That’s an illusion. Believe it or not if you ignore the “news” it goes away. Most “news” isn’t worth your time anyway and will just make you feel helpless. The best way to get the news is to be selective with what you consume. E.g. once in a while listen to the BBC news report on the radio, sub to independent journalists (channel 5 w\ Andrew Callahan, Caspian report. YT). If there’s an issue you actually care about that you heard from the news, do what you can and not what you can’t.

I definitely don’t. Better for my mental health.

You’re expected to keep your head in the sand, work for a fraction of the value of your labor until you die, too late for you to realize your life has been stolen.

People who want to know what the fuck is happening around them have to read the news and learn about the world in order to do that.

Most aren’t expected to, unless it’s your job like Kimmel, SNL, Stewart, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, etc

It’s just easier to find new content reading material than today’s market in fiction which is disappointingly awful of late.

I absolutely don’t do that, I have curated my lemmy home page to avoid politics as much as possible too, it’s mostly just people wallowing in misery complaining and not doing anything anyway, it’s a waste of time.

Personally I read the news daily because it’s one of a few things that keeps updating in real time, with a story line tying it together. Like, the events each day relate to yesterday, and it keeps developing in real time so there’s that discount aspect to checking it. That’s the need that it fulfills to me. I’d like to get off the News but I haven’t found anything else like this yet. Reddit/Lemmy doesn’t do

That’s one of the reasons I’m subscribed to a weekly magazine.

It really took me a while to experience the perfect newspaper for me. It comes daily with actual news and background stories as well as investigative reports from time to time. It is public owned, so if you have shares you actually have a say what they report.

It is a very left daily newspaper, which suits me well. Taz, if you ever heard of it.

Though, daily news aren’t too good for your mental health, especially bad ones. So, who is deciding that you „have to keep up“? I think no one expect yourself. So if you decide to just not read for a week or even a month, it is just on you. You can catch up by reading some headlines and decide, what catches your interest later on.

I think you’re just describing market forces. Good recaps are harder to write. You’re describing cheap news. If we want proper news, we need to subsidize it.

I would rather keep up on the news that I think matters to me than the news in general. People seem to just love reporting the exact same things. I used to have frequented r/news to note this.

Lots of news about dead people, dead children .etc that sparks a lot of age-old debates.

Occasionally some celebrity dies, some small, some big.

Political follow-ups that ultimately just lead to arguments.

I tend to also like getting news a little after the fact. It helps the digesting and processing in a sense.

I don’t think it’s a social expectation. It’s more of an outcome of the interaction between the current societal system and technology. There are likely several systems we can develop and implement to reduce the overwhelming amount of info we need to consume on a regular basis, but as with any social system, changing things takes power away from the ones in power.

On a good note, one reason your expected to be updated on news is that you have a say in the political system. If you didn’t have any power in the political system, then not only would you not be expected to stay updated on news, but you would be prevented from it.

No, just ignore the news. Maybe skim though the headlines if you are really curious.

Only thing you have to worry about is if the headline say stuff like:

“Hurricane/Tsunami (or other disasters) is imminent”

“Our country is being invaded”

“Martial law has been invoked”

Stuff like “Leader says stupid thing” is not worth your attention, don’t bother reading such articles.

Whose expectations? Who says we have to pay them any mind?Unless their name is on the deed, or they pay me wages, I don’t much care what they expect.

I know someone who only learned Biden had dropped out upon seeing his name was not on the (mail-in) ballot. I was a little jealous.

I follow current events, but I strive to filter out politics beyond the very top level headlines.

Why are we expected to keep up with the news on a daily basis?

If it is not faster? What’s the lifespan of any buzz news, nowadays? 15, 30 minutes? 1h?

That being said, we may be expected to do that and many people may even be willing to do it, aka gobbing news all day long, but we’re not supposed to do that. At least, not if we want

to have some understanding on what’s going on in one’s local area, one’s country and in the world.

Understanding takes times (to read more, to hear various point of views) and effort (to conciliate those various view points we hear/read, and to try to understand it (aka make up our own personal opinion) instead of merely reacting emotionally to it.

Time and efforts are two things media certainly don’t want us to practice because it will cost them a lot of money and probably, for a majority of them, their job too. Because:

• Readers/listeners/viewers that are used to do efforts on their own (instead of being spoon-fed) will also expect better quality news (instead of the actual trash that’s falsely labelled as news) in order to be satisfied. It happens that better content does cost more money to produce than trash content (it requires more work, more time and smarter people, none of those being free or AI-replaceable).
• In depth understanding of better content also requires more time to understand it. Which mean people will consume less news articles/videos/whatever and that news outlets will sell less ads.

Too bad, those medias and the army of people working there need to sell as many ads as they can in order to pay for their salaries, they need us to be as stupid as we can be so we will swallow whatever cheap turd they can produce without even blinking an eye. We may even ask for more.

It’s all about choice.

Our choice as individuals, to waste our time on such shit content or to spend it on better content, and our choice as a society, deciding what we value more between a better education and information (which takes a lot of work, takes time, and cost more) or being raised as braindead morons that will happily clap hands everytime they’re fed whatever the latest buzz-turd is so dumb that even the stupidest AI can write it in mere seconds?

Most news are clickbait focused on the negative, making us feel depressed and feeds our negative emotions. I wouldn’t be surprised if the news actively contributes to the mental health crisis.

Most news can also not be that. It’s a choice. Not an easy choice, but a choice nonetheless.

The news I read (I have quit watching TV in the early 00s when I realized what a trash can it was morphing into) are not like that, or barely are. But it does cost me money and time to make them not be clickbait trash. Which is sad since many people can’t afford one or the other, if not both. While other people simply don’t want to be bothered.

What are your thoughts?

There are still great news papers out there, and websites, coming from all political ‘trends’… Which incidentally is another of our serious weaknesses, one that is also over-exploited by trash media: our allergy to anything that would not perfectly reflect our ‘values’, aka if a news outlet is not blue, red, green, grey, pink, whatever our ‘color’ is then it’s worthless. It is not. But, here again, realizing that there a re great news outlet even in the ‘facing camp’ will take time and efforts (to read them and to spot the few that aren’t trash).

Not that you’re looking for recommendations, but Delayed Gratification magazine may be close to what you’re looking for!
https://www.slow-journalism.com/