I Quit the News Media
Why I'm sending today's news media to rest in peace with social media.
My note: As you’d expect from me, this is a positive/optimistic piece because of the “ah-ha” moments revealed to me along the way. It’s like when you know something is hurting you, you’re not happy that it’s hurt you…but you’re very happy that you know why, and can then change course.
I had this post prepared regardless of who won the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. I truly respect anyone who exercises their right to vote in this country, no matter who they choose to vote for. It’s a privilege to us all. So this post isn’t about the election or politics, per se, though any discussion about traditional media would encompass those things too. It’s about news media at large.
If you don’t want to read the rest of this, here’s the conclusion: today’s traditional news media has failed, and I’ve given way too much of my brain and thinking to the machine.
The machine has tried to hijack how I think, tried to provide me information that was not rooted in reality, and tried to contribute to making me a worse person up until 2024. 😊
I haven’t let this happen in 2024 because there was a definitive breaking point before then, as I mention below from having been in the business.
The work for me was becoming aware of the problem, admitting to myself that I was passively part of the problem, and then deciding to change.
For a good chunk of my lifetime, news media was trusted, honest, based in reality that wasn’t tied to any one person’s obvious individual opinion, and provided me with information to form my own opinions.
That, sadly I feel, is the exception not the norm nowadays.
But now, it is digging it’s own grave and I know I’m not alone in believing that.
If you disagree, just Google it and form your own opinions. The 2024 U.S. election isn’t even the thing that illustrates my point. The digging started well before that.
For years, top media folks on both sides of the aisle: 1) act smart and act like they know what consumers in our republic need, but are breathing a sigh of relief in private every day that viewers are still tuning in or subscribing; and 2) laughing to themselves on their way to the bank while they still can.
The United States First Amendment is this:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
My only wish is that it would have anticipated needing an additional call out for Freedom of Thought.
That seems overly simplistic, but with AI emerging and with lots of media outlets feeding massive amounts of content to large language models, I have a sense that we’ll need it! 😊
First, a quick comparison.
The reason I scrapped social media this year is that it’s not just entertainment or a great way to stay in touch with people.
It’s not about personal connection, and it’s certainly not “social”.
My experience was that it was anti-social. Deeply agenda-driven, manipulative, and controlling. Some would even say that it’s hateful and toxic.
Regardless of what you believe, it is a certainty that the people like me who are feeding (or have fed) the machine are just the pawns.
I’m not feeding the machine anymore.
Social media barged its way - uninvited in a lot of cases via today’s algorithms, data collection, tracking, and targeting practices - into people’s lives by trying to inform how we think, which opinions we form, what we believe is true, and even who we “should be” friends with!
Because, of course, the algorithm telling me I should be friends with someone based on some auto insurance form I filled out online two years ago would know way better than me what’s good for me!
That was sarcasm.
And I can’t believe I let it happen for so long. Then I decided I had enough. So I said goodbye.
Switching gears, programming and coverage on traditional news outlets has increasingly relied on the same tactics as the ones I just listed above that apply to social media.
And like social media, they present the same harsh symptoms of disease.
These platforms don’t simply present me with facts or hard-hitting investigative journalism. Facts are boring. Hard-hitting investigative journalism takes too much time and money nowadays.
Rather, they feed me sound bites. Splashy headlines. Definitive-sounding statements that are opinions and not actually facts. They try and take an active role in telling me how I should be distilling into opinions and choices whatever they determine the facts are.
But the truth is that traditional news media is an industry run by people. People not necessarily any wiser than you, me, or anybody else no matter what they tell you.
As this machine has gained steam over the last decade or two, there’s been a general “diminishing” effect without me even realizing it.
What I mean by that is news media doesn’t build up. It destroys. For every feel-good story, there are ten stories of pending disaster.
I realized that for a long time it ate away at my capacity for critical and reasoned thinking. Bit by bit, minute by minute. Reeling me in with intense, raw emotion, and then leaving me flapping around on the deck after any major event actually happens.
It’s my fault. I gave into that.
At some point, media didn’t just inform me anymore. They tried to inject themselves as the standard of moral superiority, intelligence, and wisdom into my life. I let them inform me and also hung on their every word like it was definitively true or definitively false.
I got sucked in until late 2023. Then I clearly had enough and it showed. More on that in a second.
But with every fight the media - both conservative and liberal - stirs up and escalates, especially when it comes to politics, they get way, way out ahead of their skies ⛷️ when it comes to understanding my reality.
Of course, the assumption the media makes is that if they cluster throngs of people together who think similarly and then create enough passion and intensity around something, they’ve built a safe community of like-minded thinkers.
Then, they have an audience. Maybe even a movement.
But what happens when things don’t go according to plan or when respectful, independent thinking ceases to be embraced?
Then, they have an unsafe, unhappy community of thinkers who feel stranded and gutted and unable to ascertain what to truly believe.
