I have to agree that a single 5 minute phone call to your Congressional Rep or Senator is worth more than 100 hours of screwing around on social media. Unless you have 100,000 followers. And even then, I’m dubious.
But while doom-scrolling is a waste of time, we need some kind of helpful information sources. I’ll list my top 5.
- Match the media outlet to the times. If we were at war, I’d recommend War on the Rocks a site I rarely visit because I’m not a military guy. If we faced a megadeath terrorist threat I’d recommend and open source intelligence outfit such as bellingcat. If we were in financial crisis I’d recommend Nobel Laurette Paul Krugman, and whomever he recommended at the time, such as Simon Johnson. Crisis in the housing market? Try Bill McBride at Calculated Risk.
But the crisis of the day involves US democracy, so we need a trustworthy and reliable US political observer. A guy or gal that will walk through their thinking, stating what they know and don’t know, and the financial firepower to run a multi-person investigation when needed. Most newspaper journalism is access journalism, whose focus is scoops rather than policy and involves negotiation with sources. Under this model the reporter isn’t the reader’s representative, but rather an intermediary between sources with information and an audience that can be manipulated to some extent. Because without manipulation, the reporter has little to offer the source. WAPO and the NYT operate in this fashion and they do some fine and not so fine reporting. What they are not is wholly trustworthy, though their ethics will block outright deception (NYT more than WAPO), unlike the propagandists at Fox News, who traffic in reassurance.
Why is honesty and candor with the reader important? Because it entails the analyst being honest with themselves. It encourages them to report what they know, what they don’t know, and what they might know but haven’t figured out yet. The alternative is to be funneled into an ideology, or barring that a fixed point of view. If you don’t doubt yourself and challenge your own thinking, you may have a reliable and predictable perspective -good for accruing a certain kind of readership- but you won’t be a reliable analyst.
I’m describing Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. Much of their content is free to the reader, but not to the writers. Membership is $50 a year, a bargain and a patriotic gift in these times.
As for numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5, I’m going to postpone that discussion in order to emphasize the quality of Marshall’s organization. They are all great, but not in a way that fits the day.