiya (coined by Stalin) is not to get people to believe the lies (an occasional bonus) —— the goal is to get people to GIVE UP on finding the truth.
Once people give up on finding the truth, dictators and despots can get away with anything because people literally do not even have the knowledge prerequisite to any opposing action; the people become a mere mass of compliant NPCs in the despot's regime.
OFC, if the news is genuinely crippling in a way that renders you incapable of any action, then by all means take care of that first.
But especially in these times of serious real threats, anxiety in response to those real threats is the exact expected healthy response!
More broadly, as a society in the US and EU, the threats have outpaced the speed of anxiety growth, a delay which allowed them to gain power. Anxiety overall is only now growing to the point where a backlash is forming that may restore small-d democratic norms and overtake a rapidly growing authoritarian regime.
Remaining ignorant is personally easier in the short term, but definitely helps an authoritarian regime gain and cement its power, so is likely to be regretted in the long term. Many under Hitler's regime lived out their lives in shame they had not done more to stop him when they could have.
I have met quite a large number of people who seem to think living in a state of constant outrage is somehow making a difference. I give the money I can to the charities and causes I care about, and I’m entirely unclear on how being perpetually hyper-fixated on the latest horrors would add to that. Either do something, or don’t, but obsessively reading the news doesn’t cause any change to occur.
The vast majority of news consumption is for feeling amusement, outrage, tribal-solidarity, etc. It almost never leads to a change in action by the consumer.
Non-entertainment news: articles that change future actions, e.g. trade publications related to one's career/job.
Need information to vote? Wait 4 weeks before the election and then go to one of the many websites that track candidates' quotes to determine as best one can what their positions are on the issues you care about. For example: https://www.ontheissues.org/
Entertainment is fine and dandy! But don't make the mistake of thinking it's productive or better/nobler than alternatives just because "journalism."
I try to avoid online news sources, because there's an infinite amount to doomscroll. I use leechblock [1] in firefox to introduce just enough friction to visiting a news site, without hard-blocking them. Because sometimes I still need to know what's going on.
I check the ten minute news summary on BBC Radio 4 as I'm driving to work. Its time-bounded, and pretty reliable imo - although I lean towards a Guardian perspective. Sometimes I hang around for the big interview afterwards, other times I go back to music on a usb stick. Or just drive.
[1] https://github.com/proginosko/LeechBlock
Also available for chrome and edge
And that was before the current age of yellow journalism. The news is 10x worse now than it was then; I strongly recommend that everyone unplugs from it for the sake of their own mental health.
That was a thing. One of my family members had to round up an entire town of German citizens and march them through the death camps as none of them believed it was a real thing. They got to see and smell it for themselves. Some were still in disbelief that their own soldiers committed such horrific acts.
In the US the closest thing to keep an eye on would be the FEMA camps. Most are in very remote locations. If Russian and Chinese start to vanish those are the first places I would look and there are many such camps. By that point the internet would likely be entirely censored and people would have to authenticate with a centralized service to use the internet at all. I would expect those implementing such services to be members here so one can only hope they chime in when the planning starts. I would expect this to eventually be a MitM agent that runs on phones and computers to monitor pre-encrypted content to report on suspicious words and phrases. It might be silently deployed to all cell phones much like the past CarrierIQ but as a helpful AI this time. The PC versions would probably get inserted quietly in OS updates under the guise of a helpful AI as well. Those working on it may not even realize it's intended purposes. I would be curious to see how they sneak it into Linux and BSD.
I missed that part of the Western Constitutions. It is likely missing because it is a false and self-serving axiom, as well as flirting with being the opposite of democracy. Mostly, it is totalitarian regimes that invoke education as being necessary for their citizens.
Is it only democracy and not a downward spiral when democracy moves in the direction that you prefer?
You might have to accept that democracy works, and that if nothing else democracy is the individual freedom to decide on what is true.
