Day 563 of 1000
I have always been an avid reader and a little bit of a news junky. I read the newspaper at breakfast every day when I grew up in Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah’s house. I think I must have started in about the third grade because we moved to Klamath Falls in the middle of my fourth grade year and I remember feeling a sense of stability after the move because I could still read the Oregonian. I think it was a pretty good newspaper back then. When Lorena and I moved back from Florida to Oregon, it was excited about being able to read the Oregonian again. I was very sorely disappointed. We signed up for an inexpensive three month trial because we were new in town. Whatever we paid it was not worth it. We found that, just like the NPR news shows, almost everything reported in the Oregonian was unreliable and had a hard left wing bias, so we quit taking the paper.
After that, I read the Wall Street Journal over lunch every day at work. I also listened to the local news radio station and talk radio. Of course, we did not have a television, so that did not fit into the picture. When news become more accessible on the internet, I started reading that a lot, too. In the early 2000’s, we moved to Albany, Oregon where there was quite a good small town daily newspaper. It was really nice to have a broadsheet newspaper to hold in our hands or lay on the table while we read it every day, but when we moved away from Oregon to North Carolina, that was no longer available. The newspaper here in Raleigh is truly abysmal–at the same level of incompetence and bias as the Oregonian and that is saying a lot, so we are paperless again.
Something really good happened after this last election. Leading up to the election, I was consuming news at an elevated pace as is my usual course. When the election was over it dawned on me that the vast bulk of the time I had invested in following all the election events was wasted. Ninety percent of the “news” I consumed was trash talk between highly partisan factions of my own party with only ten percent real information that described what was going on. At that point, I decided I was going to quit investing so much time on trying to figure out who thinks what about the news–they were ALL wrong on both sides of the political divide this election.
That decision improved my life dramatically. It made me think about my stated world view and rethink (again) what is important in that light. It has been great not to get worked up about the latest political outrage. I still keep up on the news every day. I even read two or three political blogs of the people I find most trustworthy and interesting, but I only do that once or twice per week. My life is the better for it.