alt Hacker NewsI feel like the best advice I could give to young news audiences is to stop. Just stop. What little value the news may offer to make you a more informed citizen is completely outweighed by all the negatives.
Or if you must watch the news, local only.
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Local US television news is coöpted by conservative media empires that routinely insert propaganda pieces into the stations they control.
And with that dismantle the fourth power which is nothing without an audience? Just let the powerful do whatever they want to do?
There's some drawbacks to the news, certainly, but I can't imagine not being aware or interested in what's happening around the world. Surely it's better to follow AP and Reuters and tune the rest.
Agreed, watching national or world news is useless. If you want to know what is likely to happen instead of what someone wants you to think will happen, we now have prediction markets. Whenever I see a headline I'm curious about, now instead of reading the article I just go to a prediction market and check the probabilities.
How else are young people supposed to cultivate their own cynicism though?
This is bad advice. Local news is not some noble pursuit. It's helpful but so is national news. It's good to know how the world is evolving. Burying your head in the sand is not a solution.
There are solid news sources, but they're hard to find and differ by the subject.
For example, war maps are hard to find. Al Jazeera publishes maps of what's been hit in the Middle East, which makes sense because their readers are on the receiving end. understandingwar.com contributes to an interactive war map.[1] (The site says to view it with Firefox; Chrome has bugs on mobile.)
ops.group, which is for people operating aircraft internationally, has a frequently updated map of where to avoid and what the problems are.[2] They have a GPS spoofing map. A sizable chunk of Eurasia is currently unsafe for aviation. "For flights between Europe and Asia, the normal Gulf corridor is effectively unavailable. Overflying traffic is rerouting either north via the Caucasus-Afghanistan, or south via Egypt-Saudi-Oman." Nobody wants to overfly Afghanistan. Almost no ATC, no radar, and an emergency diversion to Kabul means dealing with the Taliban. "For most operators, landing at an Afghan airport would be akin to ditching in oceanic airspace."
You have to dig that hard to find out what's going on. Neither the mainstream media nor the podcasters and influencers go that far.
[1] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/089bc1a2fe684405a67d67f...
[2] https://ops.group/blog/middle-east-airspace-current-operatio...