So Where Do You Get Your News These Days?

Who do you trust? And why?

Illustration of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, by Ralph Steadman

This may resonate with some of you. I write this as we’re steeped in all-Ukraine-all-the-time news, and there’s a salient point here. Because I’m getting my news from so many sources that contradict each other, often by the minute, it seems this world-stage crisis is as good a time as any to gaze into the abyss of news-source chaos and try to make sense of it.

Up until two years ago, I took in all my news from sources you are familiar with. The big legacy journals and outlets: the New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, et. al.—you know the set. Also, like a lot of you (depending on your generation), I didn’t become a dedicated news junkie until September 11, 2001, which ushered in the Western world’s sudden demand for round-the-clock news (and “news”) on tap. And by our dumb luck, the growing internet was there to help us drink up!

By late spring and early summer of 2020, as the world began its precipitous descent into (what feels to me like) semi-permanent insanity, I was reading and listening to these sources and their cohort, and yet I knew something was really off. Journalists weren’t even pretending to be neutral anymore, and even hard news reporting felt like it was wrapped in a clingfilm of moral sanctimony. And forget it with the op-eds. My beloved Masha Gessen, at the New Yorker, changed her pronouns to they/them (though, note: I still buy and read their books). The Times forced Don McNeil to resign due to the manufactured outrage of the paper’s youngest and woke-ist employees. All the art-world cancel accounts started up on socials, which I’ve written about here. No one was talking with each other anymore, but, online and in mainstream journalism, there were a lot of “good,” “liberal,” highly-educated people telling their readers what we should think, how we should feel about the world and ourselves, and how we should organize our lives and ethics. They told us what art was acceptable, which artists were permitted to make art, what cities and towns were models of progressive ideals, and what an average American’s daily sins were (too many to list, but I guess the kid Greta Thunberg got to make all of us feel like irredeemable sinners for awhile. That was fun.) This loose and growing cohort—this strange, unofficial coalition of what we now by default call “progressives” in media told all of us other would-be progressives (liberals striving for decency) that America is mere imperialist trash, and that the First Amendment is, too. Let’s tear it all down.

Like a lot of you, I think especially for Gen-Xers, the whiplash in this constant new messaging from our favorite press outlets was astonishing, because it was the total opposite of how our world views had been shaped up until then. By my high school years, 40 years after World War II, we had been taught—and knew in our guts that it was true—that nothing was more important than free speech, because, to put it simply and honestly, all civil rights are predicated on that First Amendment. They really are. We did read Orwell in school. And we believed him, because blood-soaked events across the globe throughout the 20th century had proved him right, over and over and over.

Illustration of George Orwell, by Ralph Steadman

And yet, from 2020 and onward, many legit thoughts, questions, ideas, solutions, and good-faith arguments by concerned people with solid, data-driven points were simply getting shut out of of mainstream media, forced to take their news and observations elsewhere. Elsewhere means hard to find. Elsewhere means that you can’t find it if you don’t know it exists. Elsewhere means “not part of any acceptable dialogue.”

Backing up a bit: As early as 2014, you may have sensed that some activist-type democrats were adopting the tools of “the enemy”—gross PSYOPs of right-wingers who would produce things like the Swift Boat ad, or Project Veritas stunts—by putting targets on the backs of anyone on their own side who did not buy completely into whatever the new beloved orthodoxies were this week or the next. And I witnessed some early, eerie versions of cancel culture in the Texas art scene back in 2012 and 2014, though it didn’t have a name yet. But I didn’t feel the mainstream press taking up these tactics as part of its own agenda, so heavily, until that spring of 2020. Trump’s election in 2016 had ramped up the moralizing rhetoric, but I hated Trump as much as any of the journalists who were out to get him, so I had just gone along with it up to that point.

