Think For Yourself

Before retiring in 2015, I spent 25 years in media relations and crisis communications, meaning I had to cultivate strong relationships with reporters and editors across the country. I learned a lot about how the media really works, how it prioritizes its coverage, how it ensures accuracy, how it quotes sources both anonymously and by name, and how it corrects mistakes, which are inevitable in the fast-paced world of news.

So, it’s natural that the question I get most from friends is, “How do I know what to believe with all the misinformation and disinformation out there today?”

It’s a fair question, particularly given the way social media platforms are increasingly playing fast and loose with any substantive fact-checking. Conspiracy theories flare up and spread, informing the opinions of millions before being debunked and largely forgotten.

And who you follow on social media further turbocharges this dynamic with algorithms intentionally designed to feed you only opinions you agree with or that cause you to react strongly.

My prior columns make my feelings on social media clear, so it shouldn’t surprise folks that I would suggest not using social media as a legitimate news source, at least not without double-checking the original sources of stories. But even those can be suspect while still looking legit.

My personal preference is to stay up to speed on the big stories through more centrist, middle-of-the-road media outlets and ignore the small stuff that’s really just partisan performance art and clickbait.

There’s actually a great source for learning about how modern, online media outlets fall on the political spectrum. It’s called AllSides (allsides.com) and it’s a media research firm that uses input from thousands of media consumers across the political spectrum as well as a bipartisan and balanced team of analysts to rate the major media outlets in five columns: left, leans left, center, leans right, right.

An example of each: The Atlantic is left; Politico leans left; Reuters is center; Wall Street Journal’s opinion section leans right; Newsmax is right.

A healthy exercise might be to see where the media you consume generally lie and then consider moving to the left or right occasionally to expand your news aperture.

For me, the most important thing to do is to augment general news intake with actual analysis, and by analysis, I don’t mean opinion pieces, nor do I mean cable news of any stripe.

There are plenty of outlets that provide in-depth analysis of current events that are well-researched and thoughtful, without being overly partisan. I subscribe to a handful of newsletters that fit that bill, but my go-to is a young outlet called The Free Press (thefp.com).

The Free Press is one of the larger news outlets on the Substack platform, an online community of writers and creators that boasts more than 50 million subscriptions, five million of them paid subscriptions.

Bari Weiss founded The Free Press as a Substack newsletter in 2021 after resigning her post as an op-ed editor and culture and politics writer for The New York Times based on what she saw as the paper’s institutional and intractable bias toward liberal causes. In her resignation letter to the publisher, which she posted publicly on her personal website at the time, she said: “A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job it is to inform everyone else.”

Of the Times’ content, she wrote: “Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.”

About The Free Press’ approach to journalism, its website states: “We focus on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative. For us, curiosity isn’t a liability. It’s a necessity.”

Far from just a Substack newsletter, The Free Press is now a full-blown media company with more than 30 columnists, reporters, and editors producing daily content that cuts broadly across the political spectrum.

One recent week’s stories included: a lengthy piece by well-known business writer Joe Nocera on the free-trade skeptics during the Clinton years who have been proven right; a detailed look by Gabe Kaminsky at how MAGA lobbyists are raking in record amounts of money, filling the coffers of the “swamp” President Trump promised to drain; a well-researched story by Eli Lake documenting the press’ exaggerated description of Gaza as suffering through a famine; and a piece by Olivia Reingold capturing the motivations behind the attendees of the Bernie Sanders-AOC “Fighting the Oligarchy” tour.

All are complex issues whose topics stand a good chance of triggering outrage by either the right or left just by bringing them up, but in the hands of The Free Press and its editors and writers, you can generally be assured a fair and thoroughly researched account of the topic, which you just don’t see too often elsewhere. AllSides, by the way, ranks The Free Press as leaning right.

Of course, any news outlet that tries to be balanced is going to get some criticism, and the left is particularly bent out of shape by The Free Press. A liberal Substack writer named Matt Johnson recently spilled barrels of digital ink railing against The Free Press because “it offers intellectual reassurance to legions of anti-anti-Trump readers – sophisticated conservatives who may be uneasy about Trumpism yet want to believe that wokeness and other left-wing excesses are the primary threats to Western civilization.”

That doesn’t describe me as a person or as a reader of The Free Press. I read it because I want smart analysis that takes me out of my comfort zone and possibly changes my mind about a topic. Or in other words, to do what The Free Press tagline says: “Think For Yourself.”