Quick quote from a short blog post I read last week:
The News is like alcohol. Both are drugs that give you a quick buzz but both are depressants. Both are habit forming. Some people can do moderation but many struggle with that.
2020 showed us that if you lock people in their homes for months on end, deprive them of the people they love, their basic freedoms and hook them up to The News and Social Media 24 hours a day, they go completely mental.
it has felt like The Public Square is broken. Online discussion is a poor substitute for face to face discussion. It’s only when discussing things face to face that you get the full range of vocal cues, body language and tonal emphasis.
To me, the most important bit in the post was this:
We can choose to reduce and control our intake. We can get more of our information from primary sources.
The most reliable information in the right context is from primary sources. It’s suprising how many news articles, tweets and blog posts all eventually quote the same source. And how different interpretations (not always malign) can change the original meaning.
But locating that source takes time. And it follows that because you can only read so many news sources, that you pick them carefully.
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