The second that you start restricting that freedom of information and individual decisions pertaining to it, impacting elections for example, you can no longer appeal to democracy.
Personally I think that more subjects are deceptive than either they or you likely know. But I'm not so debased as to call for restrictions on your information. You're free to believe in and seek out your deceptions, as a matter of democracy.
For that, I think The Economist is much better. It has more direct reporting, with seemingly less editorializing. Try their news in brief to keep up.
I think the main reason I've pulled back from the consuming mainstream media is directly tied with the change in reporting style rather than the news fundamentally being more depressing or anxiety-inducing.
For example, I was listening to Left Right and Center until a few weeks ago when Sarah Isgur departed. The show really should have been called Left Left and Center, because if anything Sarah Isgur was more center leaning while Steve Inskeep is definitely quite progressive. Now the show feels even more lopsided. It's as if journalists are so entrenched with their point of view that they can't see the wider landscape. I truly wonder if social media has clouded journalists' perception as well, which might be contributing to this phenomenon.
I really do want balanced coverage. I want to know what each side of the political debate actually thinks, from their own mouth. It turns out that a lot of the people I was indoctrinated to vilify, were in fact people who believed differently than I did, but certainly weren't so toxic as to be simply pilloried for their beliefs. That approach is tiresome and I've lost hope that such reporting will return. That's why I've given up.
If you want to do something, get involved in local politics and groups, stay off social media where Facebook like activism does nothing.
For example, did you know that in July 2025, 99.7% of new power capacity added in the US was from clean power (led by Texas)? The EU, US, and UK have committed to a $125 billion global fund to protect the Amazon? The US prison population is the lowest it's been since 1992? A new therapy has successfully cleared 100% of metastatic cancers in trial patients? 1 in 8 kids in Botswana were born with HIV in 2001, but that number has dropped to 1 in 100?
These headlines rarely make the mainstream, but they're the ones that bring me the most hope and joy. If you're looking for positive news, you will love Fix the News.
Then I generally go to the candidates individual websites or see what their main talking points are. You don’t always get a sense for everything, but you kind of figure out who they are in general.
From an actual example of a candidate’s official Facebook page in my state, if you see them post something like “how come the MAINSTREAM media isn’t covering the BLACK on WHITE crime?!” you generally don’t need to do much research on them after that.
The goal of education is to give people (ideally at a young age) valuable knowledge, critical thinking skills, and the ability to question and make independent judgments. There's nothing anti-democratic about that. Quite the opposite. And all evidence suggests this is far more common in democracies than it is in totalitarian regimes.
The goal of indoctrination is to instill a fixed set of beliefs or loyalties and to discourage doubt or alternative perspectives. Totalitarian regimes do this to create obedience and ideological conformity. And although many competing parties in democratic countries would like to do the same for their cause, that doesn't make it the definition of education.
You've really let yourself off the hook there; that's way too easy to say. What exactly do you suggest, that would make an actually useful contribution to improving the situation?
I think so much of it is us feeling emotionally overwhelmed and running away. Anxiety can be really helpful if we engage with it, have the courage to address the fear. If we just always run, especially with social conflicts, the conflicts often don't go away, we just pretend they don't exist until they boil over.
There are plenty of alternatives now which are not under control of the legacy publishers. Most of these are just as biased as legacy publications so following 'alternative news sources' is not a panacea for getting closer to the truth. You need to follow a number of outlets with different - and often opposing - biases to get a wider picture. RSS feed readers do wonders here but it still can take quite a bit of time and effort to separate 'news' from 'narrative' no matter the source.
It’s not that I don’t ever look at the “full” news anymore, but that I severely limit how much time I spend doing that. It’s been great for my mental health.
This sort of privilege must be nice. Until it runs out.
> otherwise I have effectively zero say in how these things turn out
Textbook complacency. There are a ton of things you can do to try and make a positive impact. Don't use our eyeballs here to whitewash the fact that you're comfortable in your life and don't want to be bothered with the fact that the world is literally on fire.
