Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/08/25/boomers-are-news-illiterate-co.html
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“Boomers are news-illiterate couch vegetables stuck in front of their yelling, ad-saturated televisions”
You may need to work on using non-stigmatizing language and improve your cultural competency when speaking of other peoples.
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They don’t call it the idiot box for fun…
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So, many members of an older generation that grew up watching the boob tube still watch the boob tube.
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I do a combination of watching news and reading it. However the bit of news i do watch isn’t from TV but from online sources. I really can’t stand watching TV.
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I took this as a reference to the constant “Millenials are killing X” meme that has infected the media.
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Frankly getting the news from TV is probably healthier than getting it from Facebook.
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Hey stop talking about my Dad!
(That’s my job!)
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Sounds about right. We didn’t have a TV when I was a kid, but we got the newspaper. Now, I watch a little news on TV, but not much. I get more analysis and details from reading a news story than listening to 3 lines read by the anchorman.
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People who make generalizations about vast numbers of people are idiots.
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I wonder how much of this is habit from the days when TV news meant network TV news, which at least had a chance of actually being accurate, fair, and aimed at the whole country for its audience? You know, as opposed to “Older people are more likely to be conservative and want a Fox News slant” or something like that.
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Ditto. Reading is faster. TV news simply annoys me for many reasons. It’s a varying mixture of shallow, manipulative, lurid, tedious, misdirective, ignorant . . . and those are its good qualities.
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I’m 50+ and I hate watching news - it never has any depth, and I never come away with an understanding of what’s going on. Online reading, and NPR reporting which includes BBC.
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111.5% of statistics are also made up.
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I too have noticed how the Daily Stormer, the Aryan Nation, Stormfront, et al don’t have television programs and must be read. /s
The point being that reading your news is not an indicator of better or more enlightened news consumption. There are lots of excellent news programs to watch out there. People who consume news via multimedia aren’t necessarily less aware or informed. Conversely, consuming your news by reading it does not necessarily mean you are better informed.
This post needs to get off the holier than thou high horse.
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The response to this post seems about what I would have expected.
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Sometimes it’s an insult, sometimes it’s just true.
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I think it is significant because there is a difference in barrier to entry. TV requires a lot of capital to reach a wide audience with, so your news there likely has a capitalist slant since the journalists can’t cut those checks themselves. The internet, meanwhile, has the opposite issue: no barrier, meaning no cost to spread chaotic FUD and propaganda, as the right-wing authoritarians have seized on.
So ideally we would have media with a low barrier to entry and a strong resilience to misinformation and bias. Sadly the latter requires getting a lot of people on board with a system that is opposed to their trusted sources.
ETA: As it is, I think we have many people who are more informed than ever, and many people that are more misinformed. This is scary.
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I’ll be 60 in a year and a half.
Does that mean I have to give up the internet and radio and start using a TV again?
That hardly seems a fair trade.
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I took it as reference to the Boomers are evil meme
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