We Need Less Junk News And More Nutritious News That Helps Build Our Understanding Of The World

We've heard of Fake News.  That's disinformation and propaganda, and, for the most part, the so called mainstream media doesn't intentionally offer Fake News.

But the the mainstream media is guilty of feeding us a steady diet of what I'm calling JUNK NEWS - the news equivalent of Twinkies and Coke.  It titillates, not with sugar, but with violence, sex, gossip, and cute.  It feeds our hunger for news, but without us actually gaining any understanding.  We end up growing facter and facter, without gaining greater understanding or knowing what to do to improve the world.  We get irritable and depressed instead of taking on the system.  (And yes, that work is left to the relative few who have figured out how to consume news in a healthy and productive way.)

We get so much trivia about the presidential candidates, for instance, and who's up this week and interviews with people who may or may not be representative of what others are thinking.  Basically it's random facts (this lady, from this town, who works in this organization, is this age, and she says this) used to create the reporter's opinion as though it had meaningful factual basis.  NPR doesn't report the news, it serves news stories, news nuggets, that make it easier for its listeners to consume.  Like fast food.  (I'm not saying that reporters shouldn't make the news accessible, but that the news, not the story telling, should be the top priority.

Trump successfully manipulates the media with his Tweets to bring attention to himself and distract from what's really important.  Our collective outrage over his thinking the Chiefs are from Kansas is totally wasted energy.  A reporter might say that it's important to show you this isn't just a single incident, but that it's a pattern, and that that matters. But Trump has done this so often that no one can any longer claim that the collective weight of his nonsense matters.  All the time we spend watching, reading, surfing the news, should actually be spent learning about how things work. How banks, treaties, arms sales, military spending, and dead  soldiers and civilians all fit together.    Only when you know how it works, can you focus on how to dismantle or repair things.

So I'd like to call attention to an article that dives a little deeper than most into how the sanctions on Iran work (or don't work.)  Esfandyar Batmanghelidj at Bloomberg News looks at the details of US sanctions on Iran, specifically a section on humanitarian aid.  Here's a brief excerpt from the article:

"But hidden in the mechanics of SHTA’s [Swiss Humanitarian Trade Arrangement] initial 2.3 million-euro transaction is an unprecedented provision that could help address growing concerns that the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign will be impossible to lift even in the aftermath of new negotiations with Iran.
The relevant provision is hidden in the jargon of a statement issued last October describing Treasury’s framework for SHTA: 'Provided that foreign financial institutions commit to implement stringent, enhanced due-diligence steps, the framework will enable them to seek written confirmation from Treasury that the proposed financial channel will not be exposed to U.S. sanctions.'”

And there are plenty of others who do this sort of in depth and breadth understanding building reporting.  Chris Hedges is one who ties lots of loose ends together. Much of his writing is too scary for most people.  Citizens Climate Lobby does a good job of explaining Climate Change.  Dahr Jamail is another.  Hasan Minhaj is another who tells the news in the Daily Show fashion.  Here's a whole gallery of people who try to offer more serious news.  Though in many cases, it doesn't come in convenient, tempting fast news wrapping.  This may mean reading books and other radical activities.

 We need more of this kind of reporting and a lot less of the junk news.  Media offer the news that sells.  There are huge corporate pressures for profits in the food industry and in the media.  But just as health food advocates have changed what corporations serve, so can healthy news advocates can do the same with the media industry.  There will always be consumers of click bait, we just need to keep increasing the proportion of people who make most of their news consumption serious news.