Getting the News

I saw a reference to Virtue Signaling When Saying You're Off FaceBook so I won't mention that I haven't logged on to the site in several years.  That was where I was most visible on social media, and if now I'm tagged by someone else, it probably still is.  

I had a Twitter account but never posted.  I left there when it became X, for obvious reasons.  

I follow the young people I know on Instagram, watching their children grow.  I do like some photos, but I never use words.

For long form, I've given up my NYTimes and WaPo subscriptions in favor of following some of my favorite commentators and lawyers and authors on Substack. There is Mother Jones and ProPublica . 

MeidasTouch Network is reader supported, also tending left, and is like reading a daily paper.  That said, I do subscribe to the local newspaper, and always will.  Local journalists covering local news often break the biggest stories.  After all, Woodward and Bernstein were covering the DC night court when the Watergate plumbers were brought in.  

To find out what the mainstream is hearing, TBG listens to the first few moments of the NBC Nightly News.  

Now there is BlueSky, a left leaning on-line safe space, unlike Elon's sewer, that aims for a Twitter-like experience, with fewer trolls, and, at least for now, a carefully crafted algorithm that has kept cat videos off my feed.  The problem is size.  I hope that more content providers will migrate over from the dark side.  Right now, it's an echo chamber.

I don't feel that I'm missing anything, except maybe Nicolle Wallace in the afternoon.  These are the sources that don't have me screaming back at them.  There's no sane washing the craziness.  There's a fair amount of rubbernecking at the slow train wreck of our democracy, but it comes at me in small. manageable doses I can titrate myself.

I'm not willing to fully engage.  Heather Cox Richardson's contemporaneous history keeps  me up to date on what happened today, tying it into what's come before.  She gives the facts some heft.  

And that's enough for me. I've been paring down to this level since the election, adding and subtracting along the way.