Nancy: Bad news, bad news, bad news. Jesus, Jeremy, one bus crash. What about all the buses that made it safely to their destinations, huh?
Jeremy: Yeah! Yeah, this is such bullshit.
Mark: Yes, I suppose the news should just be a dispassionate list of all the events that have occurred the world over during the day. That would be good. Except of course, it would take forever!
The same is not true of the left. What's labeled "progressive" really isn't; the left has moved right too. 15 years ago, the US was on the verge of passing universal healthcare. That's not even on the radar today.
Media orcs have not all kept up with these changes. Something that was "left right and center in 2015, would look as though it was mostly leftist today, because the ground has moved.
I appreciate The Economist, but I find that they do editorialize, they're just up front about it. They use the word "should" regularly. They have a pretty clear and consistent viewpoint advocating for classical liberalism, but they're honest and unashamed about having a stance.
I don't fully agree; there other paths, but they involve becoming _more_ politically active; calling & writing your congressman, joining political movements, volunteering, canvasing, etc. I think my argument is that if you're just sitting at home and getting outraged -- but not willing to spend the real time and effort to do the actual work of supporting a political cause, then your outage has no value in your life.
In other words, it's much more about tying your stress and outage to real, practical action. Most of us are just scrolling and fretting, but not doing anything. We either need to do real, practical things, or stop getting strung out for no reason.
>But even if that wasn't the case how can you research candidate positions without knowing the political context you want them to represent you within?
This is true, but you can just do a couple of days of research when it's time to vote. Given how representative democracy works, a candidate's stated view is sort of only going to directionally affect things, and I don't need expert-level knowledge to pick between two candidates. My decision for who to vote for just never requires much real precision.
I don't want to make this too political, but suppose that Gavin Newsom and J.D. Vance were the next candidates for president. Would I really need to pay close attention to politics for the next few years to figure out which one of them I considered to be the 'least bad' option? To my point above, that decision just does not have a lot of precision with regard to my views, and does not require any real expertise on my end. I could 100% check out between now and then, review the political platforms for each candidate (and maybe a few opinion pieces) over an afternoon, and be informed _enough_ to make a decision.
Again, voting is sort of the "bare minimum" when it comes to political participation. So I'm definitely not arguing that people should not become more involved; only that we should carefully consider whether our involvement is tied to any real positive outcomes. (and that's both personally, but also politically. A great deal of personal stress could potentially be a great tradeoff for a really important political outcome.)
The Economist definitely has bias. All reality has a bias. You may not like some topics, that's fair. But to call a report "good journalism", it should exclude fabrications and baseless accusations. The latter are tools of propaganda.
Focus on what you can control. Consider that the goal of the outrage inducing media is to make you feel powerless, or direct attention at impossible battles.
Historical situations like our own might be a good place to start to look for solutions.
To be fair, I know the least about Newsom, having never lived anywhere near California and well California doesn't exactly have any better a reputation than Florida or Texas do in my book. So I'll have to tune in late 2027 if he gets the nod. Assuming Democrats survive 2026 because frankly the party is at death's door and I don't know how Newsom is new growth. We already rejected one Californian.
I stopped supporting them during the Brexit negotiations because I was sick of hearing those entitled conservatives complain that they couldn't get from us (EU) what they knew they could never have because it was just the rules.
But I recently came back to it after seeing a link to it somewhere but it seems such a hollow shell of what it was now.
See Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda:_The_Formation_of_M...
Excerpts:
The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action.
"Differences in political regimes matter little; differences in social levels are more important; and most important is national self-awareness. Propaganda is a good deal less the political weapon of a regime (it is that also) than the effect of a technological society that embraces the entire man and tends to be a completely integrated society. Propaganda stops man from feeling that things in society are oppressive and persuades him to submit with good grace."
