This is the FCNB podcast network. A bras Monsoda day that we won't with sad and then we won't to say oh we got it does? No one can take that, Owen. It's gonna be okay, O Breasoda day that we won't with say then we won't to say oh we got it does? No one can take that, Owen. May don't be okay. Happy Black History Month, everybody, It's February. This is a month where we celebrate the contributions of Black Americans to our culture. And frankly, I have to say, as time goes on and politics become crazier and crazier, and our culture becomes absolutely insane and so anti American. As we progress, I'm starting to love of Black History Month more and more. I've talked over the years of the show about Black History Month on and off, and I have a whole episode on it if you want to go look at it, and I think my views on it have evolved over the years. I had hoped that we wouldn't need it at one point, but I think we kind of do need it now because the culture, the progressive culture that we're seeing driven by movements like the progressive culture that we're seeing is skewing so anti American that Black History Month feels very blatantly Americans. It's the one time we're allowed to celebrate American achievements these days. So Happy Black History Month. Will be running down some stories over the month for the show, just some fun stories, interesting stories, maybe things you haven't heard about, maybe things that we should think about. But that's not what today's episode is about. Today's episode is about the media. It's kind of a repeat, kind of a rehash. But we are in an election cycle and I had a really interesting interview this week, which I'll post after this episode with Batya Unger Sargun, who is the opinion editor over at Newsweek. We had a wonderful conversation and it really we really talked about good media, bad media, and how media in general is causing so much political divisiveness. And I get asked a question all the time, which Batia and I discussed. I get asked a question all the time, Kira, how do I find real news? How do I find good news? So I want to encourage you to do this. Go back and find the episode, Go back and find the episode I did on finding good information. I think it's called how Do I Find Reliable News? It's episode ninety. I just look at up how to find How do I Find Reliable News? Episode ninety? Go back, re listen to that, Send it to all your friends. I get it, asked about it a lot. Today will sort of be a recap with a little bit of fresh commentary. But I do think this is important, particularly given the discussion that Batya and I had, And just for your own reference, if you're curious about my thoughts on Black History Month, Episode to twelve is on Black History Month? Do we need Black History Month anymore? So, go ahead and look those up if you're curious. But moving forward, I do want to address this issue of how do I find reliable media reliable information? I always appreciate this question, but I always feel I always have the sense that most people asking me don't really want to know, or I should say many people, not most people, but many people don't really want to know how to find reliable information. They want to know how to win their arguments. I'll be very honest with you. That's the sense I get mostly from liberals who asked me that question. Conservatives, it's we're sort of baked in this liberal news media culture. So we already understand the two sides of the media and that we don't get the full story. And a lot of us are perfectly fine with our loyalty to bias right wing media. We know it's biased, we know it's right wing focused, fine with that, we're choosing it. But because we live in a media culture where liberals and progressives sort of own the mainstream airwaves, of course we're very aware of liberal media, and we're very aware of all of those sources. It's not the same for liberal listeners. They know things like oh, Rush Limbaugh, rest in peace, or Charlie Kirk or Ben Shapiro. They know those names. But to many liberals, because they aren't exposed to conservative media because it's not in their face every day unless they want to go find it, those are the only representations, and they're certainly not going to go listen to Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh on purpose. So conservatives, I find ask that question less because they're already quite aware of all the other media that exists out there, and they know where to get it if they want it. One thing Batya and I spoke about was these layoffs that are happening in legacy media right. LA Times is laying off a bunch of people. New York Times has already had some layoffs. We're seeing as I think Sacramento b just had a round of layoffs. Amazon has laid off a lot of people from their media divisions. So we're seeing these these layoffs and and naturally the gatekeepers are really worried about this. And so one of our favorite progressive reporters, Taylor Lorenz from The Washington Post, who honestly, in my opinion, is not a journalist but just a well paid troll. She is the one who docks libs of TikTok, which is absolutely ridiculous, and she's one of the chief ones of the progressive left in media. I hate to sound combative here because I really would like liberal and progressive listeners to hear this episode and maybe get something from it. So I hate to sort of turn off your ears right away, but I'm just being honest with my opinions and how I view this. I don't think she's a legitimate journalist, and I believe if you read her stuff instead of just watched her on TV, you would think so too. That being said, she did take to Twitter. This is what Batia and I talked about and what really triggered this discussion to complain, and I promise I'm going to bring this full circle circle here to complain about the layoffs and her fears about what's going to happen to the media. Let's just listen quickly to what she had to say. Industry is basically in a free fall today. The Los Angeles Times laid off one hundred and fifteen employees. They wiped out their entire DC bureau in an election year. They laid off pretty much all of their sports teams. They killed their entire tech and business section. They laid off breaking news writers, social media editors. The list goes on. But what's really dark is this is just the latest in months and months and months of layoffs in the media industry. In fact, tens of thousands of journalists have been laid off in the past year. Major media companies like BuzzFeed News have completely shuttered their news operations. Time Magazine also just laid off a ton of people, and Oh, Sports Illustrated basically shut down last week. Pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem that myself and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in has been completely hollowed out. And it's not just digital media sites. Local news has been obliterated. The newspaper industry is cratering, radio is essentially dead, aside from NPR, which has been gutted. Meanwhile, hundreds of workers at Conde Nast, the parent company of pretty much every major magazine from GQ to Vogue to The New Yorker to Vanity Fair, on strike because they're also facing and pending layoffs. Even mainstream national media outlets owned by billionaires like The Washington Post where I work and The Atlantic where I used to work, have done layoffs. If you're a young journalist today, there's almost no on ramp to traditional journalism. Even if you do get a