Junk news and clickbait may be free, but most reliable and credible news is not. Fake news exacts its own costs.
Access to real journalism is not free. There is a need to budget for being a reasonably informed citizen of the United States. While libraries and occasional internet sites allow free access to good information about politics, medical research and important trends, a person has to work more to track it down. A decent library is the exception, but the desire for convenience means that we tend to curate our own collections of resources, unwittingly settling on sources that monetize their existence by using “news” as bait. “Paid” stories appearing on the fringes of news websites are the most obvious cases of pseudo journalism. The first “sponsored” listings on a Google search are an obvious example. Some who have paid to have top billing may offer credible information. But their content is usually selling their own products or services. Ideally, journalism serves the public interest with the best versions of the truth; junk news serves some private interest.
Information has value. Especially in these times we need to consider paying the researchers, authentic journalists and news aggregators who must make a living for their efforts. The last election suggests the cost to the republic when voting is effected by of a ton of paid advertising and misinformation. Elon Musk alone supported the GOP to the tune of nearly $300 million in the last election. That included a brazen public offer to pay for votes for Donald Trump. We know he contributed to a mountain of false claims delivered to people who apparently never bothered to check their veracity.
We pay an electricity provider for light. We should be willing to budget some money to pay for information that will bring hard truths out of the shade.
We need to budget for high-quality news.
A reasonable budget for high quality news and information probably starts at about $200 a month, or $2400 a year. That’s the cost of access to several reliable sources within the information society. Everyone’s interests and resources will vary. The list below is one suggestion of a good mix: not unreasonable for some family budgets, but not all. To be sure, “information” is not a typical item to fold into family expenses. And yet most of us can not function without expensive smart phones, cable access, and an internet platform. It is useful to remember that a chunk of family money goes to costly travel and entertainment, money that may be spent in a shortsighted exchange of the pleasant for the essential.
Here’s one reasonable breakdown of some useful expenses, which will vary somewhat based on a family’s interests.
-Free and worthwhile: Library sources, and digital forms of Wikipedia, The Associated Press, and opinion websites like Vox or Politico. Scholastic for children offers a host of age-graded magazines on a range of national and international topics. Many are available in school libraries.
– A good newspaper, about $35 a week for hard copies . There is a good reason to have physical a copy of a newspaper sitting on the family breakfast table. A parent can do no better than make “the daily miracle” of a newspaper ready available to their word-thirsty children. Children naturally like the variety of a newspaper. Scrolling a mashup of headlines on their digital devices does not cut it.
–A quality newsmagazine. A hard copy of the weekly The Atlantic is about $80 per year
-Cable access (40 Basic Channels, including some good news sources) about $50 per month.
$2400 a year may seem like an expendable budget item. But not paying to be as informed as you can be comes at a price, including the current rueful state of American national politics.
Trump’s actions seem to come with little input or deliberation.
Descriptions of the various forms of presidential leadership usually include several basic patterns. A President can lead by deliberating with various stakeholders in and out of government. It is clear The Heritage Foundation headquartered a short walk from the Capitol almost always has ear of this president. But is doubtful their ideas were subject to much presidential deliberation. Or a leader can make a concerted effort to shape public opinion. We have been reminded recently that President Carter employed this form repeatedly in messages, arguing to the nation to be more frugal and conservation minded. Alternatively, a president can demonstrate intent by acting on his or her own ideas. In the words of political scientist James David Barber, he or she can “show an orientation toward productiveness as a value,” flooding the daily news agenda with gestures of decisiveness. George W. Bush liked to use the location that he was “the decider:” a single-minded leader with little patience for parsing various other views.
Trump is definitely not the West Wings’ Jeb Bartlett, testing ideas with insiders and outsiders from morning to night. Instead, proposals like taking over Panama or invading Iceland, you will pardon the pun, seem half-baked: made mostly in private, but announced with calculated theatrics. The theatre of stale “manly” declarations is his rhetorical method, and about 25 years out of date. The result is that we might get better outcomes with a throw of some dice.
One could fairly ask how the preposterous idea of taking over a foreign land was not fully studied and discussed by security analysts, both sides of Congress, military leaders, and, most egregiously, the effected governments themselves. After all, these decisions involve sovereign states that were–not long ago–our allies. Ditto on unilaterally renaming Denali, the beautiful word indigenous and more recent residents of Alaska prefer for this grand North American mountain. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska (R) disagrees with Trump’s decision. “You can’t improve upon the name that Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans bestowed on North America’s tallest peak.” Obviously, place names of indigenous Americans rightfully figure in every corner of the nation. Politico suggests he is just getting started on a binge of unilateral name-changes. Who knows what is in store for the residents of Minnesota, Montana, or New York?
Aside from the blunt instrument of random tariffs, which has all of the grace of shooting out the neighbor’s windows, the single biggest marvel of executive overreach is his decision to rename internationally recognized name for the Gulf of Mexico. He seems uninterested in Mexico’s or Cuba’s views or, more significantly, the weight of history and tradition that governs long-established geographical features. Changing the name of an international body of water is roughly the equivalent of announcing that Florida will henceforth be known as Swamplandia. Floridians might have other ideas. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names would normally vet name changes. But even a leader who craves the appearance of authority should know that sometimes ‘saying it doesn’t make it so.’
In the parlance of decision-making theory, these are all “low knowledge/non-incremental” changes with important ramifications that reach far beyond what the impulsive Donald Trump envisions. Consultation with effected parties on these decisions appears to have been minimal.
Students of how decisions are made note that non-incremental changes preceded by little deliberation represent the least desirable path to change. It’s a theatrical style of leadership more at home in movie script than in our elaborately interconnected world. We now must wait with our former friends for the unintended consequences to roll in.
– A good newspaper, about $35 a week for hard copies . There is a good reason to have physical a copy of a newspaper sitting on the family breakfast table. A parent can do no better than make “the daily miracle” of a newspaper ready available to their word-thirsty children. Children naturally like the variety of a newspaper. Scrolling a mashup of headlines on their digital devices does not cut it.
–A quality newsmagazine. A hard copy of the weekly The Atlantic is about $80 per year
$2400 a year may seem like an expendable budget item. But not paying to be as informed as you can be comes at a price, including the current rueful state of American national politics.
Trump is definitely not the West Wings’ Jeb Bartlett, testing ideas with insiders and outsiders from morning to night. Instead, proposals like taking over Panama or invading Iceland, you will pardon the pun, seem half-baked: made mostly in private, but announced with calculated theatrics. The theatre of stale “manly” declarations is his rhetorical method, and about 25 years out of date. The result is that we might get better outcomes with a throw of some dice.