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More and more people are tuning the news out: 'Now I don't have that anxiety

(www.theguardian.com)
126 points giuliomagnifico | 4 comments | 07 Sep 25 12:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | source
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cjcenizal ◴[07 Sep 25 15:02 UTC] No.45158794[source]▶
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Fix the News yet (https://fixthenews.com/). If you want a weekly boost of amazing news from around the world, sign up for this newsletter!

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.

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1. conscion ◴[07 Sep 25 18:56 UTC] No.45161111[source]▶
It think these "positive news" approaches are always falling prey to stated vs. revealed preference. People's revealed preference is that they want news about _actual_ events, which is why these positive news approaches always stay niche.

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.

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2. frm88 ◴[08 Sep 25 07:12 UTC] No.45165418[source]▶
This! I also wish the news would be charged to follow up on their lead stories. It's interesting to read that the US wants to sell TikTok but as soon as it leaves the headlines you have to actively search for any updates - and you're lucky if there are any.

This kind of reporting (breaking, tickers) generates more stress than any understanding and never enables you to form a more complete picture.

3. ccppurcell ◴[08 Sep 25 08:03 UTC] No.45165727[source]▶
Subscribe to a periodical. I got a bit too busy recently but for two years I subscribed to Private Eye (if you're not from the UK you might need to find an alternative) it's fortnightly and they don't put much on their website. They follow up on stories sometimes going back to the 80s or more.
4. rroblak ◴[08 Sep 25 14:23 UTC] No.45168681[source]▶
You should read Postman's Technopoly. He critiques "context-free" news as leading to a confused viewership and argues that it's an unexpected consequence of modern news media: trying to give the viewer a fully-coherent understanding of current news simply wouldn't play as well as shallow, quick stories.

This creates a skewed information-action ratio, where people are inundated with information about problems they have no power to influence. Consequently, news is reduced to a form of trivia, and the act of being "informed" becomes a passive— and ultimately meaningless— ritual.