Ramblings of a News Junkie

Over the last months, I think like many people, I have been questioning a lot of my assumptions. Among these were that my government is more-or-less on my side. As long as I am a law-abiding citizen, my government will, broadly speaking, leave me alone. If I break the law I will be treated more-or-less fairly by the legal system. I also assumed that people understand what freedom is and generally value and love theirs, and believe in freedom for their fellow citizens too, and that the mainstream media, taking into account the general left or right bias of the newspapers, broadly tell us the truth.

The last fifteen months has been a period of psychological and emotional seismic shifts for many people, and one of those shifts for me has been the questioning of all my previous assumptions. This questioning resulted in many things, but one of the most significant has been my move away from mainstream media to alternative, internet-based sources of news and comment.

I grew up in a household where politics was the main topic of conversation. If I wanted to be included in conversations, like my older brother and sister, I needed to be informed, so I started reading newspapers, and paying attention to the radio news from a young age. That habit has stayed with me my whole life. Fifteen months ago I would have said this was a good thing. Now I am not so sure.

The reason I am not so sure anymore is not that I think it is not worth being informed, it is that there are two main problems with being informed. One is that it can lead to a lot of emotional and psychological stress. It is now commonplace to attribute modern levels of heightened anxiety to the overwhelming amount of information we are subjected to: being apprised of all the terrible events happening all over the world, from wars, to plastic straws stuck up turtles’ noses, can become emotionally overwhelming. Still, I have always thought on balance it was better to be informed, and manage that stress, than not to know. The other problem with staying informed is sourcing your information. As Mark Twain warned, you may be misinformed if you do not make careful choices over your sources of information. In fact, if you get all your news and discussion from the mainstream media you may be effectively allowing yourself to be brain-washed.

By the middle of 2020 it was clear that television news and the papers were only telling one side of the story that was unfolding. If I hadn’t been such a news junkie it might not have been so obvious to me, but it was clear, all debate disappeared almost entirely.

So I switched from mainstream media to alternative sources. I now follow several podcasts. I use social media to keep an eye on what is happening and then go to mainstream news outlets to pick up on particular stories, but with armour against biased reporting firmly in place. I continue to read books to stay informed on larger, less ephemeral issues, such as climate change, the changing economic structure of society, and so on.

Moving away from mainstream media was in some ways frightening. The Times has an august reputation as does Radio 4, Newsnight, and so on. I have been used to thinking of them as reliable sources of relatively unbiased information. Did moving away from mainstream media mean that I would end up in a ‘silo’, a media echo-chamber where I only find my own beliefs and ideas reflected back to me? For somebody who likes to be informed, this is a frightening thought. The ‘silo’ issue is potentially a real problem, although it is exaggerated by a mainstream media. They do not want to lose their audience to niche, online news providers, in part for financial reasons and also because increasingly they have viewed their role as being to tell the audience what to think: they do not want them sloping off somewhere else to find an alternative view.

I do mourn my daily newspaper. In recent years I consumed it on my phone over my morning coffee, rather than on rustling sheets of unruly newsprint, but I still feel nostalgic, if not for the thing itself then perhaps the more peaceful state-of-mind I once possessed. I think up until the last five years or so, a credible case could be made for the media being reasonably unbiased, but in the last few years this has changed considerably. Recently there are some enshrined points of view, such as the disastrousness of manmade climate change (not suggesting there is no climate change or that it is not man made, just that it will not inevitably be a disaster; human ingenuity can find solutions just as it caused the problem!) and the answers to it, that are basically not allowed to be questioned in the mainstream media. It often feels that the mainstream media has by-and-large decided that its job is to tell its readers what to think, rather than providing them with in-depth reporting and allowing them to make up their own minds.

Ever since Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, the idea that the media reflects the views of the powerful, the government as well as the newspaper proprietors, has been pretty mainstream. They wrote in the eighties about America’s meddling in the political affairs of Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the brutal results of that meddling, which was presented to the American public in ways that made it seem palatable, at times honourable. It is a sobering read and although in specifics it may not seem relevant today I would argue it is supremely relevant.

Since the seismic shift in revenue for mainstream newspapers, as readers flooded away to free online offerings, the newspapers have relied more and more on advertising, and sponsors. An article published online in 2015 gives a succinct account of how The Telegraph became hostage to one of its largest advertisers, HSBC, giving an account of how reporters were ordered to destroy their notes and emails regarding an investigation into HSBC accounts in Jersey. Famously, if not notoriously, The Guardian’s Global Development site is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A list of all the philanthropic partnerships at The Guardian can be found here. They are open about their supporters, as far as we know this is all of them, and they do claim to maintain editorial balance but even with the best of intentions this is unlikely to be possible. The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun are a few of many newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns eight hundred companies in fifty countries. He has frequently been accused of using his media acquisitions to further his business interests.

Just like in the eighties newspapers are ‘manufacturing consent’ not just for governments, but for banks, large corporations, billionaire philanthropists, and anybody else who pays to keep the lights on. So, with mainstream media subject to undue and increasing influence from advertisers and donors it is not surprising that somebody wanting to find unbiased information should turn to alternative media. It is worth noting that many of those working in alternative media now used to be mainstream reporters. Perhaps they were once on the receiving end of orders to destroy notes and bury articles, and so decided it was time to move on.

Some of the best alternative journalists out there include Trish Wood and James Delingpole. There are also entire publications that are beyond the mainstream such as Unherd, and Spiked Online, which also has a good podcast. There are no doubt many others that you can add, for your specific interests, or your particular political leaning. We have to be wary though, according to this article the Gates Foundation gives “charitable grants” to Medium, among many, many others.

I would argue that whilst cherry-picking online offerings may well lead to silo-ing it can also lead to us pursuing our own interests and seeking out more, wider, and deeper information on the things that interest us and affect our lives. The mainstream media has been manufacturing our consent for many years now. This fact is something I now clearly see all around me, rather than view as a purely academic notion. Now is the time to start questioning the ideas, attitudes, and ideologies we have been fed over the last decade or two.

Before the internet there was little we could do to find out the things the mainstream media did not tell us. Now we can use the internet, carefully, to seek out a broad range of articles, opinions and information on a subject in just a few minutes. We can weigh these up and decide which seem most plausible. We can follow particular issues for months, or years, independent of the choices of newspaper editors. People will always have opinions and biases, and we will tend towards finding information that supports our own beliefs, but we all have many different beliefs and these can be fed into the discourse of society to create a patchwork of multiple opinions that must be embraced by those who wish to govern us. That is a far cry from a few mainstream media outlets ‘manufacturing consent’ to government or ideas we do not really want, and do not benefit us as individuals, or as a society.

In order to cope with the anxiety of the past year I keep myself informed using the trusted outlets I have found, and I am always on the lookout for more, reliable places to get my information. The world is a huge, complicated place and I think many of us who did not know it before, are realising that it does not trundle on broadly in a direction that benefits all its citizens, or even most of them. The answer to this is not to disengage from news of the world, but to find out as much as possible about what happens around us, and how we can influence it for the good.