> Scanning Google News or a couple of the more professional international news services like BBC / Al Jazeera / Reuters I still feel pretty well informed
I once spent several years diving deep into news, and one of the lessons I learned was that scanning headlines (or even summaries) is a very good prescription for being misinformed.
There's the obvious selection bias - you only see the headlines they put on top. But it's fairly common that the body of the article undercuts the headline. The headline will be stated definitively, whereas the nuances in the details will make you doubt the certainty of the headline. In a few cases, it would even negate the headline!
And this is from well regarded news sources (NY Times, WaPost, etc), not crappy click bait farms on the Internet.
βIt ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.β - Mark Twain
I'm a firm believer that one should either dive deep or not read the news. The moderate path leads to the most misinformation.
I once spent several years diving deep into news, and one of the lessons I learned was that scanning headlines (or even summaries) is a very good prescription for being misinformed.
There's the obvious selection bias - you only see the headlines they put on top. But it's fairly common that the body of the article undercuts the headline. The headline will be stated definitively, whereas the nuances in the details will make you doubt the certainty of the headline. In a few cases, it would even negate the headline!
And this is from well regarded news sources (NY Times, WaPost, etc), not crappy click bait farms on the Internet.
βIt ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.β - Mark Twain
I'm a firm believer that one should either dive deep or not read the news. The moderate path leads to the most misinformation.