A Balanced Media Diet for 2021
By: Tony Brasunas
Tags: Media Criticism, Propaganda, Media Literacy, Fake News, Balanced Diet

A Balanced Media Diet for 2021

A Media Diet Pyramid

Welcome to the era of fake news.

The number of media sources available to Americans has exploded over the past two decades with the growth of the internet. These myriad sources present the very same event in often dramatically different ways, which can be fascinating. The problem is, each source often labels all other sources as deceptive or even malicious by denouncing them as “fake news.”

This creates a dilemma: Either accept one news source as the arbiter of truth and let it distinguish the fake from the genuine and thereby filter the news for you, or read broadly despite the warnings and trust your own intelligence to determine the veracity of the news you read.

Choosing the first path — which many do — is creating increasingly distinct news bubbles in this country which in turn lead to social media “echo chambers” where a small and dwindling range of perspectives is available.

This guide is for those choosing the second path.

If you’re ready to acknowledge that no one news source is always right — about its take on every event or about which of its competitors’ coverage is “fake” — then you’re ready to acknowledge that we live in an era of deception and that it’s important and worthwhile to be conscious in your consumption of the news.

This guide proposes a balanced media diet — a diverse set of media sources that will allow anyone with 30 minutes a day to become aware of the truth about current events most of the time.

Just as there are food additives and chemicals that will make you sick, there are dense foods that boost your immune system; just as there are fad diets that will ultimately diminish your health, there is the time-tested notion of a balanced diet that identifies food groups to ensure any diet provides all the basic nutrients a body needs.

This media diet identifies media food groups so as to balance not only the perspectives of the news one consumes but also the sources of the news. The goal is to ensure that all media nutrients are available to the consumer’s thoughts.

Eating broadly leads to a healthy appetite and a sound balance within the body; reading broadly leads to a critical mind and a healthy awareness of the world around you. This isn’t to say it’s easy to embark on a media diet. On the contrary, just as keeping to a new food diet that challenges your cravings and eating habits, a media diet will challenge your biases, your cultural beliefs, your political habits, and your certainty about who the “good guys” and “bad guys” might be. But the potential rewards are just as great. If you do stick to a media diet for even just a couple of weeks, you will begin to develop something I call media consciousness, an awareness of the biases at play in each of the narratives you’re told about current events.

Just as fine-tuning the foods you eat for maximum health isn’t a one-time adjustment, developing media consciousness is a lifelong journey, a path of inquiry and learning that continuously deepens our awareness of the world around us.

You can skip the following four-part introduction to the current state of American media and go right to: the diet, the food groups, or the highlighted sources.

First, A Brief History of Media

To begin, a quick discussion of how we got here. It is important to understand that a biased and chaotic news media is nothing new to this country. It has been generations since the media has been so diverse, but in the 1920s and 1930s it was common for a major city to have as many as a dozen daily newspapers. Each newspaper generally had a clear viewpoint and bias known to all: the “Republicans’ paper,” the “labor paper,” the “Italians’ paper,” and so on. Most people read only one newspaper, but it was quite easy for anyone to buy a half-dozen papers one day and get a sense of the range of debate on a particular issue.

This diversity of sources began to dwindle in the 1960s as an era of media consolidation intensified and culminated in a period of deregulation in the 1990s and early 2000s. At the turn of the century, suddenly just six corporations published and broadcasted nearly all political debate in this country.

The rise of the internet has pushed the pendulum back in the other direction. Every viewpoint once again has its own media source, or even dozen media sources. Every voice can be heard if one is interested in listening.

But two things are different this time. First, there are even more accessible sources today: you don’t have to walk to the newsstand or an international news store to get a dozen different opinions, you just need an internet connection. Second, and far more important, this time around the corporate and government news organizations know what they had, and they want it back. They have no interest in another era of numerous media sources providing people with diverse, distinct narratives about events and ideas; they relish the power that comes with controlling what ideas and perspectives are published.

Second, A War for your Mind

And that brings us to where we are today. On one hand, we have a profusion of news sources and a concomitant difficulty discerning the honest ones from the deceptive ones. On the other hand, we have large legacy media corporations who desperately want to put the genie back in the bottle and regain control of the narrative. Much as there are fast food conglomerates that use advertisements to coerce you to eat one way or another, these media corporations would like nothing better than to convince you that the world was better when there were fewer sources, that it’s inconvenient to read a diversity of news sources, and that they’re best suited to determine for you which news sources are trustworthy and which are “fake.”

“Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the American media” — Noam Chomsky, before the advent of the internet

Put simply, there’s a war on for your mind. The power to control a society’s narrative about its present is tantamount to controlling that society’s future.

