What Media Do I Consume?

    I miss the times when I was in middle and high school when there was a sense that we all existed in the same informational world.  The Bills couldn't win a super bowl if their lives depended on it, we all cared whether the US government knew that Iraq had or hadn't possessed WMDs, and as a society we generally respected truth and facts as the material for which discussions and debates were based.

    I may certainly be accused of seeing the past through rose colored glasses here-- after all I was just in my youth!  I would discover later in university through Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death and Marshall McLuhan's ideas about "the medium is the message" that there was already a burgeoning awareness and concern around truth and informational fidelity.  Nonetheless, that youthful belief that we "respected truth and facts" is way more difficult to maintain in our current day in age.  A catalyst for this difficulty is the abundance of informational sources providing a veritable buffet of truthfulness, bias options and niche perspectives.  The upshot of having all these sources is that, while we exercise our personal preferences, we increasingly consume a different and individually curated informational world.  It seems more difficult today to agree upon, let alone respect, the facts by which to develop opinions, ideas and solutions.

    As a small step towards addressing that unfortunate difficulty, I provide below a list of the places I get my information about the world.  The list intends to shed light on the informational world that I inhabit.  I don't necessarily endorse or agree everything I listen to or read.  As such, I hope that my providing this list is not reframed in bad faith as if the most extreme thing ever said in any of these sources might as well have been said by me.  

    Additionally, the list isn't fully comprehensive.  For one, my social media feeds push sources like local news channels that occasionally have me click into.  I haven't painstakingly gone through my chrome history to put in every source I visited in the last n months.  Instead, the list below are the sources I reach for to engage my gray matter with information and opinions about the world.

    Finally, I've put the list next to AdFontes Media Bias Chart because I have found it to be a helpful mapping of where my media diet fits compared to what else is out there.  Recognizing my own penchant for bias, and acknowledging how my informational diet informs that is important to me.