How much news is too much? Or not enough? News Over Noise, the new podcast from Penn State's News Literacy Initiative explores that question and offers guidance on how to consume news that enhances your participation in our democracy without becoming overwhelmed by all the noise on social media and the 24/7 news cycle.
News Over Noise co-hosts Matt Jordan and Leah Dajches join us this week to discuss how the news impacts our mental health, the future of media literacy education, and more. Jordan is an associate professor of media studies and Dajches is a post-doctoral researcher, both in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State.
News Literacy Week- January 23-27, 2023
Episode Transcript
Chris Beem
From the recording the Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. Happy New Year, everybody. Welcome back. We are at it again for another season another semester. And we are kicking things off this week with our colleagues at Penn State, Matt Jordan and Lea Dajches who are the hosts of a new podcast called News Over Noise that examines this idea of news avoidance. I say at the top of the interview, that might seem like a foreign concept to people who listen to Democracy Works. But it is something that I think we have all heard and maybe many of you listening have heard from students or others in your life. So even if it might not be yours, or my daily habit, it's something that's definitely worth thinking about and what the implications of it are for our democracy.
Candis Watts Smith
Well, I just would like to say that my name is Candis Smith. And I'm a selected news avoider.
Chris Beem
Hi, Candis.
Candis Watts Smith
There are many reasons to avoid the news. And I just think that it's really important for us to think about, not just as, like a demonization of people who don't read the news. I mean, I like to believe that I'm a well read person. But there are moments of time where it actually seems like it's better to not be abreast of every single thing that's going on. And sometimes it's just that a lot of the news that we see feels like total filler, or feels like dumpster fire all of the time. And so I guess just to kind of think about the array of reasons why people avoid the news. I mean, it all has, of course effects on the extent to which any of us are fully informed. But we can probably better strategize around how to get people back in the fold or introduce them into the fold. Rather than just kind of a blanket sweep of thinking that people who avoid the news are just one particular kind of person that just needs to know better about reading news.
Chris Beem
I completely agree with that. I mean, there are I mean, we've all heard from students who have, you know, express this idea that, you know, I quit listen to the news, I don't like to listen over the news. And, you know, there is a lot of bad stuff going on, right, and stuff that they can do nothing about, and that at many points in their life seems overwhelming, and sometimes it is overwhelming. And so you could argue that in many cases, avoiding the news is a is a smart thing to do for your mental health.
Candis Watts Smith
You know, one of the things that I think is really important to note also is that there is the kind of consumer side of people letting the news come to them, or, which is a different kind of avoidance or just not engaging with various types of news. But then there's the supply side, which is what is available for us to consume. Is it high quality? Is it you know, is it relevant to our day to day lives? Is it allowing us to translate difficult concepts so that we can have a better understanding of policies or the political stances of particular, you know, candidates or our own representatives, or even understanding the way the economy works, for example. So I'm really pleased with Matt and Leah's endeavor in their podcasts, I listened to a couple of episodes of just kind of thinking on both sides, that there and I use, I don't want to say, because one of the things that you will learn from Matt and Leah, is there more than two sides, but on this issue that we might think not only about what we want out of journalism, what we want out of the media, but also how we can strategize in the particular landscape that we're in so that we can better connect so that we can better understand so that we can find translations of difficult concepts that really help us to, you know, just kind of move around in our communities and make better political decisions.
Jenna Spinelle
You know, in another hat that I wear when I'm not working on this show or at the McCourtney Institute. I do some work with a group called LION Publishers, which is a trade organization of several 100 local news startups across the country, and one of the things they're trying to do is exactly what you were saying Canada's about figuring out how to create news that's relevant for its audience. And that's challenges. A lot of the notions of traditional journalism, it's not as much about holding people in power to account or being the fourth estate is helping people figure out, you know, how do I understand my water bill? Or how do I use X, Y, or Z public service? That is difficult to understand to the point we've been on the show before about administrative burdens, right? Like, what role can the media have in doing those kinds of things, and that, in turn, breeds engagement and trust, which is also part of this, you know, people avoid the news, in some cases, because they don't trust it. And so what can news organizations do to rebuild that trust with readers.