The legacy media channels, from FOX to CNN to NPR, serve the type of news they think should be sufficient for all of us: a sprinkling of hard news on top of scandals, soundbites from pundits with uniform viewpoints, “infotainment” with little news content, “hot takes” from celebrities, and one-sided analysis of events that are presented primarily to cause outrage. What news this coverage provides consists almost exclusively of what I label party politics, contributing news from only two of the media food groups.

But worse than the shallowness of each channel’s analysis is the narrowness of each channel’s perspective, and the implication that its narrow perspective isn’t only valid but is the only valid perspective. Again, the label of “fake news” is peppered explicitly and implicitly throughout this type of media coverage these days to disparage other sources and to demand that we view their opinion about what is important and their version of events as the truth, and everything else as biased, manipulated, or simply “fake.”

Third, The Remedy

With food, any diet consisting of just one single food repeated over and over will lead to disease. Similarly, any one news media source consumed exclusively becomes disinformation. Even spending a little more time to watch two channels of the same food group provides a broader perspective on things, but given the media consolidation mentioned above that transpired over the last half century, even this effort inevitably leaves one with a narrow view of the world.

To get something approaching a complete sense of our world today, we have to explore independent media as well as corporate media, left-leaning media as well as right-leaning media, foreign news sources and domestic government propaganda, corporate PR and “native advertising,” and delve at least occasionally into deeper systemic analysis of our political system.

Reading broadly and discerning the truth from such a cornucopia of voices might sound like an impossible task, but from my experience a carefully chosen, balanced diet can be not only manageable but also fascinating and invigorating to our minds. I propose that a broad diet confers intellectual vitality as well as a more accurate sense of what is going on in one’s community, country, and world — and that it ultimately paves a path to a healthy political discourse for us all.

Fourth, What Happens When We Stay in Thought Bubbles

It doesn’t take an exhaustive review of history to find cases where great tragedies have befallen nations when the majority of the people have been continuously deceived by a single group of media sources. The Iraq War, which killed over a million innocent people and cost trillions of dollars, is one very recent such case. The Nazi holocaust is another. Tiananmen Square. The list goes on. Rising to the mental challenge of reading diverse media sources is, I believe, a worthwhile endeavor.

With such momentous events happening all around us these days — the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 election, the protests at the capitol building — it is more important than ever to have a balanced and broad understanding of these events if we are to avoid catastrophic error in how we understand the country we live in.

I’ve been writing about American politics since 2003, when I started an online political news magazine. The magazine’s second issue was titled “Big Media,” and it specifically covered our nation’s dwindling number of large news sources and the ongoing consolidation that the internet was just beginning to counteract. I’ve been tracking independent and corporate news sources ever since, and I’ve learned that nearly every news source has something to offer.

What if we each read a balanced mix of different voices and trusted our minds to distinguish the truth from the propaganda? What if we challenged our own confirmation biases? What if we confronted our fear of unfamiliar ideas? We might be able to talk to a wider array of people, we might pause to contemplate the complexity of pressing issues, we might understand the world more deeply.

A balanced media diet presents these possibilities.

Finally, I have to say that while I’ve spent hours reading, watching, and listening to sources of countless mindsets, viewpoints, and persuasions, and I can present a fairly broad-based background on the topic of news media — if you really want to get a firm grasp on how our media has functioned over the past century, you must read Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (co-authored with Edward Herman) and research Operation Mockingbird, a government project that placed CIA agents at major American news organizations. And you should know that President Obama in 2017 signed a bill making government propaganda inside the US legal for the first time. I’m writing a book about this topic as well, which I plan to publish this year.

Now that we understand where we are, how we got here, and why it’s worth rising to the challenge of digesting diverse news media, here is the Balanced Media Diet for 2021.

Below, in order, are the six media food groups, the diet itself, and the 40 highlighted media sources of diverse nutritious value. Enjoy!

Please feel free to send me any suggestions you have for improving it.

THE SIX MEDIA FOOD GROUPS FOR 2021

1. Foreign News. This food group includes any and all news and viewpoints originating from outside the United States, particularly from non-English speaking countries. Consuming media from this group is critical for reaching an informed opinion not just as a citizen of the country but as a member of this human race. 10% of the 2021 diet.

Party Politics — The next pair of media sources together look at the daily jostling over legislation and power among elected officials in Washington, DC and state capitols. From who’s placed on what congressional committees, to court confirmation hearings, to approval ratings and budgeting, this is party politics. There are also usually one or two scandals for each party at any given time that keep the party politics news cycle flowing; these days, as we’re in the third red scare, news about politicians’ interactions with Russia, for instance, provides endless scandal material. These food groups constitute 90% of corporate mainstream political news.

2. Party Politics (Republican). News and viewpoints that follow the daily and weekly news cycle of events, scandals, and legislation on the Republican side. Important to understanding how news is packaged to inform and outrage conservatives. Generally the blame is placed on the other party and there is little deeper analysis. 20% of the 2021 diet.

