Dec 16

Dec 16 Where I Get My News These Days 2

News, Reading, Subscription, Trust, Truth, Bias, Television, Media

Back in 2021 I published Where I Get My News These Days to reflect frustration with the complexity involved in keeping up with current events without being swamped with information from slanted or unreliable sources.

I’m updating that here now that we have cancelled our Washington Post subscription after subscribing since the late 1980’s. The Post’s unreliability as an objective news source, combined with its deliberately misleading headlines, finally got to be too much in December 2023.

While the Post once upon a time had a reputation for being a “liberal” paper, that’s not really the issue. My concern was that the Post’s news reporting had declined and was itself increasingly slanted. I like to make up my own mind, thank you; increasingly I realized I could not trust the Post to be objective.

This is not just a “liberal versus conservative” thing. I’m increasingly frustrated with MSNBC in the evening, for example, as it hashes and rehashes Trumpism and the attacks on democracy and the rule of law in the United States. A lot of what takes up air time is not “news” so much as speculation, assessment, and prediction.

I’ve pretty much made up my mind that, as far as elections are concerned my first question about a candidate going forward is, politics aside, does this person really believe in democracy, equal rights, and respect for the law? Once that question is answered, then we can talk politics and policy. That holds for candidates for national office as well as for local school board elections.

What I’m looking for in “the news” is information about what’s going on in the world, not just information about Trump’s latest legal maneuvers. I subscribe to the New York Times online, for example, but that’s not the only source I follow.

I’ve created a list of links in my web browser that I consult throughout the day, shown in the list of links below. Some of these I check every day, some once a week. Deliberately it’s a mix of sources reflecting my interests and it changes from time to time.

I should note that I mostly gave up on TV news years ago, not only because of the irritating commercials but because of the slow pace with which information is actually delivered. I prefer text. Usually when I click on a link and find just a video clip I look elsewhere unless something uniquely visual about the event being reported is important.

I don’t pretend this approach to news gathering works perfectly, plus I do have the luxury of working from my home office and am in front of a computer most of the day. Also, there are probably more sources I would like to list here, but there is a limit to the time and money I can devote to news-gathering and to sources that require a paid subscription. I’m frustrated, for example, when a clicked link demands I first disarm my ad blocker. Sometimes, given the mix of devices and browsers I use (Mac and Linux machines, iPhone and iPad, and occasionally a Windows laptop) I can’t even figure out how to disarm the ad blocker.

Until further notice, that’s the way it is on December 16, 2023.