Chris Beem
These newspapers have to pay people and as, as I think we've all seen, you know, with their decline in revenue, newspapers have declined in terms of quality, which makes people are less inclined to subscribe and assist this downward spiral. And so they're part of what you're talking about is not just kind of re fashioning, or reconceptualizing, the idea of what news is, and what the relationship is between the producer and the consumer, it's also a matter of finding a business model that will work in this extremely difficult climate. And it's, you put all these challenges together, and it's on both sides, right on both sides on the producer and the consumer side. It's a, it's a very new and very difficult world with a lot of different constraints. And trying to figure out how to navigate this successfully is a real challenge, even though people are approaching this with, with goodwill. And with the same kind of sense of the Fourth Estate, as you mentioned, that, you know, has always been.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and I think you'll hear some of the ideas that Matt and Leah have and some of the work that they're doing to try to get at some of these issues, both with making their podcasts, some of the outreach that they're going to do to educators and others. And we also talked to you about being a news junkie, and why that is not necessarily the most helpful thing, either. So let's go now to the interview with Matt Jordan and Leah Dajches.
Jenna Spinelle
Matt Jordan, and Leah Dajches Welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. So we are talking today, broadly about news avoidance, which is the subject of the new podcast that the two of you co host called news over noise part of Penn State's news literacy project. And I have lots to ask you about that which I think it's kind of a for people listening to this show, myself included the idea of being a news avoider or something that's difficult to fathom for, for myself or for listeners, but I think we can all conjure someone, maybe our friends or family who maybe don't share our obsessions last infatuation with the news, and we may talk about the fly that's problematic in and of itself. But let's just start off with some some definitions here. Matt, if you wouldn't mind kicking us off by talking a bit about what news avoidance is. And then Leah, I know you mentioned in the podcast that you yourself are a news avoider, at least some of the time so maybe you could share a bit about your experience and what that's looked like for you.
Matt Jordan
So news avoidance is something that people have been studying now for a while, because there's a significant swath of the population that just because of the anxiety that news creates, the way that it's framed the way that it kind of always kind of one bouncing from one crisis to the next. as kind of a wellness technique, what people tend to do is just to avoid it, right, that they're really managing their own feelings and effect level by just avoiding this kind of tumultuous day lose of bad news. So that's generally what the definition of it is. And then there are all sorts of different strategies that news avoiders use to kind of McCann manage their own sense of feeling and connection to the world.
Leah Dajches
Yeah, so Matt, Matt kinda hit the nail on the head with it's kind of you, at least for me, I tended to be a selective news avoider because I felt that the news I was consuming the news I was exposed to what I was hearing my family my friends talking about it was it was so overwhelming and it often left me feeling helpless. And I also think, you know, my, my journey throughout this podcast is really also been learning to understand how we really define news, what is what is news and how can I convey To me in a kind of more curated healthy way so that I can be an informed, engaged citizen, but not lose my mind because of all the noise around it.
Jenna Spinelle
It feels like we both have too much news, but also not enough like we hear about all this information overload, but also about news deserts and the decline of local news. So can you talk about how you maybe square those things? And how you might encourage others to square them?
