Gorging on News
Working towards a diet of healthy information intake; consuming quality over quantity.
I not only write news. I follow the news. Incessantly.
Any assessor would deem me a bona fide news junkie. All night, every night, I stream BBC Radio World on the iPhone bedside. For decades I’ve had the uncanny ability to awake whenever the announcer reads a major bulletin – assassination, passenger plane crash, devastating earthquake, etc.
After rising – some days as early as four o’clock, I check the headlines fed to my e-mail inbox. As I begin the commute north, NPR’s Morning Edition is on the car radio, alternating with WTOP (“traffic and weather on the eights”), as well as 45,000-watt WDCH-FM 99.1 out of Bowie, Maryland, better known as Bloomberg Radio, to monitor the Asian markets.
At my desk, I constantly scan four computer screens that stream three major wire services and the social media feeds. There is also a TV monitor on which I can see live shots from the White House, Capitol Hill or important news conferences anywhere in the world. If something really big is erupting that isn’t immediately on of those feeds, I can switch over to CNN, especially its more newsy international feed, which I’ll usually have muted. Is Wall Street suddenly jittery? I switch over to Bloomberg TV or CNBC.
As I discuss assignments with my editors in a couple of morning meetings, there may be time to check what’s on the front pages of The New York Times and the Washington Post.
I almost never take a lunch break and when there is a brief lull in the afternoon, there is time to skim a wider array of content – such as Bulwark, The Dispatch, the inside-the-beltway output (The Hill and Politico primarily), and the pulse of the opinion pages, partisan columnists and international publications, such as the Economist, the Nikkei Asian Review, as well as VOA’s own news site, where there are stories from pockets of Asia and Africa that are important but hard to find from English language news sources. I can decipher headlines in Spanish, French and German, as well as in Chinese and Japanese though I’ll usually cheat and pull up Google translate if I decide to read the full stories.
In the evening, there is time the long-form pieces in The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal. Years ago, however, I stopped watching cable news at home.
You get the picture. I am really, really plugged in.
Through the firehose moves a lot of water under high pressure. Only the foolish try to drink from it to quench their thirst. You will be knocked sideways and bruise your face. But that is what we are frequently trying to do — swallow rivers of information.
When I moved to Japan in the early 1980s, I went from a youthful culture of quickly down big shots of cheap liquor to sipping refined saké from porcelain cups. My Japanese hosts, whom I regarded as connoisseurs, studied the artwork of their cup, slowly raised it between lip and nose, giving a subtle sniff and then turning it slightly toward the mouth, muttered kanpai and subtly ingested a trickle of liquid. It was a process, almost a meditation (as is chadō, the tea ceremony).
These drinkers knew the provenance of their liquor and just how dry or sweet it was on a scale. A lot of thought went into selecting which bottle to summon for a particular occasion or the rank of the guest. (It took me years to graduate to the good stuff.)
I just realized this analogy is turning into a nostalgic digression. The point hopefully you inferred is that quality prevails over quantity and how we imbibe our news shouldn’t be any different.
Just as some gravitate to a lazy but comforting intake of PB&J sandwiches plus Pringles, many settle for a single source based on their political appetite – be it Joe Rogan, Newsmax, MSNBC, the Daily Show or the Drudge Report. This leads to confirmation bias – gravitating to a comfortable platform that’ll regurgitate your preferred taste, but will never challenge your palate.
Just as I understand those who eschew exercise (it takes effort and time and it can be hard!), I empathize will those who ignore the news or pay it superficial heed. After all, there’s too much of it. Opinion seeps into the reporting. Even mainstream and reputable outlets are accused of having an agenda. Some purveyors are literally bought and paid for (see: pink slime). Why bother? It’s a hell of a lot of work to find the valuable kernels amid all that slop.
But as Dean Wormer informed Flounder: “Fat, drunk and stupid is now way to go through life, son.”
Unlike the frat boys of Delta House, most of us are trying, at least a little bit. But most of us are not news professionals or full-time consumers of content – but we’re all too often tempted to snack on TikTok, YouTube or WhatsApp. Facebook has eased us into an algorithm of serving dubious content from the friends and others with whom we most frequently interact. The reverse chronological timeline seems impossible to find. Essentially, on a lot of these platforms, we have little control over what we experience.
Much content which isn’t news is now labeled “news,” so you can think you’re getting news — that’s exactly what pushing that pink slime is about.
It reminds me of an opposite approach when I was a Discovery Channel executive back when there was actually something of value to discover there. Promoting documentaries wasn’t a hit with advertisers so our content was rebranded as “edutainment.” That label was short-lived and the channel, seeking the highest possible ratings and catering to the lowest common denominator, eventually jumped the shark (week) to Naked and Afraid of Sharks 2.
Yet we wade in these shark-infested waters. Our eyes glaze over the curated videos of the prurient, mock feuding and true crime which may entertain and distract us from the troubles of daily life, but do little to inform.
