How I Get The News

The Firehose Is Your Friend

Because I write a lot — a whole lot — about media issues, one of the most frequent things I’m asked is which media sources I trust to get the news. After all, if the problems we’ve collectively documented about the mainstream media are so pervasive, there must be someone we can trust, right?

Sort of. My blanket statement is that you should never 100% cede your trust to any outlet purporting to provide the news. Regard everything you read, see and hear with some level of skepticism. You should especially be skeptical about media sources that happen to agree with you. The Fox News closed ecosystem produces ignorant people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump. Don’t be like them.

That includes skepticism of me and the outlets I have written for (The American Independent and Media Matters for America). I have my own biases and tendencies and as a human being there’s always something I could have omitted or added, either consciously or unconsciously that fails to provide the complete view of an issue.

Which leads me to the media source I recommend: All of the above, but ideally, the source material itself.

I experience the news as a firehose of content. I’m a refugee from the late great Google Reader and I became used to subscribing to news feeds compromised of all the sources I could get my hands on. Google Reader is long gone, but for me the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader I use every day (and one of the few web services I pay real money for) is Feedly. You can either do it the old fashioned way by pasting in the RSS feed of the source you want, or you can search their database of news sources. You can also subscribe to Reddit forums or — and this is a killer feature for me — a Google News search for a particular keyword.

Using this method I can see what the big outlets (NY Times, Washington Post, AP, Reuters, the TV networks) are saying but also what independent blogs or niche news sites (like Political Wire) are up to.

Memeorandum is also a good aggregator of what is going on in politics at the moment.

Many deride doing so but I have also found using social media feeds a good way to get news as well. I don’t mean the feeds of @ResistGuy1234 or @QAnonBob, but the (mostly automated) feeds for the major media outlets. Twitter used to be the best way to do this (I even had a list of journalists that I could turn to for a front row seat to news as it broke), but a similar function can be found on Threads or Bluesky.

This may be a controversial or “hot” take but I find social media, at least if you exercise some level of common sense, as a better place for news than the worst one of them all: Cable news.

I’ve gone on at length about how terrible cable news is, but it bears repeating. You are arguably less informed if you subject yourself to the whims of the programmers at CNN and MSNBC and especially to the sewer-dwellers at Fox News. Cable news emphasizes stories either with simplistic visuals or narratives or both, not what is important. I think few things have contributed to America’s collective brain rot at the same rate that cable news has.

Another great way to get news is to just watch the news as it happens. If you hear about an event in progress, I’ve found that in the last ten or so years, you can usually find a YouTube video with the raw feed. That can take the form of a camera at a protest, a political speech, a press conference, or some other kind of event. During the State of the Union, I only watch the live feed of the speech either via YouTube or C-SPAN and it is so much better to be able to absorb the event. You’ll find that you can absorb things better without the clueless commentary of a gaggle of bargain-basement political John Madden wannabes cluttering up your ears.

If you held a gun to my head and insisted no, you have to recommend one source, I’d first ask you to stop threatening my life and then I would sigh and recommend ProPublica. They don’t cover everything, which is probably why when they do cover something it’s really pretty good. I’m still trying to understand the level of coziness with power that blinded outlets like the Washington Post and NY Times to the utter corruption of Justice Clarence Thomas, meanwhile ProPublica has reported bombshell after bombshell about him. They’ve done the same on other topics, and while they have stumbled, they have a far better batting average than most.

But this is not a blanket endorsement. They could really start sucking before this story is even published. It’s always possible in the news media.

It is very hard to be informed in these times. But we shouldn’t put all of our trust into any single outlet. That way lies disappointment and misinformation. It takes some work and while it shouldn’t be this way, it is what it is. The firehose is your friend, start chugging.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977

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