3. Party Politics (Democrat). News and viewpoints that follow the daily and weekly news cycle of events, scandals, and legislation on the Democratic side. Important to understanding how news is packaged to inform and outrage liberals. Generally the blame is placed on the other party and there is little deeper analysis. 20% of the 2021 diet.

True Politics — The next pair of media sources looks beyond the parties and considers the underlying guiding political philosophies and principles that form the historical differences between conservatives and liberals, libertarians and progressives, capitalists and socialists. It has been said that all politics — for at least the past 1000 years — can be viewed as originating from one of three impulses: 1. progressive, the impulse to spread wealth and power more broadly among people; 2. reactionary, aiming to concentrate wealth and power more narrowly; and 3. conservative, aiming to keep the distribution of wealth and power as it is. The push and pull of these three impulses is true politics. It should be mentioned that the great overarching trend — the long arc of history — has been bending in a progressive direction since 1215 and the signing of Magna Carta.

Note: The terms “Radical” or “Principled” are used sometimes instead of “True” for this layer of news coverage, but the former to me tends to have too negative a connotation, and the latter too positive, so I mostly use “True.”

4. True Politics (Progressive). News and analysis that will point out flaws in both parties and that will sometimes suggest that the parties agree about most things and feign disagreement. Progressive analysis includes class analysis that acknowledges that all Americans suffer when there are wars overseas, no universal healthcare, starvation wages, polluted air and water, and crippling debt. Progressive True Politics sources tend to be marginalized by Party Politics with these labels: “radical”, “socialist,” “far-left,” “communist.” 20% of the 2021 diet.

5. True Politics (Libertarian & Conservative). News and analysis that will point out flaws in both parties and that will sometimes suggest that the parties agree about most things and feign disagreement. Libertarian perspectives include analysis of privacy and liberty that critiques the encroaching surveillance state, worsening militarism, and shrinking set of guaranteed personal rights. Conservative perspectives include attention to founding principles and favor more deliberate consideration before advocating systemic change. Words used by Party Politics sources to marginalize and silence these sources: “radical,” “fascist,” “alt-right,” “nazi.” 20% of the 2021 diet.

Deep Politics — This final media food group includes reporting on the political system as a whole, considering both parties and their principles, and also inspecting the generally allowed parameters of debate and discussion. Even a casual observer of American politics will notice that important policies remain largely unaffected by elections even if the party in power changes. Deep politics analyzes the political decisions and disagreements occurring in this permanent political establishment, which is generally called the “permanent state” or the “deep state.” Deep political analysis also contemplates covert agreements between the political parties and considers conspiracies, both those discussed openly in the mainstream media (alleged Russian election interference; 9/11 hijackings; etc.) and those not generally discussed in the mainstream media (election fraud; assassinations; climate engineering; “false flag” events and faked acts of foreign aggression; CIA-backed coups, etc.).

6. Deep Politics. News and analysis covering the underlying power structures of our country and the crucial decisions about things like war, energy, the money supply, and surveillance that are made largely by unelected officials in intelligence organizations, the Pentagon, and executive departments. Words used by both Party Politics and True Politics sources to marginalize and silence these Deep Politics sources: “paranoid,” “wacky,” “conspiracy theorist.” 10% of the 2021 diet.

THE DIET

You’ve gotten this far, so you have both an interest and a bit of time to devote to a balanced awareness of our news media and the events and ideas shaping our world. Thank you and congratulations. Greater consciousness is right around the corner.

Here’s how it works: You will read a different set of news sources each day of the week, as specified in the chart below. For each source, on each day, you will scroll down to the list of Highlighted Sources for 2021 and click to read, watch, or listen to the day’s sources. You can bookmark the sites in your browser so you don’t have to keep coming back to this page.

Three Levels

The diet has three levels to fit your available time. If you haven’t been conscious of your media consumption before, start with 30 minutes a day; it will have an enormous impact on your awareness of the country and world around you. After just two weeks, you will begin to have an entirely different experience watching and reading news media.

If you’re already consuming a lot of news media from various sources, or if you’re a professional journalist, politician, or professor, or if for any other reason you simply want an express journey to a broader understanding of our political and economic world, spend more time: Go on the “Journalist” or “Media Critic” diet, which offer more depth and a greater range of perspectives from quality journalists situated all across our media landscape.

BASIC. “Conscious Citizen.” (30 minutes daily) ADVANCED. “Journalist.” (90 minutes daily) EXPERT. “Media Critic.” (180 minutes daily)

There’s a fourth option too, for when you need to focus on other parts of life:

4. UNPLUGGED. “On a Media Fast.” (1 hour weekly)

Here it is! I spent many hours reviewing sources and balancing the diet across the days of the week and across perspectives. All forty sources are detailed, with links provided, below the chart.

The Balanced Media Diet for 2021: