I haven't had any social media in nearly a decade (actually, probably a decade now). I'm regularly called ill-informed because I don't watch television news and I do my best to avoid any news on the internet. I listen to the radio mostly for entertaining talk shows and even those have been attempting to capture eyeballs (earballs?) with the latest in pseudo-journalism. I used to be really into NPR for a long time. The news seemed okay, but the shows were absolutely the best. Then at some point around 2013 they started doing away with more entertaining shows, and by 2016 it was all politics all day. Every talk show had some hot take on the latest event (usually from a deep left-leaning stance) and it drove me nuts.

I haven't found actual journalism. Reuters does an okay job most of the time. It's serviceable. The closest I've ever gotten to real journalism was the news feed in a trading platform I paid a lot of money for several years ago. Very "just the facts" - exactly how I like it.

"Journalists" have realized two things about modern media that I think lead us to this:

1. People LOVE drama. The more you can doll up a story to be a life-or-death fight, no matter how mundane or irrelevant, the better.

2. Since everything is on the internet there's no need to be right. 50 years ago when a newspaper, or news show released its information that was it. There was usually no easy way to redact parts of a story and not take massive heat for it. Now, we can watch news articles change in real time. You might say this is good but it leads to lazy journalism. Misinforming people and then pretending they had the right idea by the time they've edited the real story in.

I just stay away from most things now. Anything important enough to truly effect me I'll hear through other channels. It's a good enough filter. I don't need to be a "good global citizen" and take the burden of the world on my shoulders. My life is tough enough as it is.