"We have all become gnostics, immersed in our own special knowledge, accepting only those reports that comport with and support our own views, and rejecting both the reports and the reporters motives of things we don’t like. The brats who cancel reporters and editors over old tweets, pronouncing a Chinese word that sounds like a racial slur are steeped in this new news gnosticism to a degree not seen before, due to the velocity and volume of bad journalism."
Bad journalism has been with us for as long as we've had news and reporters. (Read up on the history of the fights between Pulitzer and Hearst, as well as "yellow journalism" to get started.) The antidote to this isn't to expect that the news you're listening to will magically get better and abandon the creed "if it bleeds, it leads", but instead to diversify your intake from a variety of sources and see where reporting starts to overlap and where one outfit or another is out over their skis alone.
On the technology front, I still use an RSS feed reader (feedly.com - how I arrived here this morning), which allows me to pull in traditional cable news, newspapers, longer form magazines, the business press, the technology reporting, as well as outfits like this one. Each of these has their own biases and audiences to cater to, and what will fly on CNN will be a lead balloon with CNBC's business audience.
This is pretty much a solved problem on the technology side of things. Trying to change the individual media outfits to conform to what you think news should be is a fool's errand (FOX and CNN are not going to stop reporting on what their audiences crave), so diversifying your own personal attention is about the best you can do. And in the process of doing so, you're giving some smaller outlets that may be overlooked in the cable news and newspaper wars some additional attention (and maybe cash in this new Substack world) so that they can continue to excel at what they're good at and maybe expand beyond the prior titans peddling modern yellow journalism.
"We have all become gnostics, immersed in our own special knowledge, accepting only those reports that comport with and support our own views, and rejecting both the reports and the reporters motives of things we don’t like. The brats who cancel reporters and editors over old tweets, pronouncing a Chinese word that sounds like a racial slur are steeped in this new news gnosticism to a degree not seen before, due to the velocity and volume of bad journalism."
Bad journalism has been with us for as long as we've had news and reporters. (Read up on the history of the fights between Pulitzer and Hearst, as well as "yellow journalism" to get started.) The antidote to this isn't to expect that the news you're listening to will magically get better and abandon the creed "if it bleeds, it leads", but instead to diversify your intake from a variety of sources and see where reporting starts to overlap and where one outfit or another is out over their skis alone.
On the technology front, I still use an RSS feed reader (feedly.com - how I arrived here this morning), which allows me to pull in traditional cable news, newspapers, longer form magazines, the business press, the technology reporting, as well as outfits like this one. Each of these has their own biases and audiences to cater to, and what will fly on CNN will be a lead balloon with CNBC's business audience.
This is pretty much a solved problem on the technology side of things. Trying to change the individual media outfits to conform to what you think news should be is a fool's errand (FOX and CNN are not going to stop reporting on what their audiences crave), so diversifying your own personal attention is about the best you can do. And in the process of doing so, you're giving some smaller outlets that may be overlooked in the cable news and newspaper wars some additional attention (and maybe cash in this new Substack world) so that they can continue to excel at what they're good at and maybe expand beyond the prior titans peddling modern yellow journalism.