TL:DR - 50 shades of yellow journalism is what I call it. The clickbait outrageous stuff that comes in tabloids is the product of a BS selling industry that generates trash and more trash, written by trashy people with a dreadful track record. It's also a poor representation of reality, as it covers only the dumbest part of the human race. And when it's not that it's pure propaganda and socio political influencing of the masses than just reporting.

News feeds mess up your attention span and reading tabloid shit for too long can make you depressed. Don't frame your views of life on a diet of shit, but get a real newspaper, quit the crap you get online and observe the real world and real people and how incredible human beings can really be.

The automod shut this down when I tried posting it yesterday. So I'm trying again.

I see a trend where a lot of you (mostly young guys with a phone on their hands maybe) keep bringing up quotes from tabloid news outlets with clickbait titles and sensationally stupid content. You guys then discuss this as though that represents the reality of all of the world. Some of what they say is true for mainstream society, but a lot of it is absolute trash that's only ever relevant to the dumbest of our race. It's often written by the kind of people, if you do a background check on them and their history, you will wonder as to just how such utterly brain damaged buffoons were even allowed to get their hands on a keyboard.

The last one went like "How to know you're dating a Red Pilled Guy" Not only did that woman get everything wrong, mixing beta guys for RP men, in her bio she sounds like a jobless nutcase who has nothing to offer and nevertheless feels entitled to marry a billionaire and live off his lifestyle. These are the kind of fools who write in the news outlets.

The rise of the internet has allowed for an explosion of space where all kinds of shit can be propagated online in the name of news. HUGE SHOCK REVELATIONS that are just hot air.

This isn't new. It was seen all the way back in the French Revolution. But the rise of the internet combined with an ignorant readership with no frame of their own has turned yellow journalism into a monstrous global epidemic.

In the age of tabloids and twitter and social media, every fool can pass off as a sage, every opinion can pass off as sage logic, and BS can pass off as sage wisdom. But in actual behavior, you might find yourself seeing a very different society from the one that these shit papers would like you to see. If you base your conclusions based on tabloid garbage, it most likely means you're not observing actual people and society enough for you to separate the grain from the chaff. It's confirmation bias at work.

I have at one point fallen into the trap of reading news online, and now I deeply regret it. Over time Google just personalized my news feed into whatever junk that sells and gets clicks rather than any kind of actual news about what goes on in my town or country or any kind of useful stuff. Virtually everything that crops up is an opinion ad for social engineering. Actual news websites aren't that much better. Much of online news these days looks like bots are writing them.

And the worst part? It's all junk. You feed your mind with this junk that you are going to forget within 4-24 hours, wasting a lot of brain cells for stuff that isn't useful to you in real life any way. And it's fucking your attention span.

Many online news outlets are also deeply driven by insiduous agendas meant for social reengineering. They will publish any shit if you're willing to pay for it.

A decade back, newspapers prioritized content and facts, wrote good English, covered a wide variety of essential stuff, and when they weren't talking about celebrities and their brain damage, they even had some useful advice on all kinds of topics - finance, investing, cooking recipes, art and craft, hobbies, events and meetups, books, classifieds, jobs, actual scientific research, sports, style, legal advice, interviews of some actually useful folk, even fitness.

Hell, they even had crosswords and all kinds of puzzles and stuff I could actually work on with a pen and paper for my brain's amusement.

The kind of stuff that's in these tabloids, if you're spending any kind of significant time reading this BS, and even quoting it up here, discussing it and taking that as an actual representation of reality -- it means you have way too much idle time where you're not doing anything productive, nor are you able to actually connect with the vast reality outside your bedroom. Maybe you don't get a real newspaper in real paper delivered to your door, or maybe you don't subscribe to the official e-paper edition either.

Now a days Google just feeds me that stuff which my 5-year old self could have outwritten - it's horribly biased in favor of tabloid news. When it is not BS, it's all selective and sensationalist reporting -- and it's almost all negative and frankly toxic stuff. This negativity crap unfortunately does sell. Fear, panic, rumors, agitation, rage, boobs, opinions, emotions -- it's all about stressing you out. And the very fact that it does tells you just how brain dead people are if all they want to do is read about XYZ celebrity's cleavage and what color of shoe they wore today. Just eschewing shit news means you are already one step closer to actually doing something productive with your spare time.

The kind of "studies" and "surveys" That appear in the news these days is a particularly notorious example of the intelligence level of their authors and the media culture. Do you really need a study to validate basic common sense? It's always about red wine or chocolate or coffee and every day they contradict themselves. Honestly a dog or a cat has more common sense. Don't you know by your own experience? Is it really worth reading a study that claims stuff like "Exercise may be beneficial, say surveys". Ok I will concede that at least in matters of human nature, research has lost integrity to politics.

