How to Read the News

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I hear more and more, including from readers of this newsletter, that people are avoiding watching the news.

A friend and I have this ongoing conversation about whether we can trust the media. He says, No, it's designed to manipulate and deceive you.

If you can picture this, my friend sounds like the bitter babysitter in the '80s classic, Don't Tell Mom, The Babysitter's Dead, with the very hot Christina Applegate, best known for her role on Married... With Children, with the notably less hot Ed O'Neill as Al Bundy, a misogynistic shoe salesman. As mom is away for the summer, Applegate's character Sue Ellen, along with her four siblings, is left in the care of an elderly babysitter. Sue Ellen plans to party, as the kids are in the care of someone else, and she is free to do as she wishes.

The babysitter is a haggard old lady — a wrinkled brown paper sack, crossed with a drill sergeant wearing low-heeled pumps. Despite the similarities, I'm not referring to my friend, but the babysitter character in the movie. Her sole purpose seems to be to ruin the summers of the five siblings by forcing them to do unreasonable homework, imposing a moratorium on fun, and shutting off the television. "TV rots your brain!" she growls.

The angry ogre is not open to another point of view. Specifically, my friend in this case. This is how my friend views the news. He insists the media is part of a cabal oriented towards control of the masses, assigning our beliefs and manufacturing our controversies.

I disagree. Saying the media is designed to destroy you is like anthropomorphizing a tornado. It doesn't care about you at all or anything else. It is simply an outcome of the weather.

A tornado is quite simple to explain. The presence of a thunderstorm in spring weather brings warm air from the south across the sky as cool, dry air is traveling on the ground from the north. The collision of the two causes a gust of wind. With the lighter, warmer air rising from the ground, the heavier, cooler air above causes rapid updrafts and downdrafts, forming a cyclone that builds momentum as it draws moisture from the clouds. The right balance of each feature creates a devastating funnel of spinning water and wind that can destroy almost anything in its path.

So it's more of a math equation. Thunderstorm + warm moist air + cool dry air + the wrath of the dangerous and powerful daughter of the wind spirit = Tornado.

With or without the wind spirit, you have the power of the sky licking up earth like it's a bowl of frosting, killing who it kills and sparing who it spares.

We often find wind spirits in ordinary things. Oil spills, the JFK assassination, the Great Replacement conspiracy, and the Birds Aren't Real theories — there's a powerful hand guiding the evil to steal, kill, and destroy. They each have a wind spirit behind them, until we run out of ways to believe in it.

If you abandon the ideas of the wind spirit, you're still left with a tornado, because the math continues to work the same, even when you remove the neutral factor. That's what I think about the news.

There is no Dr. Evil who plotted to start a major newspaper and designed it to take over the world. He doesn't hire malicious writers who swore an oath to rot the brains of paying subscribers the world over. The media, as it is, is nothing more than an outcome of the weather, started by individuals. To keep us safe, we don't need to flee. We merely need to understand how to read the news. And how not to.

So, you can stop reading the news, just as you can unsubscribe from hiking in the forest, and bears are not made to rip your arms off.

When you understand the mythology and accept the details that are self-evident, you can use the news more productively. I think more people need to learn how to do that. Here's my system to do that.

First, Some Rules.

• I'll be referring to "media" or "news" frequently. For the purposes of this article, I'll lump them together. News/media comes in the form of formal reporting, opinion, commentary, and entertainment that covers current events.
• I'll generally refer to reading, but listening, watching, and receiving by telepathic medium are all basically the same.
• When I say "article," I don't care if it is a newsletter, podcast, or TV segment. The word 'article' will be the shorthand for all forms of published media, as it is literally accurate and less embarrassing than calling something a "blog" or admitting that you get your news from TikTok or something with "Beast" in the name.
• Most people prioritize The Lorem Ipsum above other options. While this is reasonable and probably safe, I won't be making any official endorsements in this article or any other newsletter. Just make sure that when referring to this publication, you always include and capitalize "The" as it is part of the proper name, not simply a definite article. Also, you can upgrade to a paid subscription right here.

Check Your Assumptions

People often complain about the bias of the media, but rarely do they complain about the bias of the reader. When you read someone named Charles who likes to get cozy with preschool girls, most people are disgusted. But it's perfectly normal for a preschool boy to like preschool girls. It's not normal in this day and age for a preschooler to be named Charles.

Bias in media is a feature, not a bug. Imagine you're reading a report about the moon. When the reporter is standing on Earth, he is left to report from the perspective of the subject he can see. The reader will also interpret the article based on where she is standing. If she comes from the dark side of the moon, she'll see the story differently. Bias does not mean untrue. It merely shows the writer's vantage point.

News should be filtered through two questions. What is this writer trying to tell me? And what am I reading into the story?

Lean on Long Form

A good story starts with a storyteller. A reporter should approach their subject by looking into the details to uncover the story. Do not retrofit them to a preconceived story. This takes time, rewrites, and humility.

