Do you watch the news or do you read the news?

Do you watch the news or do you read the news? I hope you know there is a big difference. I read the news. I read news from multiple sources, both left and right, and some news from other countries, aggregated into the News app on my iPhone. It doesn’t take me any longer to do this than it does to just read one source of news because I’m not reading multiple articles on the same news bit. I read one really good article about each piece of news. If it’s a controversial topic, I will look to see what the other side of the aisle is writing about the same news. If it’s about something happening in another country, I read some other countries’ news on it too.

From talking to people, I am getting the impression that there are not many people who do this. I’m hearing that most people are watching the news on TV. I want you to know that it is completely different information when you watch it versus read it. The news you watch on TV is basically opinions. It is equivalent to reading an op-ed piece in a newspaper. Also, the detail that you get on TV is about 1/10 of the detail you get from reading just five paragraphs of a news article on the topic. On TV, they are basically just giving you the headlines plus a blurb.

Written news is vetted and more responsible, if it is by a reputable news publication. Even CNN and Fox’s written articles about a topic are more factual than the same topic covered on their own TV news. I know this because, out of curiosity, I have compared each of their written presentation of news to their own TV presentation of the same news.

We have a fiercely divided country right now in part because everybody is forming opinions under different facts. I believe that if we were all forming our views based the same basic factual information, we might not be so divided. I know this because I have conversations with people who are good, smart and reasonable but with very different views and when we start hashing out the facts, we find out that we are both operating under completely different facts.

Some people say that there is no such thing as facts. But of course we know that there are facts – you just have to consult an authoritative source to find them. For example, watch a politician speak instead of reading about what they said in the press. Read the actual report, or at least its executive summary, instead of reading the press’s version of the report.

Before the Internet, there were few sources of news and news was not pushed to specific individuals based on their past reading. Online platforms show us the news bits that they believe we will like based on what we have been reading in the past. So we are basically being fed only perspectives that we already have shown we lean towards. This has created separate groups of people, each in their own echo chamber.

To combat this, in my News app, I intentionally selected sources to follow from both sides of the aisle, plus some international sources. This is an Apple support page that tells how to do this: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/get-started-with-news-iph0a16d1e29/ios. Don't "favorite" your favorite publications since that will cause Apple to push those to you, bringing you back into the echo chamber. Also, I do not think it is wise to get your news via social media platforms because those platforms’ business model is to capture as many views as possible, and their algorithms are designed to accomplish that. This does not bring you diverse sources of reliable news. It brings you exactly what it knows you will read without regard to much else.

I think, for these reasons, opinions have become so polarized that two people who disagree don’t even speak with each other about politics anymore. We have to resume our discussions with people who have views that are different from ours. On that topic see my related blog post, “Let’s Start Talking Again”.