If you keep reading that you might think this is how actual high level research works. But real scientific research and engineering, or art and craft are on a whole other level. Do you know how much science and engineering is there in your car's engine? Or actual rocket science? Or medicine? Or even sports? Your phone camera? Or pretty much anything you use today? Do you know your phone battery was the subject of a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (this year in fact) , without which Elon Musk wouldn't be making electric cars either? It's incredible stuff.

The TV isn't that much better. All these guys and gals (and now robots or CG anchors) just blabbering non-stop all day and repeating the same footage dozens of times and being paid to just spout BS and make some noises 24x7 for the TRP ratings. Not Nowhere has TV been as close to it's nickname "Idiot Box" as it is now. The Average American IIRC spends 13.6 years killing his brain cells on that stuff. With google feed, FB feed and all other feeds, probably twice as much. I can actually feel my brain cells dying and getting headaches over that shit. Just imagine losing anywhere from 13-25 years of your life? Do you deserve to do that to yourself?

We live in times where news is all about every fool and their opinions and mental illnesses make it to the headlines over actual facts and useful stuff. And when it's not that, it's paid socio political engineering. Isn't this the celebration of a mental disorder?

The media industry right now is a brain numbing, idiotic, shock attention seeking, opinion spouting, agenda driven, mass brainwashing industry. Idiots write their BS there, idiots chase every detail of other idiot's lives, more idiots publish them, even more idiots bother to read them, and the dumbest of us all actually get influenced by it and think that's reality and help those idiots make a living out of it. I call it 50 shades of yellow journalism.

And when they aren't doing that, they are busy running a propaganda industry that peddles socio political brainwashing and rumor mongering amongst the masses on both the left and right, or pro government or anti government. The media is essentially trying to brainwash the reader into their frame, no matter how bogus it is. Right now it seems like most news outlets are either left or right leaning. They also publish plenty of blatant lies, because they know it's too much work for anyone to verify the truth. As they say, lies, damned lies and damned statistics.

Why do they do this? It's because we entertain them and even subscribe to negative shit. We readers are the market, and the media outlets find a convenient excuse for their lack of integrity as long as we keep supporting them. No venture can survive if there isn't a market for it.

You can also test and filter out people who take things in tabloids too seriously or watch too much news on TV. It's a clear sign they're too young, or dumb, or have too much idle time, have bad agendas, or all of that.

And then there's social media. The concept of newsfeeds whether on google or FB or Twitter or quora is dangerous for our attention spans. We scroll down and down to no end and stare at each item for like a few seconds at the most and forget it within minutes. As a result our attention spans have reduced to mere seconds. Focusing on anything more than a few minutes makes us restless. Your memory is also getting weaker as a result. What social media does is to train your mind into a mental monkey.

So for once, I picked a couple of quality newspapers I knew had good content and actually subscribed to the real thing. Vetting a news outlet is important - I looked out for old school factual and essential reporting by quality folk and no tabloid trash or propaganda peddling. One was for economic and financial related stuff and the other for general stuff that also had good supplements on a wide variety of other topics. Frankly the difference is unbelievable. I can't believe it honestly how good it is when you read real news, good content and selectively use the internet only for productive stuff you actually need to remember and put into action.

In a real newspaper you are limited to what is printed on it - so quality content gets proritized for the most part. You start with headlines and probably end with sports and then read the supplements. So there's a time limit, and in that time, you exclusively read and do nothing else and then you go on to do other stuff.

But on the internet there is always one more article, one more topic, one more post, one more comment and there's no end to it. Before long you're just masturbating in the form of reading low level crap written by low level clowns making it look like the whole world is full of fucked up characters. A whole day can be lost in the process. It's a black hole. If that's not bad enough, the comments section is absolutely disgusting. The comments sections of some of these papers look like an online hospital for the mentally sick and are a glorious example of everything wrong with the human race.

Books and good magazines are far better too as we will read them front to back without distraction, read them many times till we remember it all and many good books have solid stuff that you can actually put into practice. They are not use and throw sms texts that you get in your news feed. Good books help your mind focus on deep work for prolonged periods of time. They also encourage depth of understanding.

Having said this, I had to carefully pick and evaluate the newspapers in my country. Some of them don't write crap, but still every article is a socio political propaganda piece.

So next time you are tempted to quote the next clickbait tabloid article or Twitter post, and talk about how the world is all fucked and turn yourself nihilistic, do remind yourself that what you're seeing is only the really dumbest, and most broken side of reality. You can also end up getting depressed reading that shit if you stay online for too long. Think of online news feeds as a toilet for the mind. You wouldn't shit in your living room would you?

Once you wean off online news, you would actually look around your neighborhood for a change and actually find there are sensible, real, people doing actually sensible stuff out there.

Mainstream reality if you actually go out there and observe real people can be very different from tabloid crap. Not all of society is nearly as fucked up as what tabloids make it look like. You may see amazing things and people too.

Remember, you're only the average of the kind of people and stuff you allow in your life. The human being is an incredibly capable life form, let it not rot at the bottom of the heap.