Since I began delivering newspapers at age 10, I’ve spent time every morning consuming the day’s news. Then, a few years ago I started to notice that I was becoming addicted to news and coincidentally becoming more alarmed about our country and our world. Each year since then I have read less news from fewer sources.
Advertising-driven media competes for views and clicks as if in mortal combat. Policies and oversight cannot keep up with the tsunami of online and social media “channels”. And my mental health could become a casualty of their war.
For me the only remedy is self-regulation, guided by these three steps:
- Media diet, reducing both my sources and time spent on media.
- When I hear “record breaking”, “trend”, or an “historic first”, I do a little research often finding “record” is obscure, the “trend” is fad and “historic” is hyperbole.
- Do a little something, here in my tiny universe, that addresses my own real concerns.
Other than sports news, my primary interest, I listen only to Bloomberg/Newsweek, NPR, and my local news website; mostly neutral but less slanted than MSNBC or FoxNews, for example.
Sources for my research: www.USAFacts.com a non-partisan, non-profit assembler of data and research and www.pewreserach.org, a non-partisan, non-profit collector of opinions.
Then there are three issues that, for me deserve my attention and my actions, however small:
Issue: Our country (again) is affected by a rapidly increasing bipolarization of wealth creating richer rich people and poorer poor people.Response: Alice and my foundation’s is entirely centered on economic inclusion.
Issue: Our system of voting rights and election integrity is being tampered with.
Response: I work as a precinct judge in my neighborhood.
Issue: Our world is experiencing increasing effects from air and water pollution.
I’ve become aware of and am working on my carbon footprint.
Will I change the world? No, and likely neither will you. But I only strive to see the facts beneath the reporting (so that I don’t freak out) and do my own little bit about the things I care about.
Most of those who came before us faced far more challenging times, such as the British who, when faced with extinction around 1940 came up with the slogan: “keep calm and carry on”.
And so, I keep calm (limit my news consumption) and carry on (do my little bit for change).
Peace.
Tim McCarthy
