My Media diet
A friend asked me recently where I get my news. My reflex was to say “the BBC, probably.” But the question stuck with me, because the honest answer turned out to be more complicated than a single channel, and getting to it meant retracing about twenty years of deliberately rearranging how information reaches me.
When I was younger I spent a few years studying video editing and visual effects, and one of the first things you learn in any editing class is the Kuleshov effect The short version: the same shot of a man’s face reads as hunger, grief, or longing depending only on the shot you place next to it. The meaning isn’t in the footage. It’s in the juxtaposition. Anyone who works in video knows this, and once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. It changes how you watch the news.
Because if a single cut can manufacture an emotion out of nothing, then the people assembling a broadcast have enormous power over what you feel. I realized years ago that the actual business of the news, print or broadcast, is to sell tomorrow’s news. The goal every single day is to get you to tune in again the next day, and the most reliable way to do that is fear. That’s where “if it bleeds, it leads” comes from. Outrage and dread keep eyeballs on the screen and ad revenue flowing, and even outlets honestly trying to get it right get pulled toward the hyperbolic and the dramatic, because that’s what brings you back. By most long run measures I could find, the world was actually getting better crime falling, fewer people living in poverty but you would never guess it from the evening broadcast.
So more than twenty years ago, I opted out. I stopped following the news entirely, for my own peace of mind. If something genuinely mattered a bill, a law I’d go read the actual text and see what lawyers and subject matter experts said about it, rather than absorb a thirty second clip engineered to make me feel something. I canceled my subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, the only two papers I read with any regularity. Part of my reasoning back then was that you can’t change most of what’s in the news anyway, so why carry it around?
Then social media arrived. I was resistant from the start late to MySpace, later still to Facebook but I used both for years, and after a while things started to smell funny. I watched Facebook polarize people I knew. I caught myself doom scrolling for hours without learning a single thing worth keeping. Reddit was better, because I could drop into very narrow communities. Linux for audio production, people who sleep on the floor, that kind of thing but I also watched friend after friend get pulled into conspiracy theories and outright lies. So I took a hard look at the whole arrangement. I read Stolen Focus and Careless People, which laid out exactly how these algorithms work and what they cost, and I opted out of that too. I deleted Facebook and Twitter.
The last few years I have been focusing on being as intentional as possible. I decided to take my whole life offline as much as I could. I read paper books. I listen to vinyl. I buy and watch physical discs instead of trawling a feed for two hours looking for something to watch. And I brought the news back but only in print, where there’s no infinite scroll to fall into and no algorithm deciding what I see next.
What changed my mind about whether being informed even matters was this: we’ve lost our shared reality. There used to be a common narrative and for all its flaws, the whole country more or less watched the same evening news and argued from the same set of facts. Now we live in algorithmic bubbles, two populations inhabiting two distinct realities, with the extremes getting louder in both. And as the press gets bought up by a handful of enormously wealthy owners, I’ve come to think a lot of our domestic news is compromised at the source.
The Fairness Doctrine, the rule that from 1949 required broadcasters to cover the hard issues and air opposing views was killed in 1987, and partisan talk radio and cable poured into the vacuum. The rot is older than that, even: Carl Bernstein’s reporting and the Church Committee documented the CIA’s Cold War habit of keeping working relationships with hundreds of journalists, at places like CBS and the New York Times. And it isn’t history. When Fox got sued over Tucker Carlson, its own lawyers won the case by arguing that no reasonable viewer takes him to be stating actual facts — and MSNBC used the identical “it’s only opinion” defense to protect Rachel Maddow. So the networks themselves will tell a judge that they aren’t really in the business of handing you the truth. Now layer on a government that leans on the outlets it dislikes: it barred the Associated Press from the White House for refusing to write “Gulf of America,” and as I write this its FCC is demanding early license renewals from ABC’s stations in what the network calls unconstitutional retaliation. A threat alarming enough that even Ted Cruz called it “dangerous as hell.” When the press admits in court it isn’t selling facts, and the state squeezes the broadcasters it doesn’t like, compromised is underselling it.
That’s a big part of why I read foreign papers, and why I pay for the ones I trust rather than take what’s free. So here, finally, is where my information actually comes from.
Newspapers
The Guardian Weekly. A British paper, kept independent by the Scott Trust. profits go back into the journalism rather than to shareholders or a billionaire owner. Both of those are why I read it: an outside vantage on the world, from an outlet that isn’t structurally owned by big business. Americans tend to have a narrow view of global politics, and this widens it.
County Highway. Walter Kirn and David Samuels’ broadsheet “a magazine about America in the form of a 19th-century newspaper,” six issues a year. It bills itself as “America’s Only Newspaper,” by which they mean one of the few that’s genuinely independent and not chasing digital traffic or corporate money. I look forward to every issue.
Le Monde Diplomatique. Monthly, in its English edition. A French vantage on world affairs more of that wider angle, non American view of the world.
The Onion. Got to keep it fun. Fittingly, it came back to print recently part of the same quiet turn back toward paper.
Magazines
The Atlantic. One of the oldest magazines in the country, founded back in 1857, and now monthly again. Long, in depth, genuinely reported pieces across a huge range of subjects. This is real journalism and I read it whenever I can.
Harper’s. Monthly. Long form essays and reporting of the kind that’s getting rarer.
Reason. I keep this one around on purpose. It and County Highway will happily disagree with what I read in the Guardian, and that’s the point: staying out of a bubble is hard, and the easiest way to build a nicer, more flattering one is to only read people you already agree with. So I don’t.
New in Chess. The Dutch chess magazine, eight issues a year. I’m a chess nerd and this is where I get most of my chess news.
Linux Magazine. Monthly. Where I get my Linux news, and one I always look forward to.
2600: The Hacker Quarterly.I’ve been reading this since the ‘90s and I have a lifetime subscription. Every issue is full of independent thought about technology and its role in society. It’s still one of my favorites.
Freeze64. A UK fanzine about old Commodore 64 games that turns up every five or six weeks. I wouldn’t call it news, but I sure enjoy it.
Make:. The maker movement magazine, now quarterly. It nearly disappeared in 2019 when its publisher abruptly shut down, then came back, which I’m glad of. I’m always inspired by it and always wishing I had time for more projects than I do.
Mother Earth News. Bimonthly. I’m an ecologist at heart, and I love its writing on living more intentionally with the land.
Self-Reliance and Backwoods Home, both quarterly. These pair perfectly with Mother Earth News and are an education in self-sufficiency. Highly recommend.
American Bee Journal. Monthly. I keep bees, and this is well worth it whether you already do or just want to understand them.
Mad Magazine. In print, because of course.
Nature. Weekly. This is a hard core scientific journal for academic institutions. I can’t read every issue cover to cover, but I read the cover stories of each one.
Online
Reddit. I still use it for niche topics, and I’ll admit I can fall into doom-scrolling, so I keep my time on it short and I’m careful to double-check the source of anything I take away from it.
Mastodon.My one social platform of choice. There’s no algorithm at all you see who you follow and nothing else. It’s open source, community owned, and anyone can stand up their own server and join the broader fediverse. It’s a little more involved than the usual social media, but worth it. For me it’s mostly jokes and Linux posts, because that’s what I follow.
So that’s the diet. It isn’t “I quit the news.” What I quit was a business model and a delivery system the daily, ad funded, fear tuned feed. What I read now is slow, paid for, held in my hands, and foreign when I need a wider angle.