But by 2020, certain topics and facts became either inarguable woke religion or totally verboten in our formerly sober press: pandemic safety theater, the discredited 1619 Project, the more violent branch of antifa and the more trolly and actually homophobic branch of transactivism, and calls to defund the police; the overall self-flagellating scene moved that “let’s-destroy-all-our-institutions” ball into the end zone. Mainstream classic liberal journalism ceased to be the ethics-driven journalism I grew up with and had entered professionally in my mid-20s, and became instead guilt-inducing, counter-factual, smokescreen-heavy sermonizing. In the news I was reading, what was played up or played down (or memory-holed) on any given day became exhaustingly predictable, and also made a lot of people—democratic liberals like me and probably a lot of you—lose trust in the outlets we had depended on for decades. I remember cringing with embarrassment at so much of what both NPR and the New Yorker were running with by 2021 that I pretty much gave up on them.

Then, also, by that summer of 2020, a subtle but real shift took place, and thank goodness I caught it: Andrew Sullivan left New York Magazine, Bari Weiss left the Times, Matt Taibbi wrote the essay “The American Press Is Destroying Itself,” and a lot of culture icons I very much admire penned and published "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” a notorious beauty referred to, pejoratively, as the Harper’s Letter. (The critic Greil Marcus, one of its signatories, is the reason I am sitting here writing this. I started reading him when I was 12, and that was that.) Finally! Oxygen! So, I followed Sullivan to his new site, and started really listening to and reading Jonathan Haidt and Glenn Loury. I went ahead and subscribed to Glenn Greenwald. (Why not go all the way?) These people, and many more, mostly through newsletter services, were way ahead of the curve—I felt dumb and slow in comparison in spotting the red flags they had seen from miles away—and they helped me feel something honest and true as the first glimmers of sanity creeped back into my headspace. And I also figured out, sometimes painfully but necessarily, who I could and could not trust to speak with honestly anymore. Cancel culture was active in Texas’ biggest cities. My own job position certainly put a target on my back, and the nature of the magazine I edited—a non-profit about visual art—always had a target on its back, especially by the time Trump was elected. People were rageful, and looking for scapegoats. I was a very nervous human, trying day by day to protect, protect, protect: protect all of our contributors, the artists and art we covered, our grantors, our subscribers and board members, and of course our whole staff.

And on this point I’ll pause and ask you—Gen X-ers especially—when you are introduced to someone new, how do you feel them out? Because unlike the freewheeling trust in good-faith discourse during the Clinton/Bush/Obama years, I bet you that you are far more circumspect in your conversations now. A major reason for this is that we all occupy different realities, because our realities come from where we get our news and information, and as you know, everyone and everything is siloed these days. The good ol’ echo chamber. Plenty of people are still either NPR listeners, or Fox News watchers. If they’re younger, they are neither. They are on reddit, TikTok, Insta, Youtube. (Before that, Tumblr.) This is obvious stuff I realize, but also unfortunately this chill on casual conversation due to lack of common ground or trust is something we’ve gotten acclimated to far too passively. Frog-in-boiling-water acclimated. I don’t think millennials or Gen Z have experienced the trauma of this shift as much, because they’ve never had it any other way. Social media has surveilled and controlled them since they could walk and talk. I think that’s one reason we can’t get past this: many up-and-comers don’t even know why free speech matters because they’ve never experienced it. But the columnist Michelle Goldberg, a Gen-Xer, wrote in the Times (I still resent this) that the only reason Gen X is upset about media’s embrace of cancel culture is because “it has been jarring to go from an intellectual culture that prizes transgression to one that polices it.” Wow! Is that all it’s about? Not the total flattening of and self-censoring of even mild conversation, and the relentless propagandizing of… pretty much all new art that gets shown now? Not the fact that you can’t tell people what you believe in (especially if they ask) without wondering if they’re looking for a suspect “angle”? Not the fact that one word or sentence uttered in a good- faith conversation can tank a person’s entire career? No, I’m sure you are right, Michelle Goldberg—we’re just pissed off these days because the band Joy Division couldn’t call itself that name anymore. After she wrote that, I started looking forward to reading Ross Douthat instead. At least I believe him.

