These days the source matters to me much more than before… Reading the news, I see that many times, the news piece is just manipulative or otherwise written by someone who doesn’t understand the topic he/she writes about.

And thus, following the news might not be a good idea unless you are ready to change your mind when you realize you were mislead by the news you read/saw/heard.

And I agree with you 100%: it’s time to focus on action, make the news rather than follow them.

But if there is just one idea I want to keep and promote from my original article, it is that we need to know where the world is going and not close our eyes. Information is often painful, but if we ignore it, the end result can be even more painful than the short term pain that leads us to action and to change the future.

I pay attention to the news often, mainly in the form of headline news on my Yahoo! homepage. While I find that it is vital to stay informed, at some point a level of saturation is reached.

For example, I don’t need to read another article in the recession, the approaching depression, unemployment, global warming, or peak oil. I have hit my saturation level on these items. Now, far from keeping me informed, they are keeping me in a state of anxiety.

Therefore, I also think there is benefit to, at some point, not “following the news”. When the information goes from being helpful to being nothing more the frantic beatings of a fear-mongers’ drum, it’s time to focus on action rather than hype. Hard to do when every headline scares me into a feeling of helplessness and inaction.

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For several years I didn’t watch the news or get much of it from any other source. But now I realised it wasn’t going to help anyone to ignore what’s going on in the world. So I’ve started paying more attention to world events and the state of the world in general, now I am a lot more interested in helping people and have started making efforts to do so. That’s one example of news having a positive impact.

Lynoure, I love your statement “I think news _are_ a Matrix too”. You definitely need to engage in critical thinking when watching the news. I saw a story in a new zealand paper saying that “1/3 of all children here live in poverty” – my first thought was “I can’t believe I didn’t know about this, can this really be true?”. As it turns out they were talking about relative poverty rather than absolute poverty, but they didn’t actually mention this anywhere in the article.

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I think news _are_ a Matrix too. They do not give a balanced reliable image of the world we live in. Quoting Make to Stick: Astma kills 80 times more people yearly in USA than tornadoes. But you’d never get that impression from the news unless you go digging for details yourself. Living in a rural community you’d only head about the lion killing people if it was at a reasonable killing distance, but the modern news bring us all the horrible stories so that we can all worry about getting beheaded in a bus…

I’m very active on Digg and Reddit so I do see some of the most important news, with a bit of humour and entertainment in between.

You do make some great points though :)

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The trick is to be selective with your news sources. I clearly remember a couple of weeks ago, when I was surfing the tv channels and ended up with CNN. The program on the air was “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer. I ended up watching it for 15 minutes, and it gave me a renewed insight in the fact that news channels are centered about pleasing the viewer.

My first real experience with CNN was when the first Gulf War developed. I remember that clearly, up to date news, a developing story, in a slick display with visual and audio effects (“suspence music”). It really sucks you into it, but that was a real story.

Now back to The Situation Room, 10+ years later. The same kind of setting, even more technologically advanced, with that suspence music in the background. I instantly thought something major had happened, but I got my share of news over the different pronunciations of Pakistan, Taliban and Nevada by Obama and McCain. And a guy reading emails on television on the question what the GOP should do to get the young voters (“Support the Obama campaign, LMAO” made it to the air).

It was worthless crap, presented as “follow this on the edge of your seat, because this is world changing news”. Definitely giving you the feeling of being on the edge of unfolding events…even when there are none!

Yeah definitely choose your sources, and diversify them to get different perspectives and build your own view.

Trivia: Wolf Blitzer didn’t know what LMAO meant. Cafferty chuckled and said he’d tell him after the show because it was too naughty for television!?

I would also be worried if my only source for news was other people because then I would be relying completely on their interpretation of the news. Don’t you think so?