I can feel you. This year I tried to follow politics a bit more thoroughly. It didn’t change anything in how I acted or voted. But it made me feel depressed and stressed out.
Agree with all the points you’ve got there. The point is to be informed of the facts and that’s becoming increasingly difficult to do. Here’s what has helped me:
Use RSS feeds. News sites are trying to compete with social media now and try to put gossip junk all over their front page. RSS serves up news stories in time order.
Use an RSS app that lets you set filter words (I like Pluma on Android, or now I’ve moved to Tiny Tiny RSS on my home server with Read You app on Android). Filter out the stuff you don’t want to see. I don’t care about Elon Musk “news”. I don’t care about the British Royal family. My list keeps getting longer, but set it up to filter out all the stuff you don’t want.
Pick the sources that work best for you. I like BBC and Guardian (checking out France24 as well), but take a few reputable quality sources you like.
Following the news isn’t a moral good (as many would portray). You can follow the news as little or as much as you like. I check it once a day to skim headlines mostly, and take breaks for a number of days at a time.
I tend to block breaking news stories from minute by minute updates and prefer to know the facts once the story has developed. Youtube channels like TLDR news do a good job of summarising events a day or two later. E.g. the recent Bondi Beach incident in Australia, I want to know the details of events once they have some idea of what’s happening (usually by the next day), and don’t care so much about hearing every 5 minutes about a reaction statement from some political figure.
Not knowing about a bunch of stuff is ok. There’s so much information out there that it is too much for one person to study on a daily basis. If you’ve got other stuff to do, that’s ok.
Stop getting your “news” from social media, messaging apps forwards, and other ragebait sources.
Thats very specific to my interests and biases. Sharing it would serve no positive purpose. I’ll give you an idea of the categories though: I’ve tried to remove as much as I can about the British royal family, American politics, Musk, sports, and many large ongoing events that get repeated coverage with minute updates (that I get summary updates for from other sources and don’t need it to overwhelm my news feed at the expense of all else). Also depends on what is popular at the time, Twitter was constantly in the news at some point and has dropped away…but that filter also served its purpose well.
I can feel you. This year I tried to follow politics a bit more thoroughly. It didn’t change anything in how I acted or voted. But it made me feel depressed and stressed out.
I did that last year. This year I set up so many filters and block lists to avoid the toxic bullshit. It’s really helped to restore my sanity.
Agree with all the points you’ve got there. The point is to be informed of the facts and that’s becoming increasingly difficult to do. Here’s what has helped me:
Use RSS feeds. News sites are trying to compete with social media now and try to put gossip junk all over their front page. RSS serves up news stories in time order.
Use an RSS app that lets you set filter words (I like Pluma on Android, or now I’ve moved to Tiny Tiny RSS on my home server with Read You app on Android). Filter out the stuff you don’t want to see. I don’t care about Elon Musk “news”. I don’t care about the British Royal family. My list keeps getting longer, but set it up to filter out all the stuff you don’t want.
Pick the sources that work best for you. I like BBC and Guardian (checking out France24 as well), but take a few reputable quality sources you like.
Following the news isn’t a moral good (as many would portray). You can follow the news as little or as much as you like. I check it once a day to skim headlines mostly, and take breaks for a number of days at a time.
I tend to block breaking news stories from minute by minute updates and prefer to know the facts once the story has developed. Youtube channels like TLDR news do a good job of summarising events a day or two later. E.g. the recent Bondi Beach incident in Australia, I want to know the details of events once they have some idea of what’s happening (usually by the next day), and don’t care so much about hearing every 5 minutes about a reaction statement from some political figure.
Not knowing about a bunch of stuff is ok. There’s so much information out there that it is too much for one person to study on a daily basis. If you’ve got other stuff to do, that’s ok.
Stop getting your “news” from social media, messaging apps forwards, and other ragebait sources.
Mind to share your blacklist?
Thats very specific to my interests and biases. Sharing it would serve no positive purpose. I’ll give you an idea of the categories though: I’ve tried to remove as much as I can about the British royal family, American politics, Musk, sports, and many large ongoing events that get repeated coverage with minute updates (that I get summary updates for from other sources and don’t need it to overwhelm my news feed at the expense of all else). Also depends on what is popular at the time, Twitter was constantly in the news at some point and has dropped away…but that filter also served its purpose well.