And to address legit whataboutism: while I love living in Texas, I think Governor Abbott is a blatant opportunist who goes about his own shutting-down-discourse business in the most repulsive and irresponsible manner—I’m referring to his sleazy policy moves on abortion, election, border, and gender issues—and also in the most psychologically short-sighted way. I understand people wanting to slow things down and get a handle on some issues as we careen through all this history-in-the-making, but Abbott’s way simply ain’t it. All it does is increase progressive activists’ urgent impulse to censor. Here’s something that happened to a conservative speaker at UNT in Denton earlier this month. This is not discourse. This is the theater of panicked spectrum kids and early-career narcissists. I’d love to tell those unhappy youngsters at my alma mater to let the invited speaker actually speak, and then argue their points with him during the Q&A (or to just boycott, which is a solid protest option)—but more than that, I’d love to tell Abbott that his dumb policy stunts cause this. (My guess is he knows and doesn’t care, or knows and likes it. He’ll get votes for it, too.)

I write this now because the New York Times published an op-ed just this week that pretty much repeats what the Harper’s Letter warned us about two years ago and yet was lambasted for. If you note the reader comments in that new Times piece, you’ll see that many still believe that the only reason people resent cancel culture (that kind that mainstream media cultivated) is because we all just secretly wanna throw racial epithets around and not get fired for it. That take is so fucking insulting. There are massive, complex conversations to be had by all of us right now, and they are hard conversations we must have to maintain this democracy: about state control, about voting rights, about racism, about the prison system, about gender issues, about empiricism, about education, healthcare and mental health and addiction and abortion, about wealth disparity, about climate and energy, inflation, union organization, affirmative action—about torture, migration and borders, about war.

And for me, and many of you, also about art—what are we doing with it? What is it for? We need to talk, we need to listen, and we need to read. But what, who, where? Arts coverage, in mainstream media, is in woke lockstep, just like other culture-war issues. Will I ever trust the New York Times again on the hard conversations around culture issues? On domestic issues? Will you?

I still read the Times, every morning. My recent piece here on images of war I hope conveyed my profound respect for legacy media’s command of tough, international war reporting. I do still read mainstream media. Of course I do. On domestic and foreign issues, I’ve been impressed with the Atlantic. I read Politico. I read the Economist. I subscribe to the Telegraph. I read the Wall Street Journal. I read the Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News, because I live in Texas and I believe in the importance of understanding and engaging with local news.

You can see who I subscribe to on Substack in my profile: it’s an embarrassingly long list of writers and thinkers, some of whom can almost violently disagree with one another by the hour. I often disagree with them. (For a civilized starter, maybe go with The Dispatch, or Sullivan’s Weekly Dish.) There is no “consensus.” These prize-winning journalists left their mainstream media posts for all the reasons I’ve listed above. They engage in real discussion because their only incentive now is to write for a subscriber who is looking for something unmitigated by the ubiquitous, pre-conditioned, top-down, corporate- and/or ivory-tower- and/or lobbyist-approved agenda.

I mentioned this in my last post, but it bears repeating (I think): I can’t recommend Twitter for news, though it is unfortunately where I am spending too much time, as a newbie, feeling entirely sucked into its pathology, though only as a lurker. If you want to see why respectable media people are so hysterical these days, look no further than that platform. Right now the moralizing drama around the issue of war is at Shakespearean levels, because what Putin is doing is about as morally clarifying as anything that’s happened in my lifetime, and journalists and media types are really, really challenged by how to frame it—especially those who have taken strong stances in any part of the recent culture wars. But Twitter is where I spotted the link to the Politico interview with Fiona Hill (who does not tweet), and most of you who read my last piece on the war clicked on that link and many have spoken to me about Hill’s take on Putin’s brain since then. I can make more recs if any of you are interested.

So, where do you get your news these days? Who do you trust? And why?