My Primary News Sources

In 2020, I feel I am not alone in my complex and confusing relationship with the news. Frankly, my resentful, Jon Stewart-esque disposition toward traditional news media has been gradually building for quite a while. Finding the truth in a journalistic landscape overrun by sensationalized exaggerations, biases, hidden agendas, misleading oversimplifications, and outright falsehoods rapidly becomes a task so draining, so infuriating, that it becomes easiest to just not attempt it in the first place. This phenomenon reached a personal breaking point with the COVID-19 pandemic – a topic which I have a specific, excessive sensitivity to/phobia around. News publishers across the world were (and still are) having an absolute field day with a global pandemic. People are confused, emotional, feeling vulnerable and needing answers; it’s like 9/11 every day, except now with “retweets” and Instagram “stories” continuing the incessant updates everywhere you go. The inability to escape the constant stream of often biased, anxiety-inducing, misleading, or otherwise divisive Coronavirus headlines quickly became too much to handle. So I said “screw it”; deleted my social media/news apps, and for the first time in months, remember feeling even brief moments of inner peace. 

 

Photo by Obi Onyeador on Unsplash

This wasn’t the first time I had done this, so it wasn’t the first time I experienced that surprising relieving of pent-up stresses I was either unaware of or simply used to. It was, however, the most powerful catharsis in memory, and whether that is a result of my since-increased age, experience, pressures/responsibilities, or a greater shift in society, it became immensely clear to me that something must change. Certainly, I’ve yet to find the magic bullet, as avoiding the news entirely is as impractical as it is inadvisable, however I simply refuse to chip away at my mental health in exchange for merely keeping some apps on my phone. As a result, I’m writing this post in a bit of a peculiar situation – I actively avoidnews coverage, and I feel confident in saying that any sources I may have used years ago are too biased for me to go to now. 
 
That being said, I am still human, and so there are still applications for the news and news articles, albeit some rather niche. Of course, there are still times in my life where I want to know more about a specific event, situation, or idea; take the tragic explosion in Beirut, SpaceX’s “Starlink” project, or Kamala Harris being selected as Biden’s running mate as recent examples. These are concepts I’m already aware of (typically via word of mouth or texts), and essentially already know what kind of information one would have to sift through when trying to learn more. In such cases, I tend to use sources with relatively little bias, if sometimes a bit left-leaning, such as the Wall Street Journal or TIME and the BBC for both national and then global news respectively. I tend to trust the consistency and perspective of these publications, and they admittedly tend to be personally agreeable in their injections of opinion. 

 

Photo by visuals on Unsplash

The problem being, even when merely accessing these publications’ landing pages to retrieve the URLs to hyperlink, I was somehow still provided with a hundred new, anxiety-inducing ways the world is going to end next month! As previously described, it is this modern journalistic climate that has effectively shrunk my proactive news consumption to primarily publications with a specific focus. For example, I frequent Pigeons & Planes, Genius, and sometimes Complexat large to get my fix of music industry headlines and information. And despite my best efforts, I still encounter news regarding anything from foreign trade deals to Nintendo games across “pseudo-social” media sites like YouTube or Reddit. 
 
Ultimately, and to my dismay, I conclude just as confused and overwhelmed as I began. I absolutely recognize the responsibility of an active citizen to remain informed on issues past and present, and I certainly wouldn’t call myself “apolitical,” but attempting to sort through wave after wave of information dumps all fighting for your attention is emotionally and mentally exhausting. I don’t envy the position genuinely good journalists are in right now; truly just taking it in the jaw from both parties as a result of their peers’ shady practices. However, until consumers and publishers alike start to make a shift in the broken, damaging 24-hour news cycle, a healthy relationship with the media will continue to elude me.