The internet is a beautiful thing, except when it is not. At a tap of your finger it brings a world of information, or a firehouse of disinformation. Rabbit holes of conspiracy theories and unvetted “news” from every angle of the political, medical and economic spectrum. The internet is NOT to be trusted, and frankly the world needs to get off the web at least 22 of the 24 hours in a day.
Gone are the days when trusted filters with long track records and editors with green-shaded visors poured over copy for sources and evidence. Today, we are bombarded with tweets, blogs, and aggregates written by anyone with a computer who claims “I do my own research”.
So, as a public service I here now recommend the following list of 5 vetted, trusted sources of information and news which have systems in place to avoid misinformation, and when they make mistakes, retract and revise. Yes, the New York Times and many in the mainstream media made huge errors in the run up to the Iraq War, but they later admitted as such and chastised themselves.
This list will consume under 2 hours of your day and allow you to sound smart at dinner parties, pick a President, know the sports scores and go about your day.
1. Turn off cable news, unless there is a major breaking news; a new war, a school shooting, plane crash or otherwise. And then tune into CNN which has the world’s largest TV reporting staff, way ahead of any other domestic broadcast service. The rest of the time, CNN and the other major cable networks MSNBC and Fox are filled with comment and opinion. While that can be entertaining, it is not news and not necessary. My guilty pleasure is Rachel Maddow.
2. Watch one or more of the 3 evening network TV broadcasts and 60 Minutes on Sunday. Even watching all 3 nightly news programs takes less than an hour if you fast forward through the commercials. They are a quick 18 minutes of news, a summary of the top stories of the day reported with perspective and in most cases experienced journalists. They have seasoned editors who vet each story and best of all, there is no time for opinion. No commentators, just news. CBS is my favorite, NBC a close second. But that’s subjective, the most popular is my former place of employment for nearly 20 years, ABC. CBS has 2 excellent Washington political correspondents, Ed O’Keefe and Robert Costa, former newspaper reporters (Washington Post) with an emphasis on straight reporting, rather than looks and performance. NBC has Andrea Mitchell, Kelly O’Donnell and Peter Alexander, with years of experience. ABC has Jon Karl, Martha Raddatz, Pierre Thomas and the up and coming Mary Bruce, all of whom know their stuff.
But perhaps most important, the process at the networks makes for few mistakes. Each script is reviewed by “the rim”. That consists of a senior producer, the executive producer and in most cases, the anchor/managing editor. Opinion, error and bias are flushed out. As are grammatical mistakes.
3. Respected national newspapers: The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Reading the top stories in these papers takes more time, but each has more actual reporters than television, radio or blogs. Their reporting is straight and dependable. And in an hour over morning coffee you will be educated and filled with data and information that will be useful when you encounter the hate filled disinformation flooding your direction each day on the internet.
4. If you have time, move to the second tier of newspapers on line. More regional in their coverage….the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal-Constitution or your local paper.
5. The Daily podcast. An arm of the New York Times, this half hour or so audio deep dive into one subject of importance makes one smarter. Each weekday morning the hosts who are decidedly not radio veterans with big voices or rapid fire cadences, interview a Times reporter about a story on their beat. From the Supreme Court to Congress to the White House and beyond. Another guilty pleasure: Countdown with Keith Olbermann, decidedly from the left, but smart and a great writer/performer.
That’s it. We would all be better served by limiting our intake. Choose a few of the myriad of would be news organizations. Make your own list, chosen after they have earned your trust. I know I have left out the scores of narrowly focused internet outlets from Politico to the Daily Beast. Mostly because they are insider type publications or in many cases aggregators which merely take from other news sources and re-publish to the internet. I’m not saying don’t read them but they can be done without for the general reader.
Also save your precious time by avoiding the tabloids, from the NY Post to the Daily Mail. And agenda publications like Breitbart and Daily Caller. They are not dependable, and they are filled with conspiracies and disinformation.
Use Facebook, TikTok and Instagram to share memories and photos, not conspiracies. And Twitter to alert you to ongoing events or breaking news. But switch to your trusted sources after the alert. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, my feed has become a deluge of hate and right wing drama.
It’s hard to look away, but we would all be better off if we did.