Propaganda employs encirclement on the individual by trying to surround man by all possible routes, in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or his needs through his conscious and his unconscious, and by assailing him in both his private and his public life.
Propaganda must be total in that utilizes all forms of media to draw the individual into the net of propaganda. Propaganda is designed to be continuous within the individual's life by filling the citizen's entire day. It is based on slow constant impregnation that functions over a long period of time exceeding the individual's capacities for attention or adaptation and thus his capabilities of resistance.
Propaganda should no longer be viewed in terms of an orthodoxy but rather modern propaganda should be seen as an orthopraxy because it aims for participation not adherence. Participation can be active or passive: active if propaganda has been able to mobilize the individual for action; passive if the individual does not act directly but psychologically supports that action.
Propaganda is concerned with timeliness since an individual is only moved to action if he is pushed towards a timely one by propaganda. Once it becomes history it inevitably becomes neutral and indifferent to the individual who is sensitive primarily to current news. "Operational words" are used to penetrate an individual's indifference. However they lose their value as immediacy passes as old facts are replaced by new ones. The "current events man" is carried along the current of news and caught in the events of today, losing interest in the events of yesterday. The indifferent are apolitical and without opinion, therefore they are outside of propaganda's grasp. Incidentally, there are also the undecided, people whose opinions are vague, who form the majority of citizens within the collective. These citizens are the most susceptible to control of public opinion that is dictated by propaganda. Lastly, this part discusses propaganda and truth or the ability of propaganda to relay something as true based not on the accuracy of facts but of reality. Propaganda veils the truth with falsehoods even though lying is generally to be avoided.
Political vs. Sociological Propaganda:
Political Propaganda involves techniques of influence employed by a government, a party, an administration, or a pressure group with the intention of changing the behavior of the public. The themes and objectives of this type of propaganda are of a political nature. The goals are determined by the government, party, administration, or pressure group. The methods of political propaganda are calculated in a precise manner and its main criterion is to disseminate an ideology for the very purpose of making various political acts acceptable to the people. There are two forms of political propaganda, tactical and strategic. Tactical political propaganda seeks to obtain immediate results within a given framework. Strategic political propaganda is not concerned with speed but rather it establishes the general line, the array of arguments, and the staging of campaigns.
Sociological propaganda is a phenomenon where a society seeks to integrate the maximum number of individuals into itself by unifying its members' behavior according to a pattern, spreading its style of life abroad, and thus imposing itself on other groups. Essentially sociological propaganda aims to increase conformity with the environment that is of a collective nature by developing compliance with or defense of the established order through long term penetration and progressive adaptation by using all social currents. The propaganda element is the way of life with which the individual is permeated and then the individual begins to express it in film, writing, or art without realizing it. This involuntary behavior creates an expansion of society through advertising, the movies, education, and magazines. "The entire group, consciously or not, expresses itself in this fashion; and to indicate, secondly that its influence aims much more at an entire style of life." This type of propaganda is not deliberate but springs up spontaneously or unwittingly within a culture or nation. This propaganda reinforces the individual's way of life and represents this way of life as best. Sociological propaganda creates an indisputable criterion for the individual to make judgments of good and evil according to the order of the individual's way of life. Sociological propaganda does not result in action, however, it can prepare the ground for direct propaganda. From then on, the individual in the clutches of such sociological propaganda believes that those who live this way are on the side of the angels, and those who don't are bad.
"For propaganda to be effective the propagandee must have a certain store of ideas and a number of conditioned reflexes that can only be acquired through peace of mind springing from relative security. The establishment of a mode of common life—all this leads to the creation of a type of normal man conveniently leads all men toward that norm via a multitude of paths. Propaganda's intent is to integrate people into the normal pattern prevailing in society bring about conformance to way of life. To sum up: The creation of normalcy in our society can take one of two shapes. It can be the result of scientific, psycho-sociological analysis based on statistics—that is the American type of normalcy. It can be ideological and doctrinaire—that is the Communist type. But the results are identical: such normalcy necessarily gives rise to propaganda that can reduce the individual to the pattern most useful to society.
