I know two couples like this. One is a woman who works for me, and her husband. Great worker. But as I spend a lot of time with her at work, I have come to realise - and she has plainly stated - that they pay zero attention to news because it’s “boring” and “always depressing.”
The other couple are neighbors of mine; he is retired and does handyman work and yard maintenance so mows my lawn and does odd jobs. Again, they do not ever pay attention to news. The TV is on all the time but to cooking shows, movies and Animal Planet. They are very nice, kind people - we have keys to each others’ houses to let dogs out in case of long days or whatever.
Both couples have computers, smartphones and are literate. They are not really stupid people; they get along in life pretty well - homeowners, close to family, generally functional etc.
None of these four votes, or pays attention to the process. I guarantee you if I were to mention “Islamic State” or “Ferguson” or “Climate Change” or anything to do with local/regional news, they would be utterly blank and clueless and have absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I know because I’ve tried, and don’t bother any more. This makes conversing with them quite limited: family, neighbor gossip, what we had for dinner last night, cute things the dog/cat/grandchildren did, reality shows, medical conditions, weather - this can be all quite interesting (except for the reality show part) to me, but damn it’s limiting and frankly boring when it comes to spending any extended time with them.
I have a hard time understanding how people can live in the world and not be remotely interested in it. It seems so apathetic and lazy to me. How common do you think this is?
I remember my aunt asking if we were at war. We were like five months into the Iraq War at the time and it seemed like everyone I knew was fired up about it. Except for my dear aunt.
My interest in the news comes and goes. I scan through the headlines on reddit and check Yahoo News! every hour just in case there’s an active shooter I need to worry about it. And I keep NPR playing all day long at work. But lately I haven’t really been paying attention to much. And I definitely haven’t been paying attention to local news–which really is boring. I don’t care to know that the resident of the 2500 block of Random Street was found dead early this morning of a self-inflicted gunshot.
(shrug) People got by for millenia not knowing what happened two villages away. And I never read newspapers or watch TV news, except the weather. National news is almost entirely fluff these days, and local news is fluff plus stuff about Chicago (don’t live in town and could hardly care less about it) and sports (could not care less about it).
Of course, I’m an NPR junkie and look up stuff online.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to give the impression that I’m a uber-knowlegeable political or news junkie and somehow superior. I’m not; not at all.
But I do check in with news websites daily and listen to NPR at work…my understanding about many news stories is fuzzy. But I at least have a broad understanding of what is going on in the world and I do pay extra attention to election-related news because I sincerely believe that voting is an important civic duty. (Yeak OK, cue corny music.)
It’s more the…complete lack of curiosity that I don’t understand.
I also don’t agree that news is “mostly fluff.” Sure, I guess if you focus only on celebrity and sports nonsense, it is. But reading more broadly, there’s everything from what’s going on in the world to politics to medical news to opinion pieces to environmental to science to…well, all sorts of interesting stuff.
But to find Rachel Ray or Steve Harvey or Dancing with the Stars or whatever interesting enough to spend hours watching per week, but not think watching (or reading, or listening to) 30 minutes of news is worthwhile seems very odd to me.
What direct impact does the news really have on one’s day-to-day struggles?
I read the dope and reddit every day, I listen to All Things Considered and Marketplace, I watch The Daily Show, etc. I know what’s going on in the world. My wife doesn’t do any of these things. She relies on me, the morning radio guys, and office chatter.
War in Ukraine, Japanese PM Shinzo Abe dissolving parliament, yet another remote terrorist/rebel attack in Africa, G20 meetings? None of that is going to affect the fact that we both have to wake up and go to work each day. Domestic stuff? Ferguson riots, asshole governors jailing not-ebola patients, political scuffs over immigration? Not going to change our lives.
I know about stuff because my brain has an unhealthy obsession with knowing things. It doesn’t actually help me get ahead in life.
Yea, I don’t think its that uncommon not to follow the news. And I don’t think its necessarily lazy either. As garygnu says, there isn’t really much one can do to effect events, and since a lot of news tends to be depressing, its often not particularly fun to follow either.
As to it being intellectual laziness, well, you can’t follow everything. Most of the people I know who are apathetic about the news spend are technical people who spend a lot of time learning about STEM topics, both those related to their career and out of general interest. I do follow the news, but I can’t really say its a better use of my time than what other people are doing.
I don’t follow the news, or check the news. My partner does, and he lets me know of anything interesting. I also get news from the Dope, if something major happens. It’s like a filtering service.
Last night, the news was on, but my partner was out of the room and not listening. The newscaster said: “The following footage is graphically violent and may be disturbing to some viewers.” I immediately switched it off. I don’t need to see that shit. Just going to ruin my night.
I consume news (and related information) voraciously. Even if it doesn’t affect me much personally (and it often does, without looking very hard), it always affects someone, and I ought to care about them, since I would appreciate the same if the roles were reversed. Also, I’d hazard a guess that the vast majority of the people participating in (or even reading) the discussions on this thread and on this entire board have more ability to make change than most people in the world do.
When people organize, there are no limits on what can be achieved.
