Posted on 02/23/2017 9:59:32 AM PST by Kaslin
For the past decade, there has been an increased focus on good nutrition and "real" food. Most people understand that while a treat at the ballpark might be fine in moderation (who can resist the cotton candy), a diet of cotton candy will not lead to a good physical outcome. Neither will a diet that consists only of fast food and processed food items.
Michale Pollen, author of "Food Rules," wrote that we should avoid "edible food-like substances. They're highly processed concoctions designed by food scientists, consisting mostly of ingredients derived from corn and soy that no normal person keeps in the pantry, and they contain chemical additives with which the human body has not been long acquainted. Today, much of the challenge of eating well comes down to choosing real food and avoiding these industrial novelties."
This same challenge confronts us in the news arena. News is now packaged to be entertaining, to be fluffy, to be compelling. Let's call this the choice between real news and industrial news novelties that are newsish.
So what is news? Is it factual? Yes. Does it reveal something new? Yes. But real news does more than provide information; it is relevant information that is important to us and worthy of our attention.
The challenge is when everything is news, nothing can be thought about properly. This funnel needs to be reworked.
This week's example is the focus on President Donald Trump's comment regarding Sweden this past weekend, when he said, "what's happening last night in Sweden." While cable news and the internet erupted with disdain for the lack of a specific event the prior night -- the thoughtful discussion that could have happened -- about refugees, assimilation and potential outcomes, was lost in spectacle.
Over a year ago, James Traub wrote, "The Death of the Most Generous Nation on Earth: Little Sweden has taken in far more refugees per capita than any country in Europe. But in doing so, it's tearing itself apart," which ran as a feature story in the February 10, 2016 edition of Foreign Policy magazine. Traub visited the refugee center in Malmo, Sweden, on the Danish border. Sweden took in 160,000 refugees in 2015, a large number for a country whose population is 9.5 million. The question he focused on was Sweden's ability to absorb and assimilate the large number of refugees, and the resulting impact to Sweden.
"The fear is that the recent generations of refugees have become isolated from Swedish life, as has happened with North Africans in the French banlieues, the slums that have become incubators of alienation for many North African immigrants," Traub wrote. "[Thomas] Gur [a widely published critic of Sweden's open-door policy] says that 20 years ago, Sweden had just three residential areas where significant numbers of citizens did not work and did not have access to good schools -- the indispensable instrument of social mobility in Sweden's high-tech economy. That number, he says, has now reached 186."
Traub wrote that due to the high numbers of refugees and low assimilation, Sweden was changing it's open door policy to be more restrictive.
"Something even greater is at risk," he ended. "The Europe that rose from the cataclysm of World War II understood itself not simply as a collection of peoples, white and Christian, but as a community of shared values. The refugee crisis has forced Europeans to choose between the moral universalism they profess and the ancient identities they have inherited...
"Now the Europe where the Enlightenment was born may well be making the same choice. The Muslim influx threatens Europe's liberal, secular consensus; but rejecting the refugees also shakes one of the great pillars of that consensus." Traub closed by warning Americans of complacency regarding refugees and immigration.
Now that was real news... a year ago, and worthy of serious discussion.
In an odd juxtaposition, CNN reported Wednesday morning, "riots broke out in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood of Stockholm Monday night, as residents clashed with police officers and set vehicles on fire, Swedish police say...More riots erupted later in the evening, causing damage to shopfronts as well as instances of looting. A police spokesperson said 10 cars had been torched, but that order and security had been restored by midnight."
As news outlets reach out, via the internet, newsstand, Facebook or twitter -- pause for a second and think -- is this real news or just an industrial news novelties that is newsish. What you consume and comment about is up to you.
Junk News like junk food will kill you...................eventually................
I don’t think the example given as news is news. I think it is news with a lot of analysis and opinion. The CNN story is news. Raw news. Dog bites man is news, but worthless news. Man bites dog is news, and more interesting.
Dog bites man because it was starving is a bit more useful news, but it is also kind of opinion.
Junk News like junk food will kill you...................eventually................
