Nassim Taleb has convinced me that he is right - listening to the news not only doesn't make one smarter, it actually makes one dumber, since it fills the mind with bias, spin, misdirection, outrage, exaggerations, unfounded speculations and fantasies. Ezra Klein, a journalist and political commentator (and co-founder of Vox), has written a new book about this entitled Why We're Polarized. An interesting excerpt from the book can be read here.
Klein makes several interesting points in this excerpt (I look forward to reading the whole book). He notes that the news business is in fact a business, and the news is tailored to maximize profits and enhance the careers of reporters, not to educate people. He asserts that the real significant divide in the political world is not between right and left, but between the politically interested and the politically disinterested. And he notes that political theorists thought that increasing the amount of information available to the voting public would improve democracy, whereas now that we have massively increased the news available to the voting public with television, cable news, and the internet in all its manifestations (blogs, twitter, facebook, etc, etc) it seems to have had the opposite effect.
This is an interesting perspective.
Thoughts and observations about the world condition.
See also the annotated book list on the sidebar at the right, as well as the YouTube Lecture list
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