There’s a (very slowly ongoing) comic book series called Berlin, written and drawn by Jason Lutes. I recommend it to everybody. It takes place in Berlin, in between the World Wars. There’s one sub-plot in which jazz music has come to Berlin, and in one scene, a journalist is trying to work at his desk at home. He’s deeply stressed out by the increasingly ugly political changes taking place in Germany. His girlfriend puts on a jazz record and starts to dance about, oblivious to his turmoil. He gets up, snatches the record away from the player, and goes on a tirade about how the reason things are in such trouble is because “people are just dancing to this shit while the world crashes down around them!”
Is the message clear? In the last minute or so, while typing the final sentence of the previous paragraph, I thought of other examples from Don Henley, Morrissey, Alan Moore/David Lloyd, and George Orwell, but I think you get the point.
I read a weekly news magazine every week. And skip the daily written BS and 100% of the 24-hour TV blather.
As a result I have all the big stories with some time and space for perspective, and none of the breathless space-filling repetition and very little almost-100%-accuracy-free scoop-of-the-moment stories.
Because I travel for work, for many years I’d grab the local paper from the hotel each morning in whatever city I happened to have stayed overnight. It wasn’t surprising that the national and world news was about the same whether reported in Chicago, Denver, Boston or wherever else, whether large city or small.
What was horrifying, and finally turned me off this newspaper-reading habit, was to notice that the *local *news was identical in each city too. The city council factions are battling, a police force is in trouble over some cop’s actions late one night, some developers are trying to bulldoze a beloved park to make a ticky-tack shopping center. Over and over and over. The names were different but the stories were all the same. Yecchh.
As entertainment it’s absolutely stupid. Formatted as actionable information for people who’ll take action on it, it’s great.
Most news is noise. I figure if something important happens I’ll hear about it. After I hear about something, I do take the opportunity to look up articles on any major events, but I never really see much point in checking the news every morning. Chances are either nothing has happened, or the “new developments” on some hot issue are, in fact, barely relevant and there just so they have an excuse to keep talking about it.
I found that when I actually tried to follow the news the vast majority was fluff, manufactured outrage, or due to the “man eat dog” principle, presented a very warped view of the world.
Yes, sometimes I do miss important things (I hadn’t heard that Abe had actually dissolved the Japanese Parliament until this thread), but generally it works pretty well.
Well, not being interested in the news isn’t really the same thing as not being interested in the world.
[QUOTE=Henry David Thoreau]
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure—news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions—they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers—and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers
[/quote]
Nothing passes the time better than stone-skipping over the latest news, touching on this development, that revelation, some discovery. I want to know what’s going on in the world and I wanna talk about it. I don’t think that degree of disengagement is common and would find it frustrating to work with people who didn’t care.
I know a few people like that but they live pretty far off the beaten path. One friend my age almost ended up in the wrong department of the hospital because they asked him the standard “who’s President” type questions after a car wreck and he didn’t get very many right.
I don’t read newspaper, I don’t watch any national news and very, very rarely watch the local stuff. I do, however, have Yahoo set as my homepage at work so each time I pull up FireFox I get a bunch of random blurbs that keep me at least a little bit tuned into what’s going on, even if it just means catching a few headlines as I’m going to another website (read:Typing Google into the address bar).
I remember hearing something many many years ago* that some (high) percentage of Americans get their news from the news segment from Saturday Night Live. I’d be willing to bet a good chunk of the people do. Even if it’s not SNL, it’s probably still the late night monologues.
*A long time ago, I think it was during the Dennis Miller Administration. Also, FTR, I don’t remember where I picked it up, for all I know it was one of the SNL anchors that said it.
I avoid American political news like the plague. I don’t ever watch TV news anyway, but beyond the headlines that I can’t help but see when I check Google News or the Washington Post for something else, I eschew reading about it. It fills me with anger and despair and makes me jaded and there’s not a damn thing I can really do about it, so why get my blood pressure up?
I don’t know what it is about political news that agitates me so much more than factually depressing shit like ISIS, Russia descending into craziness, mass shootings, etc. but I try to keep informed of those sorts of current events. However, the less I know about whatever messed-up, ineffective pile of partisan bickering BS that Congress is vomiting out this week, the happier I am.
My sister doesn’t follow the news at all. She has two children, doesn’t vote, only wants to know if there is an impending natural disaster.
I stay away from the TV news mostly. Occasionally, I watch BBC World News or PBS News Hour. Otherwise, I look up stories online mostly BBC, Aljazeera, Washington Post, NY Times. I admit to the occasional Huffington link! I find the comments entertaining.
I pay attention to the news only cyclically; I have an anxiety disorder, and when I’m under a lot of pressure overall, it can ramp up pretty badly. I start avoiding newspapers, headline news, etc., as a stopgap stress-moderating measure. One year, it happened around election time, and afterwards I made it a point to find out who’d been elected specifically to avoid your friend’s problem. If I had a panic attack around people who didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t want one of them to think I’d had some sort of head trauma because I had no idea who was going to be POTUS come January.
(These sorts of things become much funnier in retrospect, I assure you.)
