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SarahTheCoat

@sarahthecoat

mostly Sherlock. The New Semester my dreamwidth
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marta-bee

I'm going to go full boomer here for a minute: if you're interested in (US) politics, you should really be watching regular non-social media news.

Supernatural memes are great fun. And lots of people on social media are highlighting under-covered stories, giving voices to people who don't often get invited to MSNBC or CNN, and pointing out how to take action. But outrage is a great motivator and it takes work to put a post together. Assuming they're not outright bad actors, a lot of people putting current events social media posts together are outraged by something (which may well be outrageous), and want you to be outraged too.

Nothing's wrong with that in itself! The problem comes in when it's the only way you get news. Professional journalists are getting paid to collect, present, and analyze the news, so they're driven by something other than "this outrages me." Not always better, but different. And because they're dealing with current events consistently, you get deeper trends, more proportionality, more recognition that the very fact that X is outrageous but not unexpected given Y points to a larger problem Z lurking under the surface, that kind of thing.

Plus you get out of the echo chamber. That in itself can be helpful.

I personally like MSNBC's panel discussions. They're definitely liberal and often I wish they'd go further toward the truly progressive or even Marxist side of things; but they are close enough to my beliefs I can usually hear what they're trying to say. And if you don't have cable TV (I don't), they've got quite a lot of content on their YouTube page. It's a good complement to the more Tumblr-style news if nothing else.

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