News is Bad

 From : http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli

• News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking . That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking). Go for long form journalism 
•  News misleads and is irelevant - A building crashed - it will focus on human emotional tragedy , who owns the building , who was living there instead og concentrating on why the building failed , leads to formation of wrong risk maps .We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk
• We are stuck in the vicious loop of  new and irrelevant news , hopping rom one hyper-link to another
• The more "news factoids" you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. 
• News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.
• News increases cognitive errors. News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact." News exacerbates this flaw. It also exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that "make sense" – even if they don't correspond to reality. Any journalist who writes, "The market moved because of X" or "the company went bankrupt because of Y" is an idiot. I am fed up with this cheap way of "explaining" the world
• News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it's worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory's capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a certain amount of slippery data. The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must pass through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension. Online news has an even worse impact. In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an intentional interruption system.
• News works like a drug . Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books
• News wastes time 
• News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is "learned helplessness".It may also be responsible for depression