Culling My News Feed

I've never really been a news junkie or a political junkie.  My Uncle Sam used to go to the corner store every Sunday morning and purchase all the New York newspapers except The Times, which he would replace with the National Enquirer.  There were multiple daily papers in those days, all but two folded.  As I moved on to college, The Times could be purchased from a dispenser.  Philadelphia had the Inquirer in the morning and the Bulletin in the evening.  I preferred the Bulletin, of blessed memory.  Once I graduated, I rarely read the paper and really never became a great devotee of Sunday morning's talking heads, though I learned to Washington Week in Review.  I much preferred magazines, some by subscription, some in libraries.

CNN became a novelty once I got cable.  The novelty wore off as the stories became more sensationalized for capturing market share.  As our political process became more toxic and the sources mostly linked to agendas, I've largely not watched anything that I could predict accurately without watching it, which is most things these days.

There is misinformed and there is uniformed.  I'm probably neither.  I protect what I access but I access some things.  Cyberspace being what it is, most comes to me passively in small bites as a news feed each time I try to see who is mad at me on e-mail.

While I am pretty amenable to what people try to tell me, some screening goes on based on source.  Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and NY Times get shoved aside, usually without looking at the title.  There is nothing editorially objectionable about these but they want my money more than they want my intellect.  I cannot read them without a subscription.  Off they go.

Fox News will let me read anything.  Once an entity establishes itself as offensive, even thrives that way as part of the business plan, even the sports scores and recipes and travel advice go unopened, with that notice slid into my electronic wastebasket.

That leaves me with a lot of stuff to open.  Science from science publications, I like recipes adaptable to Kosher, I watch and read about sports in a limited way, I know where conflicts are, and I can figure out which public figures, political or starlets, are far afield from what I aspire for myself or my children.  I remain adequately informed, and without the sources that think I am either too much of peasant to engage for a price or too stupid to understand when I am being manipulated as part of the business model, I have more good stuff to read and think about than I can realistically engage.