Matt Jordan
Well, I'll flip the questions and say that I think one of the reasons we have a certain kind of news is because of the decline of local news, which is to say that news should be about connecting people to the environments that where they live, helping them manage what's changed, what's not changed policy that's coming up all the things that we need to make sense of the world. And increasingly, that's not being done. So what's filling that void. Now that Deb, you know, kind of newspapers are drying up and TV channels are drying up, whatnot, is a kind of nationalized spectacle, where politics, this team versus that team, and that kind of zero sum game, nature of that win for Republicans win for Democrats, that's coming to be dominant, right. And so for a lot of people who are news junkies, that's kind of, that's the melodrama that they're tied to. But when you're glued to that all the time, and we only have so much time in a day we work, we do all kinds of other things, we walk the dog, then you just tend to avoid it. Because that's not really giving us any purchase around the world. That's not really helping us manage the changes in our lives. And we're just kind of following what gets framed as news.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. And that leads to the concept of political hobby ism, right? Where Yeah, rather than, I don't know, going to a meeting, or even just being more more aware of what's happening in your own backyard, you know, far more about the ins and outs of Kevin McCarthy than you do about your own city council or something like that. Yeah, and
Matt Jordan
Exactly. The thing is, when you you're involved with your city council, or people that are your neighbors, you realize that people are a lot more complicated. They're not, you know, partisans, really, they're, they're people who are into the governance of democracy, they are people who care about their children who care about the sewers, and the city works and whatnot. So in a way, that's a that's a, it's a good example of where democracy works in relation to news, whereas the kind of who, what Kevin McCarthy is doing, if you'll get those votes, in a lot of ways that doesn't really matter to people's everyday lives.
Jenna Spinelle
So, you know, I think when we think about news literacy or media literacy, the onus is, often if not always on news consumers to say, Okay, you need to seek out these sources, you need to do X, Y, or Z. But I can see how, Leah that might lead to some of what you were talking about, like, I don't have time to visit these, like at five different sites, or check this or that media bias rating or, you know, whatever it is, that's kind of the the conventional wisdom of media literacy. So to balance what you were just saying that about, we all have busy lives, like, are there things that are maybe missing from that kind of traditional media literacy advice, either on the on the consumer side, or maybe even that news organizations themselves should be doing to think about how to move this all forward?
Leah Dajches
I mean, I think for for consumers, I you know, Matt, Matt was talking about local news. And I think that was definitely a takeaway I've had I've had so far from one of our episodes was that often a good place to start is looking at your local news, you know, you're not having to worry so much about maybe not necessarily a larger agenda coming from a larger corporation, although sometimes you do, depending on the local news outlet, but it feels more kind of on the ground. It's an it's an a context that you are better able to understand can connect to yourself. So that's something that I thought I find is an easy way to kind of entrance into wanting to consume news. For sure.
Matt Jordan
There's always been an onus on the kind of consumer side. It's kind of caveat emptor type type logic. And one of the things that we've been thinking about is how that's inadequate, right? Because then it's blaming the consumer if they weren't good, a good news sifter. So as Leah said, finding sources where you can trust their curation, I think is important, right? And that's one of the things that this moment of social media was supposed to kind of, you know, destroy the old gatekeepers and whatnot. And I find myself nostalgic for the old gatekeepers responsible editors who realized that not every you know, hambulance needed to be chased and not every, you know, man bites dog story needed to be covered. There are certain things that are important for us to know as we try to govern ourselves and our democracy and there are certain things that are distractions.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and I think what you said Leah about the you know, being more careful about your curation, I can see how that is both a good first step for someone who maybe has some of those news, avoider tendencies. But also on the other end of the spectrum, maybe like people who listen to the show who can't stop refreshing the Washington Post, or the New York Times, or Axios, or politico, or, you know, whatever it is, throughout the day, just being a little bit more mindful about what you're doing and how much time you're spending doing it.
Leah Dajches
Yeah, absolutely. And this idea of kind of curating the news that's coming to you. It's also so simple. This is something that I've talked with my dad about too, is like, also turning off the television, when you've been watching your news channel. And it's just been playing in the background, your favorite news station all day, there's a comes to a point where it's time to turn it off and and to say that you've absorbed as much as you're possibly going to and taking a step back, because news is important. And it's definitely essential for democratic participation, engagement. But also there are times where I can see people getting frustrated, losing hope. And that's when we start to fall into that. News, avoider tendencies,
Matt Jordan
I would just say to that, as well, that, you know, in our lives, I think we should be striving for a kind of a more holistic approach or kind of a balanced approach to the things we do, we should work out a little bit, we should maybe check the news a little bit we should eat, eat good food, et cetera, et cetera. And part of that mindfulness that comes to being wanting to be more realistic is also recognizing that the news is not the only important places that we're getting stories about what makes people in a democracy work, right we'd from art, we get stories about what good virtue is, and what not. And I think the, the, the danger is that when we think that the only way we can be engaged in democracy or politics is by being a news junkie, then we get pulled into only one kind of story and attempts to send tends to only have the same kind of characters, villains, and people who are doing this bad or that bad. And so we're talking about in a way, the worst people in the world and not talking about this people who we see as helpers or people who are going to help us be better.
