Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time.

Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears. Back then I said facebook was bad for my mental health, and I quit reddit when they made it harder for me to prevent what I called amygdala-bait. But it's totally the same thing.

These days I love to watch nuanced explanations on youtube of complex issues, but youtube's algorithm desperately wants to feed me stuff like How Money Works and other channels where it's dressed up as nuanced explanations of the world, but every single episode is how X is screwing you over or how the Y is going to blow up the economy any second now.

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frantathefranta 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I'm probably a heavier user of reddit than most but I recently deleted the reddit app on my phone because it's just too much. I still use the site though, but now I use an iPad with old.reddit to make using it as difficult as possible.

	▲	justonceokay a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		Reddit is fun for a while but there is a strong “lowest common denominator” problem that plagues almost every subreddit.

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PaulHoule 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One of my in-laws who immigrated from Italy with a big family has a "command center" with a computer he trades stocks on and a few TVs and it drives me nuts when he watches Fox News and they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success.

YouTube is all over the place. You really can get great stuff but are you always a few clicks from blackpill hell: "men suck", "women suck", "famous consumer brands that have lost their way", "it all sucks", ...

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joseda-hg an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In defense of 'How money works' I don't think there's much in the way of positive anything to cover for his format/field, not for current times in particular

His most famous videos are on the topic of bullshit jobs, the movie Wolf of wallstreet, various X is collapsing and a Money Laundering Explanations

	▲	SpicyLemonZest an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There's lots of positive things to cover. He made a video 2 weeks ago about tourism, his first ever as far as I can tell, and there's plenty of interesting things a general Youtube audience could learn about how money flows around in the context of tourism. But he chose to instead talk about "The End Of Budget Tourism", believing (perhaps accurately!) that a negative framing would help get people to click on his video.

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nancyminusone 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I do find it amusing how on the internet the X and Y can be governments or corporations, or the hosted platform itself. Seems like something a competent "we control everything" organization should be able to prevent. But as long as you do nothing but come back for another helping of rage, I guess they're fine with it.

	▲	harrall 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Cuz the actual nuanced reality is that it’s structural. (Most) corporations don’t want to control the world but they do have their own self-interests, but because there are so many corporations there’s always some corporation controlling some facet. For another example of a structural problem, California has been trying to add housing for the past few years but it has been one piecemeal solution after another. People who own homes don’t want their lives to change, cities like how they are laid out already, parking requirements exist to prevent developers from skimping at the time, environmental reviews are meant to protect the environment… at no point was anyone thinking “I want a housing problem that leads to job flight and homelessness” — everyone is just solving their own problem at the time but together it creates a major structural obstacle. The people at YouTube don’t actually care about controlling the narrative. They just want to make money while removing problematic content, but they’re not exactly sure what problematic content is and Google tends to invest in algorithms more than support, but the end result is channels get randomly removed sometimes. The world’s problems are hard because not because people are generally malicious, but because everyone is just doing their own thing. That’s why the only fixes are structural, but structural solutions are really hard.

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carlosjobim an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

News are for news worthy things - which are things that deviate from everyday life. Wars, disasters, crime, in short things of concern. As well as political struggles, economic struggles, and any kind of conflict.

So all is well in that aspect. That's how news have always been, since the first pyres were constructed to light fires to alert neighbouring communities of enemies arriving.

But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the presenters talk. The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very important" things they are talking about. Weak minds are conditioned to feel respect and reverence to those who treat them with despise, and unfortunately also to feel the opposite to people who they believe themselves superior to.

It's completely deliberate, to make people addicted to it.

Consider if a well dressed person came to your house and started talking in the same voice as the TV anchors do. You would instantly think it was a dangerous psychopath on the loose, and try to find a weapon swiftly to ward them off. If somebody at a barbecue started talking like the TV anchors, you'd think they were on drugs and tell them to leave. People would call the police.

The next time you catch a TV news anchor, picture them being with you in your living room instead of in the TV studio. You will instantly conclude that the person is mentally and spiritually unwell to talk and act like that. You can practically smell the reptilian from them. Do the same thing with politicians and other leaders too. Many of them say things that on paper seem nice, but with a demeanour that you wonder when they're going to break out into "Who is the boss of you!? I am the boss of you!?"[1]

And I don't think they can see it in themselves or smell it on themselves, like everybody else with a mind can.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QM_AcLBSQM

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afavour an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> The next time you catch a TV news anchor, picture them being with you in your living room instead of in the TV studio. You will instantly conclude that the person is mentally and spiritually unwell to talk and act like that.