Information is indistinguishable from propaganda in that information is an essential element of propaganda because for propaganda to succeed it must have reference to political or economic reality. Propaganda grafts itself onto an already existing reality through "informed opinion".
Citizens are aware that political decisions affect everybody and governments cannot govern without the support, presence, pressure, or knowledge of the people. Yet the people are incapable of making long term policy so opinion must be created to follow the government because the government cannot be led by opinion. All of this describes the "Mass-Government" relationship characterized by people demanding what has already been decided, in order to appear as though the government is actually caring about what the people need.
An ideology provides society certain beliefs and no social group can exist without the foundation of these beliefs. Propaganda is the means by which an ideology can expand without force. An ideology is either fortified within a group or expanded beyond the borders of a group through propaganda. However, propaganda is less and less concerned with spreading the ideology nowadays as it is with becoming autonomous. The ideology is no longer the decisive factor of propaganda that must be obeyed by the propagandist. The propagandist cannot be constrained by the ideology of his State but must operate in service of the state and be able to manipulate the ideology as if it were an object. The ideology merely provides the content for the propagandist to build off since he is limited to what already is present within the group, nation, or society. The fundamental ideologies are nationalism, socialism, communism, and democracy.
Propaganda and Democracy:
Since democracy depends on public opinion, it is clear that propaganda must be involved. The relationship between democracy and propaganda evidently presents a conflict between the principles of democracy and the processes of propaganda. The individual is viewed as the cornerstone of a democracy which is a form of government that is made "for the people and by the people". However, as discussed in early chapters Ellul described the masses are incapable of making long-term foreign policy and the government needs to make these decisions in a timely manner. This is where propaganda comes into play and projects an artificial reality to the masses to satisfy their need to participate in government while the decisions are really made behind the scenes. This was also describe earlier as the "mass-government" relationship. Democratic regimes develop propaganda in line with its myths and prejudices. Propaganda stresses the superiority of a democratic society while intensifying the prejudices between democratic and oppressive.
If you have a suggestion about something practical, that can actually help, please speak up. Offering more platitudes is just way too easy; it feels good, maybe, but it's really just an admission that we don't have a good outlet for our outrage. Which is why so many of us spend our days venting online, because apparently (judging from the lack of concrete ideas offered) it's about as effective as anything else we could do.
At the very least, vote for politicians actually taking the myriad of issues seriously. Millions of Americans couldn't be bothered to do even that bare minimum in 2024, despite knowing what shitshow the first Trump term was. And no, voter suppression isn't an excuse, the Democrats lost more votes from 2020-2024 than Trump gained.
And it's not just the federal elections where votes and engagement can and do make a difference. The book bans? Passed by school boards (crazy enough these are a thing in the first place, most other countries run that through regular civilian administration). That nutjob sheriff Arpaio? Voted and confirmed by locals. You get the point - the far-right has done local legwork and voting for decades.
And finally: stay informed about what is going on, so when Uncle John goes off on his usual tirades at family gatherings after a few beers, you can recognize what the lies are and call the lies out.
it helps
Two years ago people were saying Republicans were on their way out because of the circling around Trump.
The fact that Democrats are not consolidated is a feature not a bug.
Part of the anxiety is the bias of the media and their attempts to get attention by sensationalizing the news, and often by lying.
Having the lies in text without photos does not fix the issue.
Edit: if you find yourself disagree, then it's because of your political position. I did not see it was NPR when posting this. replace NPR with Fox News and then read my comment again, see how you feel.
Unless he is running without significant primary competition, he wouldn’t get the nod, even effectively, until sometime in 2028, probably sometime in spring, so you can’t really start doing something in late 2027 based on whether thwt happens.
I ask again, do you have any practical advice that people can follow today?