Dr. Oz: EEG Brain Scans Reveal Fake News Threatens Your Health
Observer ^ | 2/23/17 | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Posted on 2/23/2017, 9:55:44 AM by Mozilla
Our show will spotlight a first-of-its-kind social experiment to identify the dangerous and disruptive effect of fake news on our brains. We had high profile fake news creator Jestin Coler craft two fictional stories: one designed to prey on liberals and another on conservatives.
Women read the articles, not knowing they were fake, as neuropsychiatrist Dr. Daniel Amen gathered quantitative EEG assessments. The findings supported results of a functional MRI study recently published in Nature Scientific Reports, which showed how challenging a person’s political beliefs could activate the parts of the brain associated with emotion and self-identity.
A self-described liberal woman in our social experiment reported feeling sad after reading a fictional article on illegal immigrants, but revealed stronger irritation and anger when processing a fake story about a jailed climate change researcher. Simultaneous changes in her brain activity were also much greater when processing the climate change story and correlated with a strong emotional response of angst and fear.
A conservative woman demonstrated opposite reactions. For her, the article on illegal immigration elicited changes in brain activity changes that you would see during a physical threat.
The women were not told that the articles were fake until they were seated on stage. What happened next was startling. First, the women understandably, but awkwardly, tried to defend why they believed the false stories, rather than expressing frustration that they had been duped. This natural human tendency was highlighted by one woman’s comment that while the news was fake, it reinforced a truth she felt about our country—so the piece was tolerable.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3528304/posts
So protect your mental health by never watching ANCNNBCBS and some Faux liberals.
Never read any article by the NY or LA Slimes, Compost, SF Gay Rhonical, WSJ supposedly about President Trump.
Then: Donate Monthly to Free Republic and don’t read posts labeled as Fake News or Not Even News. Let Trump drive the liberals and their mediots even more insane and depressed with his real news from Tweets and his controlled Press Conferences!
Facts are news, everything else is commentary and opinion.
Fixed it for you.
I made the assumption that for facts to be reported they must be known and thus revealed.
I know, okay. But what I hate is that facts aren’t reported at all, and people are kept in the dark about them. For every fact that is known and revealed, there are thousands of important needed facts for the situation that are known but hidden. That is the fakery, not just making up stories but also hiding stories. I have to read foreign news sources to find facts about local U.S.A. events, because our domestic news media neglects to report them. The revealed facts become the news, whereas unreported unrevealed facts become commentary and opinion. Up becomes down, down becomes up. It’s a frustrating situation, one that President Trump is trying to rectify.
Facts are available for those curious enough to find them.
I too seek out facts from sources outside the us.
Ignorance is sself-infliceted and easy to solve if one is willing to put in the work to do so.
Cart and horse. News is not necessarily noteworthy to everyone. The construction shown above puts the onus on the media to decide what is "relevant information" for the audience, and that is exactly the reason why there is so much newsish crap on the airwaves.
Take the cited example - the President's remarks about Sweden. The media pounced on what was not said ("terrorism"), conflated it with the lack of a specific deadly attack the previous night, and tried to make that the story.
President Trump, who did not misspeak, pushed back.
But what did he actually say that caused all the fury? He merely identified that there is an ongoing degradation of society in Sweden that is caused entirely by their importation of Muslim refugees. And he is entirely correct - but that does not fit the narrative the media wants to report.
So they report on what he did not say, pillory him because they would never have said the factual words he uttered, and then gloated because they made the story about themselves.
Screw the media.
Does anyone else find it striking that the same media who tugs at our heartstrings with stories of how the application of law in the United States terrorizes illegal aliens refuse to report on how the abrogation of law in places like Sweden where there is a rape epidemic by an identifiable group of residents terrorizes law abiding citizens?
Not that I am surprised, but rather how the media thinks their audience is too stupid to notice.
I found it in Brietbart, Lifezette and WSJ, A YEAR AGO
The largest U.S. banks were penalized for their role in inflating a mortgage bubble that helped cause the financial crisis. Who got that money?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-banks-paid-110-billionin-mortgage-related-fines-where-did-the-money-go-1457557442
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