"Oh I never watch the news"

[oklumberjack]

Ok, I feeling really judgemental about this I'll admit, but here goes.

I went out for dinner this week with some school mum's from the primary my dd has just left. These women are acquaintances of mine. Nice women, friendly but I don't consider them my closest friends.

Over the course of lunch, we were discussing our summer etc. I mentioned the Olympics and something about Theresa May. They all looked blankly at me. All 5 of them said they hadn't seen any Olympics and had no idea how we'd done. 3 of them had not even heard of Theresa May. The conversation then got on to how they never watch the news, or read a newspaper or even access it online. As soon as news comes on they turn over. I was shocked. I kept very quiet that I'm a Radio 4 and 5live listener, avid Daily Politics watcher and rather enjoyed watching the cycling,rowing and diving at the Olympics on the BBC.

However they could tell me all about Love Island, Big Brother and TOWIE which is where the conversation went next. I felt really out of place. They seemed to think that being interested in the news made you some kind of snob.

Ok, so we're out of step in what we like. We probably won't hang out much in the future, however please tell me I'm not really unusual in checking in with the news at least twice a day!

The other thing that gets my goat is when people seem to think that only those who are truly informed should have the vote. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in the referendum. I was a staunch remainer, but people voted to leave because they felt they aren't being listened to. It was the one time people felt that they could really effect any serious change in this country. I'm not sure if it was true democracy due to the sheer amount of lies peddled by all sides but I can see why we ended up where we did.

I agree. What's more, I really hate the idea that people mostly Guardian readers think there's one single truth and that anyone who is on the wrong side of the truth is a Daily Mail reader.

I'd just rather see people, whatever their political bent, be skeptical consumers of information so that politicians left and right find it harder to profit from their position of power. LurkingHusband posted a great quote on the HC thread the other day, that democracy is fleeting because ultimately politicians get cozy and complacent.

I don't watch the news. I'm often doing something that I find more useful. I catch the odd radio bulletin.

Last year, I had to explain to a lovely friend, who David Cameron was.

I was shocked, in 2015 she didn't know that David Cameron was out prime minister.

I avoid sensationalised terrible news as I have anxiety issues with some of the things, but I'm aware of uk politics and I do listen to discussion radio. I don't have a clue about soaps, celebrity gossip or much like that though.

I don't watch the news. It upsets me and makes me feel down for days.
I don't watch bb as its like going to the zoo and watching the Jeremy Kyle guests in one big house having sex on air. It's just boring. If we all stopped watching, the programmers would be forced to reconsider their programmes and we may get some to worth watching.
I don't watch much telly. I see it as adverts with a few token minutes of to thrown in so we don't all rebel. 😄
I'm aware of what is going on through chats with relatives and my oh LOVES the news so he tells me. I just can't watch the misery myself.
I did watch some olympics (inspiring) and will watch some Paralympic too.
I know who the pm is as I am interested in politics.
I do think it odd for someone not to know who the pm is, tbh.

Last year, I had to explain to a lovely friend, who David Cameron was.

I once had to explain to a Swiss gentleman (a customer who was listening to the BBC news sometime in the 90s) how the House of Lords worked.

He genuinely could not understand how Lords could not be elected. He had absolutely no frame of reference.

As he said "even the East Germans had elections".

Switzerland. Great upholders of democracy. Didn't women only get the vote there in 1970 or thereabouts?

"I was chatting to my cleaner once about the murder of Fr Hamel in France and she'd not heard about it. Apparently her Reiki master told her she shouldn't watch anything negative!hmmhmm"

So? Why does she need to know that? Why do we all need all the desth and destruction 24/7. Need to know all the grisly details of many outlandish events. We here about horrible murders from places we've never heard of random people. It's not necessary. It's like misery porn.

I was referring to contempt of court acts rather than public order, tbh.

Like I said, we have laws. The Sun and The Mirror were fined for transgressing the Contempt of Court Act for their reporting.

I don't watch soaps, talent shows Towie, BB etc etc or sports (so no idea about the Olympics other than from new reports), but ordinarily I am a voracious consumer of news and current affairs on radio - 4 and 5 mainly.

I gave up regular newspapers a while ago as they all seem full of London-centric lifestyle articles rather than news.

I've just returned from a 7 day holiday with no telly or radio and only occasional online News. I feel like a different person - much happier and more relaxed. I don't value ignorance at all, but I'm wondering if I should extend the experiment.

.....and these people are allowed to vote

Disclaimer - I haven't read the thread, just the OP

.....and these people are allowed to vote

That's your basic rule for a democracy nowahousewife. Do you want to suggest something better?