The FT post-dates the original pink 'un sporting newspaper, but was also, and still is, commonly referred to as "the pink 'un".
Maybe the real source of anxiety is people have justified anger but no where to direct the anger to affect change?
Maybe it is better to keep reading the news and organize people to make it so we do not have any bad news to report.
And notably, they also couldn't defend the constitution when it came time.
So it's a choice between 'delusional-we're-doing-good-everything-is-fine' and 'delusional-lets-not-look-up-and-blame-everyone-else'. The first group continuing to apply pressure in this non-working direction just made the second group inevitable.
Pretending people aren't people, and don't have their own reasons why they voted the way they did is exactly what led to the current situation. It's the pendulum swinging. Now we'll get 'people can only be their worst (except me), punish them, regardless of the evidence'.
Or as the old quote goes - "Democracy is the idea that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it - good and hard."
The only way I can avoid this is to refuse to update my priors at all. But that means that I cannot learn.
I've listened to NPR for decades and the only thing I've noticed as far as "progressivism" is that the weekends include shows that speak to non-white audiences (Black and Latino).
I'm curious as to what you think was "too progressive".
Your insistence that someone have a concrete, unassailable answer for you plays right into nihilism. Why don't you suggest something yourself? Or is "off with their heads" in fact your suggestion?
1. 99.7% of power capacity coming from "clean power" can be interpreted by people on the right as the grid getting more expensive and less reliable in order to solve a climate problem they don't think is real.
2. Countries committing to a global fund to protect the Amazon can be interpreted as using money critically needed at home to bribe South Americans into doing what they should already be doing themselves. If the people who actually live next to it don't care enough to protect it themselves then why should random people in Iowa or Ireland be forced to?
3. The US prison population being low is only a positive if crime is low. If people don't feel safe, then it can be interpreted as a result of not locking enough people up, and positive news would be hearing that the prison population is going up. This claim may not feel positive if you just saw the video of the murder of the Ukrainian lady on US public transport by a known-dangerous dude who just randomly stabbed her from behind for no reason.
A news feed that is only positive news for a conservative would obviously look very different to such a feed designed for liberals.
People stated reason for not liking news is the stress, attributing this to the negativity of the news. I think a larger issue is the frequency and transience of the updates, leading to oscillations in peoples understand of situations (similar to the car dealership example in the "Thinking in Systems" book).
Modern news networks are always pushing shallow views of new events (i.e. "BREAKING"). Unless someone explicitly follows up on a story, they were only exposed to the crisis and not the resolution of it. I'd love a network that was "yesterdays news" which waited to publish any news until a broader picture of the situation was understood.
A newsletter is problematic if it doesn't cater equally to people who believe that climate change is a hoax? Seriously?
The reason they were pro-EU is that there were no realistic arguments where Brexit would benefit The UK’s businesses, finance sector or economy as a whole.
I think in this age of information wars where my country's administration is unironically posting memes about their policy: it's almost as important to be informed of the "pulse" people have towards news as it is to understand the news itself. In a increasingly post-truth society, being informed of reality isn't enough.
Something like Ground News, but even there I'm not sure I trust their algorithmic weighing.
How does your political leanings affect how you react to clickbait? NPR makes clickbait, Fox makes clickbait. Images make it easier but text can still be effective.
I don't see the spin here. Yes, news across the spectrum is lying more and more. Or at least severly downplaying some heinous events. That shouldn't be a partisan stance.
A lot of people don't like that option. They find it distasteful, they don't have the time, or they think it will not change much at all. But that's the truth -- Democrats taking control of Congress in 2027 is the fastest way to improve the current situation.
Well one of them had billions to advertise and make dark patterns to keep people on. And people still don't realize those tricks in at play.
This is sadly why proper regulation is needed. We didn't cut down o Yellow Journalism in press last century by simply informing the populace better. In many ways, the honest people need enough power to punish the dishonest people. Shame that 2025 is not the year of honesty.