Jenna Spinelle
We've been talking thus far. I think about people that maybe had some sense of the pre social media news environment. And you know what it was like when there you could literally only get your news at certain points of the day when the paper came out or when the you know, TV broadcast came on but there's at least a whole generation in Gen Z and I think maybe a lot of the the millennial generation that kind of came up in the social media world for all this, as you said before, has has been scrambled. I know that you had on Annie woohoo manage. John Fetterman owns social media campaign. And so she had a lot to say about how she thought about the news cycle, the relationship between social media and the news. Can you just share a bit about those insights? I hope people will go listen to the full episode. But what what did you take from that hearing from someone who was literally in the thick of some of these conversations?
Matt Jordan
Well, I'll answer and then maybe Leah has some other things to say. But one of the things she said that is achieved focused a lot on authenticity. And I think she This is one of the things that made her such a good social media director for the Fetterman campaign was that she realized that people want authenticity, and they're not feeling like they get it in the news, right? If you think about how the news is somehow journalists are supposed to be people who take all this information in and yet have no opinion about it. Right? Nobody's like that. It's inauthentic. And kind of what she was saying is people smell that right that there. There's something phony about, I have no idea what's going on here, even though we're trying to we're being manipulated. So she was talking about one of the reasons that Gen Z is going to Tic Toc, for example, which you know, pure report tells us about 60%. of that generation is, is because they're getting it from people that they trust, right? And they trust them in that kind of parasocial way that you get on social media. But it's precisely because they feel like there's they're just they're not being phony. They are they're being authentic. So kind of what I got from Annie was that there's a lot to be learned by traditional news organizations who are desperate to regain the trust of their audience that that the status quo way of doing the news is turning people away in droves. And what they want to hear is something from somebody who seems like a real person.
Leah Dajches
Absolutely. And Annie also mentioned that it's really about meeting people where they are so if you're trying to have have a message or an impact among the younger demographics, Gen Z is meeting them where they are is to go on social medias to make tic tock videos is to find ways to curate your news stories or projects that are accessible for Are these demographics? And I think naturally, you know, as Matt mentioned, a lot of these social media outlets are places where you can really kind of emphasize and build upon that sense of authenticity.
Jenna Spinelle
I mean, it seems to me to be so I have seen this come across, maybe not surprisingly, the best, you know, from journalists who are willing to go out and develop a strong personal brand, I'm thinking about, like Taylor Lorenz at the post, for example, or the any number of journalists who have left major media outlets to start their own sub stacks, or all those things that we were talking about earlier. It seems to me there's others, maybe a bit of a, I don't know if paradox is the right word here. But you know, we still think about mainstream media outlets, and they still aren't, maybe have this idea that they need to be everything to everyone, which prevents them from being having that more authentic relationship with their readers. So do you do you think that they will need to ultimately change? Or? Or is there there a way to still preserve what we have traditionally thought of as mainstream media or news but bringing in this element of of authenticity,
Matt Jordan
I think they're going to have to try, right? That they're, it's they're losing and because they're losing, democracy is losing, right? Because the, it's easy to attack them. And this has become a feature of, of kind of anti democratic discourse is to is to attack the press. And that's becoming a norm. So if they're, these institutions don't try to develop a rapport with people that they're talking about. And with their audience, frankly, what partisan media does really well is that, and somehow the people who are trying to play it right down the center, there's a person I follow a Jay Rosen, he's an professor at NYU, and he talks about how people write news from nowhere journalists, and and if you're writing it from nowhere, how do I know where you're coming from? Right. And that's, I think journalists are going to have to rethink how they do this in this moment. Because, frankly, one of the political parties in our two party system is just doesn't care about democracy very much, it's in their way. And acting as if they do acting as if the same old kind of play it straight down, the middle stuff is going to work. Nobody's convinced of that. So it's going to be a tough conversation, they're gonna have to make some institutions like the New York Times that have been around for 150 years playing it through and look at the same way. They may not be able to say, Well, look, we just need to preserve what we do. Because the audience is moving away from it.