Bunty, yup, federal elections in 1971. In the previous referendum as to whether Swiss women should be allowed to vote in 1959 or 1960, nearly 70% of the (entirely male, obviously) turnout voted no.

And in fact there was one of the German-speaking cantons that only allowed women to vote on local matters in the 1990s.

I wasn't holding Switzerland (nazi gold) up as a shining beacon of democracy, btw ...

On a wider note, with so much "news" surrounding us, it has become pathetically easy for it to be manipulated.

^This has it spot on.
Reading mainstream media does not, IMHO, give you any more "right" to vote (one might argue quite the opposite).
Anti-intellectualism is one thing. The anti-democratic shite we've seen in the last few months is at least as scary.

I'm always a bit shocked when grown adults say they haven't heard of The Beatles, how can people wilfully ignore recent history and popular culture as well as the news? It would be mean avoiding a lot of TV and radio. I worked with some guys, all in their 30's university educated, never heard of the Suffregettes.

I avoid the news, i have anxiety and like to concentrate on my own little bubble. I do know who the pm is though.

I heard a teacher say that Florence Nightingale was a serving nurse in the first world war. Even the most educated people can have massive knowledge gaps.

Of course ...

en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes#A_Study_in_Scarlet_.281887.29

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth traveled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

I have experienced this as well. When you have spent a night discussion OK and Hello magazine and talking about the various celebrities as if they were your friends you know you've hit rock bottom friendship wise.

The importance of being well-informed isn't limited to just being aware of what is going on in the world; over time, listening to/reading a wide range of news sources give you the ability to critically analyse information.

I really despair of the fact that so many people just don't understand this.

at not knowing who the PM is and thinking that's ok.

The only time I switch off is when people start droning on about the mainstream media

I avoided the news for quite some time due to anxiety. It did help. I was a proper news junky beforehand and it was just fuelling it.

That is just to do with sensationalism though. Even 'respectable' news outlets have to talk up some terrible event half a world away. There is something about terrible events coming into one's little bubble that personalises it, somehow. Which would be great if we could do something about it, but what can we do? So now you are horrified and helpless. You may or may not donate a fiver into a fund - I suppose if everyone did that it would be worth it. But you can't do that for every devastated person on earth. It's overwhelming.

That is a separate thing to current affairs, internal politics, but the two come wrapped up together.

One thing i have found useful is adding a few Positive News outlets to my fb feed. Patches of ocean cleaned up, a teenager in malawi powering his village with a windmill he built out of scrap and a library book.

The importance of being well-informed isn't limited to just being aware of what is going on in the world; over time, listening to/reading a wide range of news sources give you the ability to critically analyse information

And not even just that, if we believe the research in a new book - I'm pasting in a post I wrote earlier, because it's behind a paywall:
------

I thought this was interesting - a new book, Head in the Cloud: The Power of Knowledge in the Age of Google by William Poundstone (which was extracted in The Observer last weekend). Behind a paywall, so here's the gist -

The author did surveys of general knowledge in the US and the UK (and discovered that more than 50% of people under 30 couldn't name the largest ocean on earth, the famous palace built by Louis XIV, who invented radio, or which Roman emperor supposedly fiddled while Rome burned). So what, you might say.

But the bit that was interesting was that he found a correlation between general knowledge and socially responsible behaviour.

He asked whether you would throw your pet off a cliff for £1 million - only about 7% of the British public said yes, but that percentage was double among people who scored poorly in the general knowledge quiz.

In the same survey, the people who didn't know which document King John signed in 1215 were more likely to think people should be allowed to smoke in pubs. Those who couldn't name their MP were more likely to say it was OK for businesses to post fake online reviews under a false name. Those who thought humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs were less likely to vaccinate their children with the MMR.

His conclusion on the vaccination issue is that a significant portion of anti-vaccine parents do look stuff up on Google, but aren't able to distinguish medical research from pseudoscience and conspiracy theories on someone's anti-vac blog because a general background in evaluating knowledge isn't something you can Google, it's something lifelong, so the internet is no help to them.

a significant portion of anti-vaccine parents do look stuff up on Google, but aren't able to distinguish medical research from pseudoscience and conspiracy theories on someone's anti-vac blog because a general background in evaluating knowledge isn't something you can Google, it's something lifelong, so the internet is no help to them.

That is so true.

My DD got taught how to triangulate sources of information at school. Recently, a colleague with a younger DD was incredulously telling me about his own DD learning the same thing - "can you believe she was told to check the source of information?"

I introduced him to the website Snopes. I think he cried himself to sleep that night.