I could stand on a soapbox and be the old man yelling that the problem is we no longer teach civics in schools or have stopped unifying our citizenry through mandatory national service. Where’s Walter Cronkite?!
Yes, there are those – of a certain generation – yearning for the so-called good ol’ days. Others see the past as archaic, discriminatory and a cautionary tale. It is apparent from giving lectures across the country and taking questions from the audiences that the muscle of critical thinking has atrophied in all age groups and political preferences.
So what can we do? What can I do?
In recent years, I’ve asked myself numerous time what’s the point of writing the news if no really gets the news? To get it is to understand how it relates to fundamental issues and to interpret the nuances. The purveyors are selling flawed products and consumers cannot discern the defects.
I am very fortunate to work for the Voice of America, non-commercial, non-profit and government-funded, focusing on a non-North American audience where our reporting must be built from the bottom up, explaining terms and players that an American reader would or should know. My stories are translated into dozens of languages. Thus I must void cheeky phrases, difficult-to-translate analogies and ambiguous aphorisms. No inside baseball outside of the stadium. But I try to hit one out of the park, or at least advance the runner, every time I am called to the plate. On Friday that meant taking a crack at explaining the mutual embrace of former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and a former Republican president, Donald J. Trump.
I frequently feel I am striking out.
I am not pushing an agenda, not playing favorites. But on any sensitive topic there comes criticism on social media from both the right and the left informing me I’ve got it all wrong. How come I didn’t mention this or that? Constant invectives of what I call “whataboutism” abound. And sometimes there are threats to inflict bodily harm because of the way a post is headlined or incorrectly interpreted. Folks, please keep in mind a one-sentence tweet — or whatever we now call it in the Musk era — are not news stories. When I post something from a Trump rally or the tarmac next to Air Force One, it is a snippet. Maybe I’ll have a real story later, maybe not. It’s a microsecond in time. A snapshot, not the movie. These posts are the protozoa of the body of journalism the same way journalism is the first draft of history.
Yes, most online critics don’t even bother to read our stories. They have preconceived notions so they think, why bother? And of course in this mix are the bots, trolls, bad actors and the propagandists working on behalf of hostile foreign governments – like mushrooms after a rain storm they proliferate under the clouds of what we are told are existential elections. That’s why I mostly don’t read the comments in my feeds.
Again, I undergo a self-inquisition. What can I do I’m already not doing? When I was on the White House beat, the answer was not much else. The job was frequently seven days a week, up to 18 or even 20 hours per day. There were even longer endurances on international trips with presidents, vice presidents and secretaries of state. I realized that if one stays awake for 30 hours or more, there are hallucinations of flying insects.
On my rare days off, I did little else but sleep and try to eat a decent meal.
My sleep habits and nutritional intake improved in 2022 after I took myself off that non-stop high-speed treadmill and a non-election year break finally from the campaign trails.
To provide a bit more historical context and insight into how the sausage is made, I wrote Behind the White House Curtain: A Senior Journalist’s Story of Covering the President—and Why It Matters, published by the estimable Kent State University Press. (The editors weren’t keen on my suggested catchy two-word title: Press Pass — book title algorithms also apparently influence buyers.)
I also began teaching part-time. Two universities in Virginia agreed, even though I do not possess a PhD, to allow me to guide undergraduates in college classrooms where journalism was being taught. I listened to my students’ burgeoning beliefs and occasional criticisms, such as “We don’t want to hear that Edward R. Murrow should be our role model.” A very bright, activist student actually said that. Ouch.
I invited talented guest lecturers, including Pulitzer Prize recipient Lewis Simons, whom I first met in Asia decades ago, veteran war correspondent Mike Boettcher and the peripatetic Patsy Widakuswara, my stellar successor as VOA’s White House bureau chief. All, I thought, should be more modern role models if Murrow is moot.
It is vital to inculcate the rising stars of journalism, even though I realize most of my younger students will gravitate to public relations or totally unrelated fields where there is job stability and a thicker pay packet. But journalism training is valuable for every stakeholder in our democracy. That includes dialogue with the more mature members of society.
My most engaged audiences have been the silver set in retirement communities, online courses and the itinerant Road Scholars (not to be confused with Rhodes Scholars). They remember Cronkite, Huntley & Brinkley, Peter Jennings, Max Robinson and, of course, Edward Murrow. All in this senior student set likely had that now elusive civics class, perhaps some of them in a quaint one-room classroom. But those now wrinkled with wisdom have made it to this century frequently illiterate in navigating the online universe with its black holes of disinformation, phishing and phonies.
Not only are our elders especially vulnerable to scams, they can have trouble tracing the origins and motives of the YouTube videos and Facebook ads that autoplay. So, when the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Johns Hopkins University invited me to teach online a six-session course on media literacy I agreed to do it amid covering the final stretch of a presidential election.
I am hoping to also learn from these students as we collectively attempt improve our fitness to confront the complexities of our media environment.
I may be no Jack LaLanne of journalism, but I maybe I can serve as an adequate coach as we progress from the old school dumbbells to the newfangled ellipticals.