I think being anxious in these times is important. But the anxiety has middling returns. I want to do more, but I know spending hours worrying over stuff I can't control is futile.
Firstly, the example above with healthcare.
Secondly, deregulating things like zoning are rather popular with the modern left, and generally free-market approaches to housing. Dems are less friendly to unions than they were, lip service aside.
I don't think there's much that wouldn't be recognizable to a Clinton dem. The identity politics around trans rights etc are the same civil rights the left has been supporting for a century. Abortion is the same debate we've been having since the 60s.
The left has either not changed stance, or moved right, on all issues.
If being a member of the EU was objectively a benefit to most UK businesses then that is what I would hope to read in an FT editorial, not some Kumbaya "it's all good, we have no opinion".
So just hear carefully curated words and not see the actions they did? Yeah, that's pretty much how my country got into this situation.
There's plenty of fluff, but lets not pretend that there isn't actual reporting out there for stuff that does or will affect your daily life. 1000x so with local policy where it is so excruciatingly difficult to find any real information on. Just
1) be honest about when you want either the dryest, direct report, or you want a show to go with it. I'm definitely in the middle myself, slightly skewed towards dry.
2) Understand the balance of relevance, impact, importance, and fun to your life. We can be honest and admit there some important news out there that simply isn't a fight you want to participate nor follow closely.
Likewise, we're on a tech forum right now and I'm sure while many of us would read about a distributed GPU runtime that we also all know it's not necessarily the most important thing in life right now (unless that is indeed your career right now).
Awareness can do a lot to drive behavior by itself. We just first need to be honest about it.
And to boot, city townhalls here are every other Tuesday, usually around 4-6. Better than others I've seen at 2pm, but still not quite something a full time worker can drop in on.
Me by myself can't do much, and that's frustrating. But if nothing else, social media does at least let me boost people who do have a voice and can shout through all the spin (even if yes, they need a bit of spin themselves). I've joined a few protests in my area (things that the news will never inform and cover themselves), I try to at least like important news stories on social media to help those kinds of modern reporters rise up. I've been trying to at least keep a pulse on any union situations around here (none, sadly. But it's a muscle to flex with that will pay off later).
It doesn't feel signifigant on the day to day, but I do see the wider effects happening overtime. If you feel you don't need to do any work to progress that, I understand. But I also just want to lightly ask to consider the bystander effect. If everyone thinks "someone else will do something", no one will.
Or rather, it varies from community to community. This one is a lot of the former. Ones I see on Reddit are probably a bit too much of the latter everytime I see stuff like "it's too late to vote in 2026" or "protests aren't doing anything, we need more". Saying that just ignores all the lawyers and judges who are in fact slapping such attempts away in real time.
Fighting that base instinct of "I need to call this guy out for how BS this is" was definitely a much harder issue for me than I care to admit last decade.
I'm not saying you're doing this, but often when people say something is "virtue signalling" it's actually "critical thinking but with either base values or a conclusion I do not agree with"
It's easy even for children and many animals to understand the Golden Rule: treat others like you'd want to be treated. It generally takes an adult to fail to understand it.
A couple of days ago, I heard a host and a reporter literally mock and make fun of RFK Jr. when they should have been trying to educate him and his supporters. Trust in institutions (including the news) has completely eroded, and instead of trying to build it back, they double down on what hasn't worked.
Indeed, if we are surrounded by only supposed "information" that is false, it is technically the same as having zero new information!
So it is the situation preventing us from learning. The key difference is the disinformation tempts us to falsely learn, when the right move is to hold onto our priors until we can find verifiable new information.
I feel like the experiment of moderation decisions via mob rule is largely a failure, and I much prefer the style of old webforums where moderation was left only to the people who ran the site/server and the people hand-picked by them. Tildes does this, as does Discord.
Personally, my news diet is Kagi with a well-curated blocklist and Tildes with a few targeted topic tag filters.