Jenna Spinelle
You know, the other thing about social media, you devoted a whole episode of your series to this news finds me mentality. And I think that whenever at least I asked my students at the beginning of every semester, where do you get your news from? They say, well, it's just whatever comes across in my feed, right? I think that's, that's the norm these days, as strange as it might be for for older, older generations to conceive of that. So can you talk more about the insights that you learn from that episode? And how this idea of how we physically see the news in our social media and elsewhere figures in here?
Matt Jordan
Well, it's kind of it's part of the news avoidance phenomena, right, that that is that it is a strategy for managing the flow and the kind of paralyzing choices of what do I read today, so that what people think is in a way, they have more faith in algorithms than they do people, right. Journalists are subjective, they've been taught to say, you can't trust him. So this algorithm is a neutral machine thing that's coming at me. And if you're looking at, say, Tiktok algorithms, most students are convinced that their tic tock algorithm knows them, right. So that that very understanding of the way that they interface with the machine kind of builds a trust that other forms of current news curation don't have. So they just say, Whatever comes through, that must be what I need to know. And what we know from this, the research on this is that it leads to more homogenization, it leads to more partisan views of things, because that's what algorithms actually do is give us exactly what we want to hear, or at least what they think will engage us. So it's a news avoidance strategy. And it is pervasive, it's one that we would really like to make people aware of, again, in the sense of being more mindful of the way they consume.
Leah Dajches
Yeah, and that's something that hopefully listening to that episode. You know, listeners can be a little bit more self reflexive when they're just they're scrolling through Tik Tok or Instagram or even Facebook. It's how they can break away from that kind of echo chamber of their algorithm that they've, that they think that they're there Reading and it's getting to know them.
Jenna Spinelle
And on this point about echo chambers, I think we heard a lot, particularly in the years after the 2016 election of, we need to have a balanced news diet, we need to break out of our own echo chambers and, and filter bubbles. And I wonder that seemed that kind of nicely aligned with this idea of of objectivity or both sides journalism, we need to kind of do the same thing as as consumers. But I think that leads to like, people don't have time to seek out all those different things. So I guess I wonder how how much if at all, you think this idea of a quote unquote, balanced news diet applies in 2023, compared to when we first started talking about it back in 2016 2017?
Matt Jordan
I find it kind of frustrating. And I think it's one of the it's one of the paralyzing forces in in journalism right now, is this notion that there are two sides. I mean, what we know about people is that we're complicated. And democracy is also complicated, right? So having a space that acknowledges the kind of the extent to which we barely know what's going on all the time, in terms of our own lives, in terms of our own moral intuitions, all of these things. And that really, people can be persuaded to go either way. I mean, the partisans at both sides, which are mostly audiences that are cultivated by a very niche oriented media that wants loyal audiences that are easily predictable and persuadable, having both of those sides in my life I'd like to avoid, right? So I'm kind of sad that I want something that is the in the medium between those two, but I would, I'm in search of media doesn't reduce things to both sides. So my students say this to me a lot, right? I want to hear both sides. And I'm like, Look, every story has like 20 sides if you really think about it. So avoiding that framing, I think that's what I'm in search of for media. And that's what I think people should, should go for. So if you're thinking about in relation to diet, both sides is like, you know, cotton candy, convenience food, right? It seems like it tastes good. But it has very little nutritional value, whereas the stuff that you have to break down, that you have to kind of chew on a little bit, I think is more nutritious for us all.