Reporting quality is almost impossible with an instant news cycle. Fairness and proper context are impossible in a highlight reel. Long-form journalism is the only way to provide this. Breaking news, pull quotes, and video reels have their place, but the only way to avoid being fooled is to get the whole story. Always place long-form above short-form content. Read the full article, listen to the whole speeches, and understand the full context of a story, including the what, who, and why.

Watch for Selection Bias

Good reporting is truth-seeking. Most reporting chases big, notable stories and ignores the routine and unremarkable. The reporter gets the dirt from eyewitnesses and expert opinions and provides commentary. The best backup for a story is a source, and a report is only as good as its sources. To oversimplify, if one source says a shooter was 10 feet away, and another says two, he was probably six.

Sources can be 100% accurate, while still missing key details, or favoring one detail over another. This is source selection bias. Furthermore, story selection can also favor one story over another. This skews our opinions over time. We might see copious coverage of crime, and because of it, we think crime is up, even if crime is down. Assume each story is one that was selected, and others were passed on.

This doesn't mean one-sided content is bad. One outlet may cover the content of a speech, while the other covers the response of the crowd. Both are worth reading. Each telling of a story is a single shade; the whole picture is in color.

Understand Incentives

The currency of the internet age is attention. For social media, attention is instant and fleeting. For TV, attention is 3-5 minutes long with commercials in between. Without attention, there is no money. Without money, there is no story, and in this dystopian reality, the story comes last.

Live, 24-hour TV news is the cocaine of the news. Social media is laced with fentanyl. It's an instant hit that doesn't last long, leaving you craving the next hit. These formats take news from informative to habit-forming. Every bit of news demands sensationalism to entice you to keep coming back.

Long-form written journalism benefits from length, discipline, and attention to detail. For example, the New York Times has a few ads and lots of subscribers. The New York Post has lots of ads strewn across a cluttered screen. Ad-heavy posts tend to focus on page views and, secondarily, time on screen. Subscriber-based posts tend to focus on long-term loyal readers. The former produces more clickbait, and the latter more in-depth reporting. Subscriber-based news is better than ad-based news almost always. That's why it comes with a cost, and because people like free stuff, it continues to get harder to find.

The negative of subscriber-based reporting is that an outlet can be captured by its audience. If they keep their subscribers by promoting the preferred narrative, they may tend to favor those stories. This also results in a news outlet adding games to the app for subscribers, which is not bad, but it's also not news. When subscribers have a diverse and loyal audience, they can prioritize truthseeking because their income is not dependent on any one audience group or sponsor calling the shots.

Watch for Spin Doctoring

A popular podcaster once claimed, without citing evidence, that The Lorem Ipsum is not the biggest newsletter in its category. Loyal readers know this is misleading and needs context, since this publication is in a category of its own, and is most certainly the largest of its kind.

Often, well-meaning reporters inject a narrative element to spin the story one direction or another, as I did with the opening of this section.

When a reporter says a public figure made a claim, "without citing evidence." People speaking in public settings almost never cite evidence in real time. The reporter is injecting a point that is not needed and is usually only meant to cast doubt or push a narrative, or both. Watch out for these kinds of words and phrases.

Referring to someone as "pro-choice" or "pro-abortion" changes the narrative and the reader's view of the person being referred to. So is calling someone "islamaphobic" or describing someone as part of the "radical left." Phrases like this exist only for spin.

This is why I don't use the term "gender affirming care." The term injects narrative and avoids truthseeking, and I would argue, to the detriment of its own cause. When we refer to dental work, we don't call it "bite affirming care" because it is not necessary to reference something that is quite simply dental work. Calling it anything more is superfluous. Simply being aware of spin allows you to filter it out when needed.

Separate Details from Narrative

Contrary to what some might think, the job of a reporter is not to tell you the facts. It's to tell you the story. Their job is to build the narrative so you can understand the story. Your job is to recognize the difference between the details and the narrative.

Consider this headline: "Three men shot in Cleveland amid tension over racial equity." Immediately, the reader would assume the shooting was a crime between people of different races, almost certainly a white and a black person. The writer was aiming to tell the facts and offer an explanatory narrative in one sentence.

For the reader, the narrative helps them make sense of the story, separate the underdogs from the nepo babies, and distinguish the crime of hate from the crime of passion. When you read an article, read the story, and recognize the narrative, but know the difference.

Consider Source and Credibility

You should read multiple sources, and the methods above will help you assess each one's quality. But history and reputation are also a shorthand. If an outlet has been known to provide high-quality, fact-based reporting for 100 years, there is a good chance it still does. If it's known for junk, you can expect to see more of it. The most established institutions often have built-in policies and business models that increase the likelihood of achieving quality. Still, the same institutions are made up of people, and like the weather, the right conditions can create a storm.

Neither tornadoes nor the media are out to get us. If it swallows you up, you can hardly be angry at the weather, but you still have to practice caution. If you know what you're dealing with and act accordingly, you won't get hurt.

That's it for this week.

Remember: The Lorem Ipsum gives you the truth, without the burden of accuracy. You'll always get an honest take from us, even when it's made up.

Have a great weekend!