They're two different scenarios so it's not exactly a surprise they sound different. Same goes for anyone giving a public speech, their cadence and tone would sound bizarre if they were just say in a room with you.

> The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very important" things they are talking about.

I can't say I identify with that at all. I do not hear "pure venom" when I listen to a newscaster. They're usually either trying too hard to be serious or trying too hard to be lighthearted and chummy. But neither is venomous.

IMO the biggest problem with cable news is that it runs constantly. News doesn't. So they have to fill endless dead time with hyperbole. One newscast in the evening ought to be enough for anyone, really.

	▲	carlosjobim 12 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Some are absolutely better than others when it comes to this. But I was shocked and instantly repulsed when hearing and seeing CNN at an airport after having been away from televisions for a few months. > Same goes for anyone giving a public speech, their cadence and tone would sound bizarre if they were just say in a room with you. Then imagine these newscasters giving a public speech in that same way. You'd think you had stepped into the quarterly meeting of psychotics planning a spree. EDIT: And most importantly in my living room example: That's where the TV is. If you wouldn't invite a person in the flesh and blood to your living room to behave like this, why do you invite them through your TV? What about true crime and murder series on Netflix? Who would want to spend your evenings with a flesh and blood person in your bedroom who would go on into gory details for hours about murders and abductions? But still people invite these reptilians to their bedrooms through the TV.
	▲	PaulHoule 22 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The basic problem of CNN is that a person who tunes in at 5:30 pm has to get basically the same story as someone who tunes in at 7:30 pm so they have to repeat the same "news" over and over again. You could have a magazine format with lots of little documentaries about little different things that happen all over the world and you would be better "informed" in the sense of learning something but you wouldn't have as much shared experience with other viewers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bagdikian is most famous for his book The Media Monopoly but his obscure 1971 book The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media was highly predictive of what news on the web was going to look like because he had worked for the RAND corporation and tried to sell a very unprogressive (in terms of business) media interest on the idea of online personalized news and they didn't want to make the investment. That book has some of the most damning indictments of the concept of "news" from a McLuhanite perspective that ever been put to writing, most of all a description of how the editor of a small-town newspaper has about 6 seconds to look at a newswire story and decide if he wants to run it. It's a fundamental act of violence against the framework of reality to throw out 99.999% of it and the kind of "bias" that people get stuck on where people think we need an equal balance of stories that infuriate right-wingers and infuriate left-wingers.

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PaulHoule 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwgJgTL5JmE

I can say circa 1990 people in my pod noticed this phenomenon that "ruling class" people who get interviewed on TV as well as many TV performers (new anchors!) seem to show a kind of asymmetry of facial expression that you don't see so much in ordinary people.

Today we might blame the botox but it's widely thought that this is a sign of emotional suppression

https://www.jnforensics.com/post/chirality-a-look-at-emotion...

Though as much as we wish we could be observant and understand people like Cal Lightman in Lie to Me signs of deception are never completely reliable.

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UltraSane 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"one of them always has a 24 hour news going "

Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.

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walthamstow 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It doesn't matter which one. My mother mainlines BBC News which is state-owned, establishment-centrist, has no adverts or profits, but has the same effect of dialing up the viewer's fear of the outside world.

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ffsm8 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

While I'm not American, calling bbc centrist in 2026 is just objectively false. It was centrist in 2000s, but it hasn't been in at least a decade.

	▲	galangalalgol an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Whose interests does it serve now? That is the main thing to understand of you are to get anything out of news.
	▲	30 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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Quarrelsome 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

sadly forces in the BBC also value "engagement". Idk how we got here, it never used to be like this.

This is why cultural stories now are higher than before on the main site. It used to be the case that news was _just_ news. Politics, crime, economics, health, environment, etc. Now culture stories, like puff pieces about the royals or entertainment end up on the front page.

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UltraSane 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It matters very very much. Fox News is much much worse than most news channels. It was created specifically as GOP propaganda.

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nancyminusone 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I had a relative for which it was CNN. We even share the same political views, but watching that stuff or having it on in the background literally from 8 am until midnight is tiring.

	▲	croisillon an hour ago \| parent [-]
		when in a hotel on vacations we sometimes have a television and hence bbc or cnn... i used to nickname cnn "the fire squad": whatever the topic they're just shouting and hyperventilating... it is tiring indeed

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malfist an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's actually CNN, but they flip to local news often too to hear about all the car wrecks and local murders and robberies and other things to make them afraid.

Fox and CNN are both bad, but different flavors of bad.