Full Disclosure: I work for a news organization and I don’t actively follow the news.
I am a media literacy educator at the local public media station KQED. I love my job and I’m proud of our hard working journalists covering the stories that matter for the Bay Area and beyond.
But when I’m not at work, I find it really hard to follow the news. Or consume media that is about anything substantive, like documentaries, issue explainers, or news analysis.
I spend most of my time reading light scifi and fantasy, watching hours of silly YouTube videos, and reading Reddit threads about Disney theme parks. I can feel myself getting dumber each minute.
When I was younger, I remember waking up, going down to breakfast and reading the front page of the New York Times. I subscribed to the New Yorker and read it cover to cover. I would buy academic books and read them “for fun.”
But gradually my media consumption habits started to veer toward only light entertainment. I stopped reading the newspaper (although I still have a digital NYT’s subscription). I haven’t read any non-fiction books in months.
I realize that I’m part of the problem.
In my professional life, my goal is to get young people to be engaged with the world around them, to think critically about and evaluate the the media they consume. But I’m not setting a great example.
So I’m tackling this dilemma in small, manageable steps. I read a couple of articles in the NY Times this morning. I’m adding the public library’s Kanopy app to the top of my TV’s menu of options, and adding several documentaries to the queue. And I, for the time in forever, checked out a library book that wasn’t scifi or fantasy — on gender diversity in young people.
I’m hoping to rekindle and re-develop healthier media consumption habits. Fingers crossed.