[aaronbaugher]

My girlfriend says she doesn't trust the media, but she has to follow it to know what they're lying to us about. I've pointed out that the problem goes deeper than just whether they tell truth or lies. They don't just tell you what to think; they tell you what you're even supposed to be thinking about, and by omission what you shouldn't be thinking about. You can take the opposite position on every issue to the one they're pushing, but you're still letting them frame the window of what you are and aren't thinking and forming opinions about.

The only way to take that control away from them is to cut the primary "news" sources out of your life entirely. I still hear about important events from people around me, and I can see what people are hyperventilating about at forums like this, which is more than enough to know what the media is hyping each day and why.

[randomNumber7]

She definitely has a point here. The problem is that a democracy kind of needs the media and a public discussion.

How do you decide to vote if you completey go out of the loop?

[aaronbaugher]

That's the funny thing, I'm not out of the loop. When friends bring up current issues that matter, I'm generally better informed than they are, but I'm clueless if they bring up the latest controversial TV show or whatever is today's outrage narrative that will be replaced by the next outrage narrative tomorrow.

It turns out that by letting the people around me sort of curate the "news," and reading thinkers who write about bigger topics rather than what's in the headlines, I wind up with a pretty good filtered news feed.

[119]

Which thinkers do you read?

[vel0city]

> How do you decide to vote if you completey go out of the loop?

I tend to stay pretty well informed without watching cable news or constantly reading political gossip on social media. When I hear things like "the Supreme Court issued an opinion today..." I go read the opinion. When I hear "Trump signed an executive order saying..." I go read the executive order. When I'm talking with people about inflation, I go look up the BLS data among other things. If people are talking about what's actually happening on the ground some place, I will end up having to find some reports reporting things and ultimately have to weigh the fact they're choosing where to point their cameras to my understanding of what is actually true.

Some of these things are hard, like the "big beautiful bill" is 1,116 pages long. I'll jump to the things people around me are talking about, like work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP, and read those sections. I might go look up some direct commentary from trusted sources about it for deeper analysis, and probably try and find some real statistics to compare.

We have so much actual real data and original sources to go read, I don't need someone else to tell me what they think of it for me to have an opinion.