Stop Watching the News
First off, I am not saying “don’t be informed” or “only listen to me.” That is completely ridiculous.
It’s a bad habit that I have to switch on the TV and watch the news, or to absent-mindedly go onto a news website. I’ve been trying to actively stop, but it’s like an addiction that I have, from years and years of watching and reading multiple times a day. As you’ll see later, I am not kidding about this being an addiction. I’ll tell you why I believe this is a problem, since (I’m told) admitting you have a problem is the first step.
To give you some context, I should go back to when I started to have my doubts about news programming. I remember back in 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared. Now, this is no doubt a tragedy, and barring any miracle, 239 people very likely died in this event. I don’t bring this up lightly, but what I want to bring your attention to is the news coverage, specifically CNN’s news coverage. What I remember the most was that it was incredibly excessive.
I remember one of the anchors asking an (aviation?) expert they brought in whether a black hole (clearly not her area of expertise) could have swallowed up the plane. And the expert, knowing nothing about black holes, came up with an answer that was clearly not knowledgable of black holes. Obviously. One of the anchors also brought up the possibility of using psychics to track the plane. While I don’t have any proof that psychics aren’t real, I think it is incredibly irresponsible to give false hope like that. They also kept one of their reporters in a flight simulator, and every couple of hours they would check on him cooped up in this small room with a pilot trainer, and ask him a pointless question. And then after they got tired of that, I think they sent the same reporter into a bathysphere under a lake, and for the rest of the week he was under a lake. There’s also a few other silly things I think I remember, but this was like 6 years ago, and this isn’t a humor piece, or a “make light of tragedy” piece, I’m trying to make a point. Why in the world would CNN do this?
Well, I’m a materialist and a communist. I can figure this out. What motivation would CNN have to spend so much time sensationalizing and covering this one story, to the point of self-parody? Profit. Because they get money from advertising and high viewership. At the time this was happening, I was a “progressive” liberal, a Bernie Sanders type “socialist”. (Yes, I liked Bernie before he was mainstream.) I didn’t know enough to understand at the time, but this sowed some distrust in the media in me.
Now it’s a leap from “the news companies are making profit from your viewership” to “stop watching the news”. I’ll acknowledge that, but I will say that it is important to understand that news companies are businesses, with material interests and motivations. This is true of FOX, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, any news media company. They are all owned by capitalists, and they are curated to support capitalism. The most obvious of these (American) companies is probably FOX, and most “liberals” (in the American sense of the word) will volunteer this when asked. It’s obviously conservative propaganda, and depending on when you are watching, actively manipulates and makes false claims in order to, presumably, convince people to vote for Republicans.
One key insight of being a leftist and rejecting liberalism is understanding that both American political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans are liberal parties that are owned by capitalists and serve and support capitalism.
So why would you expect that all of these other news media companies aren’t doing the exact same thing as FOX, but just providing the “liberal” side? All of it is propaganda, designed to make you believe that the liberal order isn’t broken and undemocratic. That capitalism is just fine, and just needs a few tweaks.
I think it’s also quite obvious the disturbing mix of entertainment and news, where everything has to be sensationalized, and breaking news. It’s because what they are showing you isn’t just what’s happening in the world, it’s some of what’s happening in the world, shown through a lens of entertainment and liberal propaganda. This is why I believe that watching the news, at least uncritically, is unhealthy. Unfortunately, the capitalists make it very difficult to find other sources of news.
So while I have a clear position on what the “news” is, I don’t have a replacement. Sorry. I think at the very least it will help counteract some of the negative effects if you make sure to remember this when you see the news. It’s designed to make you have an emotional reaction and obsess. It’s designed to make you buy into the system. It’s designed to make you complacent.
Don’t let it.