I know I have felt this at times through the years.
h/t to Clint Hurdle for passing along this tidbit from Tim Keller, which I think illustrates some observations about what news media is preying on in recent decades:
If you center your life and identity on a “noble cause,” you will divide the world into “good” and “bad” and demonize your opponents. Ironically, you will be controlled by your enemies. Without them, you have no purpose.”
Many people have taken demonizing to an art form in this current climate and both sides of the aisle believe they have the noble cause.
Guess who’s holding the match and subsequently stoking those flames?
And unfortunately as with so many things, it’s all about the money. For the news media, every viewer - that’s you and me - is worth x$ per viewing minute and sold as advertising.
That’s it.
I have a bit of additional inside perspective here.
For about 18 months, I worked in the news media business. I was hired to try and inject life into a flailing and failing business model.
I did my job well, got great performance reviews, treated people well, and spoke what I believe to be a lot of truth along the way.
It was like oil and water though, I knew it immediately, but didn’t know exactly why. There was just no place for my voice and my truth. Some particularly out-of-touch people held the keys to the machine the same way they had for decades while claiming industry superiority.
A failing industry, mind you, but they still clung to those keys.
If you don’t believe that it was a good thing I got let go from this job, I’d point you to anyone on my team the day I told them I was history. There was real shock, but it was as much due to my nonchalantness when I delivered the message to them.
It was basically, “Y’all are such great people. Good luck. Godspeed.”
I liked and connected with some people inside the business. Genuinely good folks trying to do much-needed public service. Smart folks. Educated. Kind. Award-winning.
The problem wasn’t and isn’t those individuals.
The problem was the larger machine. The way it had collectively tried to train and push audiences to consume information and salacious headlines that stretched the bounds of what qualified as facts and good information to form opinions about.
So I came to really dislike the overall industry. Why?
Because every company in the industry has such an opportunity to actually be a public good and stop short of peddling bullshit as news.
But they absolutely collectively lack the backbone and courage to do it.
And there’s also financial discomfort in changing course.
Collectively, they could have understood the need for a few tough years economically to make necessary fundamental change in how they engage with people.
Instead, they ignored the sea change that was happening in how people were using news media and what people really needed to get from it.
They followed the lead of the direction social media took.
Bad move.
No, they needed to lead people through the haze and not shove them deeper into a toxic race to the bottom.
And now they can’t do that because 1) they don’t know how; and 2) because it would mean confronting inadequacies and admitting they don’t know anything about anything.
Throughout this year, I applauded a lot of opinions from both conservative and liberal people about this, and I’ll take Jon Stewart’s which you’d probably guess was from this past week (emphasis mine):
"We’re going to come out of this election, we are going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is and what this world is, and the truth is, we are not really going to know shit."
"I just want to point out, just as a matter of perspective, that the lessons that our pundits take away from these results that they will pronounce with certainty will be wrong. And we have to remember that."
Within its walls, and I expect other places like the company I was at previously, there’s little actual embrace of independent thinking based on facts.
There’s a lot of embrace about collective thinking based on facts-ish that riles a whole bunch of people up.
Because in the end, it’s a business. It’s a numbers game.
That’s it.
“But Mike, how are you going to stay responsibly informed about everything?”
The answer is that I will be very selective in who I choose to listen to, what I watch, or what I read. I’ll consider what the source is and do a little extra work to better inform my own opinions. It might come from a podcast, Substack, or another outlet where the source is backing up their opinions with facts and then discerning between the two.
Because it should not be that difficult.
Be well my friends,
Mike
Great move, Mike! I returned our cable box back in the 2000s and caused some chaos as to what to do with it since they’d never had anyone return one unless they were trading up or moving. Haha! We don’t watch tv at all. Our screen isn’t connected to the internet. We occasionally watch our hard copy DVDs and BluRays. But without the television brainwashing, life is beautiful. My friends know not to send me “headlines” or “news” stories because I just laugh when they want me to be stirred up. Not gonna happen. Go Mike!!
I, like you, stopped listening to the news a long time ago. I will on a rare occasion turn it on to view data on natural disasters but I watch and read very little.
For those wanting to “stay in touch” with what is going on, good luck to you. All that you’re staying in touch with is curated opinions, not facts. And opinions from others isn’t what I want to base my world upon.
So, what am I doing? In the face of all the hatred and unrest? I am staying as true to my own heart as possible. I am being kind to all whose lives touch mine, I am donating to causes like The Ocean Cleanup because they are not only cleaning up the great garbage patch by thousands of tons every year, but they are deploying interceptors to catch trash in the world’s rivers before it can even get to the ocean.
I won’t ever have world wide influence, nor would I want it. I choose my world, my family, my friends, my neighbors, my community, and I affect it as best I am able with caring, sensitivity and equality.
Thanks for this piece Mike. I applaud you.