Establishing A New News Diet For The New Year

We often joke about January as the month when gyms fill up with people trying to fulfill overly ambitious New Year’s resolutions about weight loss, only to empty out by February. This year, knowing myself too well to get a gym membership, I decided to focus on a different kind of diet: my news diet.

Just as it’s easy for one’s food consumption to be made poor by stress and a lack of time to plan and prepare meals, I have let my news consumption lax over the decade or so. Some of this is personal, and some of it is structural. Just as a poor diet can be rooted in a broader food culture that produces and pushes junk food, my poor news consumption has been abetted by a national media culture that pushes the equivalent of journalistic junk food.

For a long time, I had a pretty steady news diet, one far better than the food I was eating. As a college student in the 90s I may have had a few too many late-night runs to Taco Bell, but I read the local paper and the Times practically every day (both available in the student lounge of the history department) as well as weekly news magazines like Newsweek and The Economist. (I was a debater in college, so it was part of the deal.) In the evening, I would often watch Newshour on PBS. In grad school, I added morning NPR listening while grabbing one of the copies of the Times that was always lying around the teaching assistant’s lounge. By that time, the Golden Age of the Internet had dawned, and I could read newspapers from around the world online for free.

That version of the internet (which I miss so much) gave rise to the blogosphere, which I heartily jumped into. Instead of reading the fatuous palaver of Dowd, Brooks, and Friedman on the Times’ opinion pages, I could read far more insightful voices. I still relied on the Times’ news coverage, but I went to bloggers for analysis.

When the 2010s dawned, I had ventured onto social media, but my news diet still mostly consisted of my Times subscription, the BBC app, various blogs, and especially NPR. Getting on Twitter began to change these habits for me, however. By following lots of journalists and other smart people I could rely on them to share links to important stories. It’s where I started going for news first every day, not any news site. Twitter was more satisfying because it cut through the bullshit framings I was finding ever more frustrating in mainstream news sources. This was especially the case once Trump came onto the electoral scene.

The Times’ infamous coverage of Hilary Clinton’s emails was the culmination of the mainstream media’s pained attempts to treat Trump like a “normal” politician and go out of their way to “balance” their coverage. NPR’s coverage in 2016 was so mealy-mouthed that I pretty much stopped listening to it completely despite years of being a tote-bag-carrying public radio stan. The election coverage disaster was then followed by all of those horrible “Donald Trump became president today” articles. The Times and their brethren desperately wanted to normalize Trump so that they could maintain their detached “both sides” stance and stenographer to the powerful gig forever. Despite January 6th altering this dynamic somewhat, they publish every op-ed they can poo poo-ing courts disqualifying Trump under the 14th Amendment. The Washington Post just let go of Greg Sargent, their main opinion writer on the democracy beat.

While Twitter offered refreshing doses of real political analysis instead of horserace coverage and “both sides” equivocation, it started to become a trap. Scrolling Twitter, especially in the chaos and death of 2020, would severely darken my moods. I found myself getting angry all the time and getting drawn into rancorous personal beefs among Twitter personalities. That was before Elon Musk took over. He’s now pushed out a lot of people (including me) and by eliminating link information to outside sites he’s made it very hard to use Twitter to find news.

Twitter was not the only part of my news diet making me unhealthy. I must also now admit that yes, I started watching a lot of MSNBC around the time of Trump’s rise and continued into his presidency. Whereas so much media coverage was of the “but her emails” variety, Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow cut through that by treating Trump as the serious threat that he is. In the overheated atmosphere of the Trump presidency, watching Maddow and Hayes and their guests made me feel more sane. Over time, however, MSNBC bore diminishing returns. The shows just began repeating the same narratives over and over again. They did a good job of excavating Trump’s scandals, but often missed the big picture. Their breathlessness complemented my doom scrolling in negative ways, making me feel anxious and hopeless.

Last year I quit Twitter, and I barely ever watch MSNBC anymore. I also read the Times for local and international news only, ignoring their horserace political coverage. (The Washington Post has tended, up until now to do a better job of political analysis.) I suddenly went from a junk food diet to a starvation diet, which is just as bad or even worse.

This year, I am setting out to consume more news and get back to the healthy diet I once had. Instead of leaving the Times app in disgust when I am hit by one of their stupid national politics headlines on the landing page, I will go straight to the International page. I will keep hitting up the Washington Post for politics analysis, however. I am going to keep using BlueSky, but am resolved to close it out the minute I am agitated by something stupid. Weirdly, I have found it better to follow a bunch of news sites on Instagram, where I can find a lot of quality coverage without the overheated discourse. I’ve also decided to watch more TV news again, but to do it on BBC World. For a different outside perspective (and to keep my language skills fresh) I am planning on reading more German-language media again.

We are entering what promises to be one of the most contentious political years of my lifetime. It is happening as misinformation has metastasized to truly frightening levels. I have resolved this year to spend less time complaining and more time acting. For that to be possible, I need to be informed, and also not burned out on politics by the wretchedness of online discourse. It’s going to be a hard year, but one so momentous that no one can just sit it out. As you spend the new year thinking about physical diet and exercise, take a minute to think about your news diet, too.