Ridiculous Opinions #264
Oh, hi there!
I’ve been busy, and quite frankly, not that interested in writing the newsletter as of late. Partly because I’ve been exhausted (teaching is exhausting), and partly because there’s really been nothing to write about. Moving on…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the news lately, mainly in light of the current election in the United States. I’m not sure whether or not the news could ever truly be trusted, but in this day and age, it’s glaringly obvious that it’s just a shitshow of nonsense and clickbait. The news is designed to be outrageous and to make us salivate at the horrors in front of us and crave more of the same.
I read a LOT of news on a day-to-day basis and I wish that I didn’t. It’s toxic. Whether it’s mainstream media sanitizing the horrific things that Donald Trump says on a regular basis (here, here, and here…there are a thousand more instances…), their lack of coverage of anything good happening either in politics or the world in general (goodness gracious…crime is going down; the economy isn’t so bad, etc.), or their lack of coverage of anything else going on in the world that we should all be outraged about (the horrors that Israel is perpetuating in the Middle East, the horrors that Russia is perpetuating in Ukraine, the horrors of global warming, etc.), it is getting harder and harder to discern what, exactly, is happening in the world.
So my brain was pondering…how do you fix all of this? In a day and age where it can be a lot of work to sort the truth from the lies, how do you salvage what is left? When billionaire owners of newspapers can dictate what is said in those papers in order to serve their own interests, what hope do we have of changing the rhetoric? How do we fix this?
As I sat pondering this notion, my initial thought was that someone should form their own newspaper! It would be great to just start from scratch with a newspaper or media organization that was able to focus on things that are true. We need to create a new version of trusted journalism, where our reporters and editors are tasked with speaking truth to power, where their primary mandate is to speak in plain terms about what is actually happening, versus what the narrative might be.
That’s a really stupid idea.
It would be virtually impossible to build something like that in this day and age. To try to start a media organization from scratch is just a naive approach to all of this. How would you get reporters? How would you fund all of this? And the minute you start doing this type of thing, you become a slave to money, which will influence your coverage, which would lead us all down the same road upon which we currently find ourselves.
So with that completely out of the picture, what else is there to do in order to seek out the truth? Who can we trust to give us information?
I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, one of which is Nextdraft, run by Dave Pell. I’ve been a Nextdraft subscriber for over ten years and he is the only news source that I read regularly. I don’t know a lot about Dave himself, other than I suspect he made a LOT of money at some point in the tech industry. Either way, Dave publishes a newsletter every day that breaks down the news, with his commentary to add some extra flavor. I trust Dave’s approach to the news. Though I do not always agree with his opinions, he is someone who will give you the straight scoop. He scours the internet every day and then distills the information that he reads down into a digestible format that makes for quick reading and keeps me informed about a LOT of things happening in the world.
Then, it hit me. This is the new media.
Not a newsletter. That’s an old, but reliable, format. I think the future of news is distillation.
What if we started a news organization that had trusted reporters analyzing the news for us? What if we started a news organization that was able to look at the big picture, offer cogent analysis of everything that we see, and break down the truth through all of the noise? What if we had a one-stop shop that cut through all the bullshit and gave us exactly the information we needed (with links and references) to understand what is happening in the world?
That’s it. That’s the solution.
It’s what I do on a regular basis. Because I read through so much news, I often see patterns of reporting. I often see the same AP stories, lightly rewritten, across multiple news organizations. I often see people towing the same line when it comes to the dissemination of information. We need someone to cut through the noise for us.
Had I the wherewithal, that is what I would do. It would be cheap, easy, and thoughtful. Because of the way that the internet works, it would be able to be widely distributed without the barriers of big money’s influence. The “reporters” for this organization would have to be thoughtfully chosen and trustworthy. I would also shy away from opinion pieces, because the reporting that is going on is, inherently, opinion.
I’m sure you could sit back and say, This exists, Randall. It’s called a blog. And I would say that you’re right, but you’re also wrong. There’s no shortage of opinions on the internet. There’s no shortage of news analysis.
But there isn’t a coherent, one-stop shop for all of the analysis that we need. I would frame this entire thing as a news source for your news sources. It would be an educational lesson. It would be school for news. It would be a way for your average person to wade through the propaganda and be educated on issues that are thoughtful and relevant to their lives.
It is something I would love to see, but that is not something that is going to happen any time soon. I couldn’t do it. But someone like Dave Pell could. I would follow Dave without question and I would trust him to lead an organization that served as the central source of our information in this day and age.
Wouldn’t it be nice to trust the news again?
Come on, Dave. Make this happen.
Happy Birthday Mr. GIRDNER. I hope your day was a great one.