Leah Dajches
Yeah, to piggyback off of Matt's kind of analogy here about you're wanting nutritious news that you can kind of chew on, I think something that's really important when we're thinking about a news diet, too, is making sure that you as the consumer are ready to critically engage or analyze the news that you're consuming. I mean, I've heard people who try to read news from both sides. But are they are they reading it with an open mind? Are they analyzing it? Are they you know, doing that kind of quote, like News Literacy steps that we imagine where they're comparing they're analyzing, they're thinking about it? Or are they just reading both sides so that they can say they've done it, but then still agree with the one side that seems more favorable to them. So I think, beyond considering a news diet, too, it's thinking about kind of your intention and the mentality you have when you go into your consumption of the news.
Jenna Spinelle
So I know we saw recently, I believe that at the end of 2022, or maybe the beginning of this year at all, it all blurs together, but New Jersey announced that it would be the first state to require media literacy to be taught at the K-12. level. I know that in addition to this podcast that the two of you are working on, you know, curricula and materials for K 12. Teachers, what types of things are you thinking about for that audience?
Matt Jordan
Well, we start these in January, we're starting in fact, we're the first we're going to do a series of webinars for continuing education. The first is going to actually get me on the news finds me mentality, because we know that that is the dominant way of consuming news that we have among the youth. So that along the lines of what they're trying to do in New Jersey, we think that this is part of a civic education, right? It's public health, right? And that democracy will rise and fall depending on how easily people are manipulated, and are manipulatable. So I think New Jersey has figured out that the forces that are using these techniques like computational propaganda, you know, digital media manipulation, disinformation, they're not going to stop, right. And so the best way to do this is to make people inoculated from this stuff, and that really happens through through literacy.
Leah Dajches
Yeah, and we're going to be having some webinars that also focus specifically on social media, because when we're talking about K through 12, you know, a lot of that demographic, you know, they're on their phones, they're connecting on social media with their friends. And so some, some forms of media literacy also are considering around the types of information that they are sharing on social media as well as the information that they're consuming.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, you know the as we've been talking here there's a phrase that Tom Nichols used when we had him on the show was moral hectoring can use that in his book as well, this idea of like, you have to do this and I think you hit hinted at this before that when we're talking about the role of, of news, consumers and doing things right versus doing things wrong, I guess, how do you think about, you know, packaging this, you know, media literacy curriculum, whether it's for K 12, or for for college students in a way that does not you feel like you're, you know, lecturing, or morally hectoring them, or that kind of thing. I think there's also a notion of like this, this needs to be fun, not that the news itself is always fun, but like just maybe not taking itself.
Matt Jordan
This is a challenge, especially for an aging white guy like myself that the tendency is, and this is, I think, been a problem with newsletters and media literacy in general, is to make people go through some kind of exercise and then show them how wrong they are. Right. And what we know about persuasion is that rarely works. So making not making it exactly fun, but making people feel like it matters is is really important. Now, if to go back to my nutrition, you know, there are a lot of lessons to be learned in terms of how that works as well, right? Because you can Hector, people tell him you need to eat your broccoli and your spinach and stuff like that. But there are ways to, to have people be more creative about them to make them feel more agentive. About that. So we're going to try all kinds of different techniques, we're one of the things we're doing is we're using News Literacy ambassadors. And we're going to be expanding this through the Penn State system. Because we think that students do a better job of talking to other students about the importance of this, then ageing white faculty do. So meeting them where they are making, giving them things that are more easily digestible. Or using things like infographics, we're gonna be trying to, you know, again, find as many angles to the solution as we can, because not any one of them is going to reach everybody. So they're really trying to kind of multimedia multimodal approach.
Jenna Spinelle
So we are recording this 10 days into January, it will come out a little bit after that, but still within kind of new year's resolution timeframe. So going back again, to your diet metaphor matter for thinking about resolutions, news resolutions to make it for this this coming year. What would you say is a good, you know, actionable goal for both people who are news avoiders, but maybe the news junkies as well?
