Gird your loins
It's a different world and you need to be in it
Growing up, I don’t remember ever relying on any one but CBS’ Walter Cronkite for news. I mean, my town had a newspaper and there was the slightly-larger Joplin Globe next door, but mostly? We believed Uncle Water.
If you go back now and watch him in action, the whole production looks sweetly bush-league. But not the journalism. Mr. Cronkite managed to earn and keep the trust of television viewers from across the political landscape, in part because he was a tough journalist and in part because we didn’t have such a huge pipeline of misinformation shooting swill at us 24-7.
I’m not sure we could ever have a Walter Cronkite today, and maybe that’s not a bad thing. It was never up to Walter Cronkite to keep us informed. That’s always been our responsibility, and now we must be far more proactive than in the past when it comes to assembling our news. I won’t go into the damage done by corporate media and hedge funds and organization such as Alden Global Capital (which purchased and is killing my Hartford Courant). And I won’t belabor my deep disgust of the New York Times and their incessant attempts to push Joe Biden off the ticket. You know this already. I don’t have good answers about corporate media (other than corporate media all die) but I do have a part of an answer for you, the regular news consumer.
At this point, if we’re not working to gather our own news then we are setting ourselves up for failure and not just in November. If we aren’t already, we should be going to varied and various news outlets and not just newspapers or magazines, and not just websites. You cannot call out the press for crappy reporting and then wait for someone to spoon-feed you the contents of, say, Project 2025. You cannot have it both ways, and the old model is not working. There are simply too many bad sources of bad information and people are skeptical — which is good — but too many are not taking action. They are, instead, whinging on about the sad state of affairs. Such hand-wringing is pointless after a while, and the only way to right the ship is pick up a goddamn oar. I have cheerfully muted a host of bedwetters on social media who daily haunt posts with this kind of horseshit. Yes, things are bad. Now what are you going to do about it? Start by working to inform your own self.
Feel free to share your favorite sources below. Let’s start today.
I am with Nancy on Beau of the Fifth Column. Jim and I catch him daily. The Atlantic is a daily check, and I still value Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid. What I miss is a LOCAL news source because so much is happening now behind closed doors that is in line with what is coming nationally, and I am seeing local governments trying to shut the public out more and more as fewer and fewer outlets have staff to pay attention. So I go to meetings, then tell everyone what happened. Sometimes WE need to be the source of truth.
Monday thru Friday, at about 10:00 a.m. Eastern, Democracy Now posts a 10-minute world news summary on YouTube. There is another Podcaster, who goes by "Beau of the Fifth Column", who posts multiple short segments a day on both national and international political issues. And I think both NPR and BBC world news have different perspectives to offer. I like multiple pov's, especially when I can listen vs watch or read, tbh.