Comment by hagbard_c
The Dutch term for the German 'neurgierig' is 'nieuwsgierig' which translates to 'greedy for news' and as such is even closer to the subject of this post. I also use an RSS reader - Nextcloud News - to follow the 'news' (including this here site, HN) and I sometimes feel the same about what is pushed by the legacy media and its more recent competition. Much of what is published is tailored to fit some political agenda, often a 'progressive' one for most of the legacy news media and - due to my conscious choices - a more 'conservative' one for the more recent counterparts. I made this choice to get a somewhat more balanced view of what actual facts the stuff published by 'left' and 'right' seems to be based on but... man, is it often tiring to see 'both' sides go on and on and on pushing their agendas.
Even more tiring is to see how useful idiots [1] happily take the propaganda pushed by the media and trumpet it as if it were pure gospel, often with dire consequences. Should I just quit following the legacy media and the more recent anti-dotes and try to live here in quiet and solitude on the farm? Well, no, I don't think I should. I will be confronted with te results of the media poisoning the minds of their victims the next time I go to a city and find the roads blocked by a crowd of people shouting inane slogans. Where did they get those from, what are they blathering about, why does this crowd of screechy weasels hollering about some supposed misdeed performed by some government somewhere far from here occupy the station? Almost invariably it comes down to the propaganda pushed by the media - nowadays usually some on-line version which is amplified up by the legacy dinosaurs and trumpeted by the other titles which are more often than not owned by the same conglomerate - which the useful idiots uncritically pick up and use as their guide star. I read this stuff because I want to know what ideas the media is trying to amplify and which they are attempting to suppress. I read it because I sometimes have to quench whatever fuse has been lit by them in the heads of my children. So, tiring as it is I'll keep the feeds running and try to follow my way through the mire of deceptions, half-truths, outright lies and other propaganda which is what goes for 'news'.