Matt Jordan
Well, if you think about New Year's resolutions, these are all about trying to break habits, right. And that's the that's why they're so difficult for most of us. So think, first about what the habits are, what have you gotten used to doing what? What becomes ingrained in your daily routine that maybe you should rethink would be the first of these, and that's kind of a general one. But then the other one is that, you know, the world is, is complicated. It's not always burning, sometimes it's burning, but sometimes it's not. So if you if you're getting a dopamine hit every day from, you know, feeling rage, or feeling strong emotions, you're probably being manipulated, right, you're probably the product for them to sell advertisements to. So gonna kind of be for people to be more mindful about how they feel after they've been dealing with the news, you know, do they feel you have to kind of run straight to social media and, you know, crank on the keyboard a while to release all this this bad anger and it's bad juju. So if that's the way you feel, make a resolution to be more mindful of what it is you're consuming.
Leah Dajches
My resolution, I think it goes really well with yours there, Matt. And that's focusing on everything in moderation. And so this is a, you know, a mantra that listeners can put really towards anything in their life. But when they're thinking about news, and their consumption of it, it's really for me focusing on moderation. So again, as Matt said, mindful when you're consuming and you're, you know, curating and selecting your news, but then also remembering moderation. So trying to engage with yourself and check your feelings throughout the process. Maybe even sometimes it's setting a timer and giving yourself a couple of 10 minute chunks throughout the day, but finding ways to be more active and your new selection and moderation in how often and frequent in what you're consuming.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. And then finally, for for our listeners who may have people in their lives who are news avoiders and they want to set it as a resolution to help them break that habit or to start to consume news more like where the where do you start? What what's the best kind of step forward there the best first step,
Matt Jordan
Talking to them, I mean, talk it telling them why the the stuff that you're passionate ly, you know, binging on the news, if you're if you're a news junkie. And that's the other side of this equation that probably should mention as well, right? You probably want to talk to the news junkies as much as you want to talk to the news avoiders because somewhere in the middle is where virtue is I would imagine. So to talk to them about why you think these things matter. Or why why you care about this particular story. Because in my feeling this is what our news isn't doing well, right? This matter, this story matters, not because it's a win for Democrats, right? But this story matters, because this is about this has, you know, on the ground implications for people who are vulnerable for things that we care about and say, I'm sure you care about this too, right. And more often than not, that's that translational element is not what our news cycle is doing very well. So the more that we can do that work, saying why this stuff matters, then you pull people into the conversation. That is not just the conversation about the news, but it's conversation about democracy.
Leah Dajches
Matt has said throughout this episode so far, he said the phrase, people are complicated, you know, people are messy. And I think when you're wanting to talk to someone, whether a news, they're a news avoider, or a news junkie, I think it's important to you know, try and find out why, why? Why are they avoiding the news? What about it so that there could be more pragmatic solutions as to how to introduce them to healthier ways to potentially consume the news. And shameless plug, I really after having gone through this journey in hosting, co hosting news over noise, all of our episodes, I think, really point to why it matters and can provide listeners with tools, who as a news avoider are very useful to kind of help you dissect and work through the messy news landscape that we are kind of just bombarded with.
Jenna Spinelle
Great. Well, that is an excellent place to wrap up the conversation, we'll link to news over noise in the show notes. I hope listeners, go and check it out, Matt and Leah, thanks so much for joining us.
Candis Watts Smith
Thank you, Jenna, for that excellent interview with Matt and Leah. There are a number of things that stood out to me, but one was about authenticity. And, you know, just to kind of circle back to a thread from earlier is about the extent to which people don't trust various news sources, and how some of that trust comes from the kind of idea that that we have like hyper partisan news. But somehow everyone claims to be objective. And so I really, you know, the point about the kind of idea that people see and really hate and authenticity in their new sources, is when I think that can be tackled in different ways. I have ideas about, you know, ideas of, you know, ideas about objectivity and news and the extent to which we value it. But I'd be interested, Chris, to hear what you have to say about it.
