This piece by Ron Unz about the media has gotten some attention. Frankly I don’t what’s so interesting about it. The point is supposed to be that “the media” is not very good at its job (where “the media” is narrowly defined as newspapers and magazines), but I think that a) that’s sort of obvious at this point, and b) more related to human nature and readers’ biases than to major failures on the supply side (i.e. demand-side media bias matters much more than people complaining about “the media” tend to give credit for).
But in any case, here is one important passage:
“For decades, I have closely read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and one or two other major newspapers every morning, supplemented by a wide variety of weekly or monthly opinion magazines. Their biases in certain areas had always been apparent to me. But I felt confident that by comparing and contrasting the claims of these different publications and applying some common sense, I could obtain a reasonably accurate version of reality. I was mistaken.”
Actually this is very nearly an ideal strategy for obtaining an accurate version of reality. Ron’s mistake was that he stuck to just newspapers and magazines, without going further.
If he’d just slipped the blogosphere, NPR, industry reports, non-profit reports, podcasts, think thanks, some primary sources like FRED data etc., into that paragraph, then he would have had a very good information-consumption strategy. If he’d also added his own biases to the list of biases he needed to keep an eye on, then it’d be pretty much the ideal strategy.
A good information diet consists of a variety of different sources of information, balancing them against one another and against your own priors, but that means reading a variety of media, not just a diversity within one medium. You can’t just rely on newspapers and magazines. Reading a “wide variety” of just those media is rather like eating a wide variety of breads as your diet, or investing in a wide variety of industrial stocks and calling it a well-balanced investment portfolio.
One of these days I’m going to draw and post my Food Pyramid of Information. Blogs will be near the bottom, newspapers and radio just above that, magazines just above that, “primary” sources like FRED data and academic journals will be higher up, and if network television appears at all it will be in a tiny triangle at the very top (the “sugar/sweets” section). This will vary from person to person, but that pyramid is a good starting point for the average Joe.