Chris Beem
Well, I mean, I'm feeling you know, like an old, old white guy right now. But I mean, I have this sense that authenticity is and and this desire to be an A neutral observer is has something to recommend it. I mean, I take the point that there was this short window in American history, where journalists strove for this kind of of neutrality, right? Just just reporting the news, just getting the facts out there. But I don't think that that is necessarily inauthentic. I think it means people are striving to serve a role in society. And, you know, I mean, Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America, right? I mean, I just kept going back over and over as I was listening to these arguments about this is just Aristotle's golden mean, how do you figure out the right spot to find between these two objectives? And and we are in a different circumstance, which means the mean has changed and moved, and it's never easy to figure out where it is.
Candis Watts Smith
So I don't think that we disagree in fact, I mean, you really stated it quite plainly that striving for objectivity is not inauthentic. But I think what Matt and Lea are pointing to is the actual context that we're in right now. Which is this idea that people say that they're objective, and they are not. I wonder the extent to which some of our problem that we're having around partisan media is that the average American doesn't know when they are being exposed to news. And when they are being exposed to entertainment, that looks like news.
Chris Beem
I think that's a really, really good point. And it is part of the reason that Matt and I have this podcast is because we have entered a world in which the demands that are whether we like it or not, that are placed on the on the news consumer are much higher, right? There has to be this kind of caveat emptor on the part of the news consumer, the news buyer, to be able to make those kinds of evaluations to be able to say, you know, this person is manipulating me, this person is telling me what I want to hear, or this news reflects a point of view that, you know, is is is different from or you are new to me or whatever, right? And not to mention, is this the kind of news that I that I want to hear about that these are issues that are important to me, right. I mean, the one thing about the newspaper, and or for that matter about a weekly news is that there was an editor making those choices. Now, you can make them yourself.
Candis Watts Smith
Okay, I would like to stand up for Tick, tock, and other. Please do forms of social media briefly. I mean, I think what you're saying is that we used to have a time when there were gatekeepers that really did. And I think Matt mentioned this, it really did just kind of make sure that the news that was presented was important was you know, not about every single drama. And I actually am all for the idea of having news that is important. And not just about every single drama presented to us. But I also think that it's important for us to not be nostalgic about that era, where a lot of mainstream media didn't give stories about people who don't matter to people who are reading those outlets.
Chris Beem
That was very well said, and I would just stipulate everything you said, it's all true. And all I'm doing is trying to say, Yeah, but there was something valuable about that model. And that is that is too easily dismissed for the very reasons you cite. And they're all true. And when you have a bunch of, you know, urban, white male, people making these decisions, clearly, there's going to be a lot of stuff that's going to be left off. And I think a lot of news outlets have, over the past, say 3030 years, straight striven to rectify that situation. I don't think it's as bad as it was, but you still have biases, those are, those are just part of human human nature.
Candis Watts Smith
So I really appreciated that moment in the in the interview is just kind of thinking about, we need to think more broadly, if we're not, you know, kind of traditional journalism and what we are provided in the media isn't safe, satiate satiating us on having an understanding of how our society works, and how we could move forward that there are other kinds of places that we could be looking and thinking about in terms of in terms of these issues that are relevant to us.
Chris Beem
Finding that kind of balance is is part of being, you know, a healthy human being and therefore a good Democrat. I also think, you know, you just, it's just incumbent upon you just as being healthy requires you to eat certain things, and not other things, and doing some things and not doing too much of another thing. Being an informed citizen means taking some control over what you're listening to how much how you are assessing it in terms of what's being conveyed to me is this telling me what I want to hear being not too To stay an informed consumer, but also a little bit skeptical and owning that this is this is my choices that are determining this not not just the producers.
Candis Watts Smith
Which I would say is one of the things that Matt and Leia are doing for us and their podcast is really just kind of helping people to guide through the landscape as it exists to enhance literacy and critical thinking and reading. And to help us think beyond the habits that we've already developed around our news consumption. So kudos to them.
Chris Beem
So from the McCourtney Institute and Democracy Works. I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
And I'm Candis Watts Smith. Thanks for listening.