job, journalists salaries have been stagnant and even declined, And by the way, we don't make that much to begin with. I don't think people understand how bad the world would be without journalists. I think I'm making the case today that the world might be better off without what people like Taylor are calling journalists. But here's what really stuck out to me about that little diatribe, and it stuck out to Batya too. We talked about this. She said, radio is dead. Talk radio is dead except NPR. Okay, this is an example if you're still with me, any liberal listeners, if you're still with me, this is an example of what I was trying to explain to you earlier, how liberal media consumers are not as well rounded as conservative media consumers. And I use that term very lightly because conservatives being baked in the liberal media sphere, we already we already have to go search out the media that we want and the media we don't want right in front of our face. You guys don't have that. Taylor is the example here. She thinks talk radio is dead. Talk radio is thriving. Talk radio is still a huge industry. Eight out of ten Americans still listen to talk radio. But Taylor lives in a bubble. She lives in a bubble in the Beltway on the coast, and she doesn't know any people who aren't like her. She doesn't have a diverse circle. So ay, I can tell already Taylor doesn't have any black friends, because black people listen to talk radio all the time. Have you ever heard of a guy called Charlemagne, the God, the Breakfast Club, the Shade Room. These are all talk radio slash podcasting platforms that are huge in the black community. So already she's just being an ignorant, you know. So already she's already showing us her lack of perspective with that. But then obviously, talk radio in the conservative sphere is booming as it always as it has been since the days of rush Limbough. That is part of the problem too. We have a group, we have a sector of our society who simply doesn't know that these other sources exist. That's what makes you less well rounded. So I'm not saying you're less intelligent, certainly not saying that, because we have our fair share of idiots on the right. I'm not saying that, or I'm not saying that you're intentionally ignorant. But what I am saying is that you're not getting the full perspective. This is an example from Taylor Lorenz. Already, our media is divided. Already, you are getting curated news. News, of course is curated. It has to be why, because there are so many things happening on any given day. You're getting the tip of the icework. If you watch, if you are a CNN, we love to use CNN as an example. If you're a faithful CNN watcher, you're getting the tippy top one percent of the one percent of news. If your store, if you're CNN viewing every day, is filled with reports from Congress or the border, or about the Trump campaign. That's not even a smidge of what's happening in across the country on any given day. Why are you getting that news and not the other news. Well, that's because CNN has curated your news. CNN has decided, Okay, these are the story is that our viewers are going to be interested in. We don't think they need to know these stories or care about these stories, so we're not going to spend our time and resources on them. Right or wrong or there might not be You may believe, well, there's nothing nefarious about that. Fair enough, Okay. All I'm saying is you must admit your news is curated. That's one place to start. As soon as you understand that you're halfway through the battle here. If you can find reliable you can find information that is how do I put this? That has value by starting with the recognition that you're not getting all the information where you're looking and Again, as I said before, if you're fine with that, fine, be fine with that. But don't hate people based on limited information. Admit you have limited information, decide you're going to go with that limited information. Let that limited information tell you how to vote if that's what you want. But to hate an entire subsection of American society based on limited information, I think that is the scariest thing of all. Please don't do that. That's why I think just recognizing that you have bias in the media you consume is half the battle to solving divisiveness. Again, I'm not telling you what to believe. I'm only telling you what to know, what to understand. This is nothing new to regular listeners. I say it all the time. You cannot judge a story by a headline. You can get some clue. And I'm just as guilty as anyone of this. So please do not think that this is mea preaching. I am also guilty and still I mean even to this day. You guys know how long I've been talking to you about this, but I'm still I feel just as susceptible to s airing a headline or a clip that really gets my hairs raised Before I even dig in and look at the details and see what it means and see if it's true. I'm gonna stop here for a second and just make an observation based on my last two episodes on Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Act and Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh and their comments about it. The clips that have been going around of Charlie Kirk saying these things that are making people nervous or perceived as racist, or are racist, however you want to look at it. I decided not to address this on Twitter or publicly because frankly, I don't want to be perceived as trying to rescue Charlie. He is making his own bed. Let him lay in it. But I will say this, the first clip I saw of Charlie, when it cut off, I thought, oh my gosh, what he said was pretty That was pretty Uh that was pretty cringey. But I did notice that the video cut off, so I thought to myself, I wonder what the moment after is here? I always think that what's the moment before? What's the moment after? We get these little clips, and these little clips tell us how to feel about something, But there's always a moment before and a moment after. Sometimes they don't make any difference at all. The situation is the situation. But I went to find that episode and I played the entire segment, and as the segment went on, he wasn't saying those things. He actually, oh, he did say those things. But then he went on to say, I think that's wrong of me to think that way. I feel terrible, and I think that this is what this I'm just paraphrasing here, but I think this is what the stress of DEI and CRT and the devicesness it causes. It also causes this unhealthy thinking, which I fully admit I have. So I don't know if that would change anyone's perception of what he said, but I do think it was relevant. And I did notice that that account that clipped that is called Patriot takes if you want to go look at it, the account that clipped it. I did notice. I felt that the clip was strategic. I didn't feel I definitely felt when I looked at the whole segment that it took a little air out of the outrage, maybe not all of it. I say all this to say this, that's an account that is clearly dedicated to trashing Charlie Kirk, No hate, do whatever you want. But when I look at that account, that's the context I have to look at those clips in. It's not somebody who is just curious or sitting on a fence. That is their dedicate because I looked at the account, so that is their dedicated goal is to troll Charlie clerk Charlie Kirk, excuse me, and clip up his problematic statements and set a narrative for him. So again, it's fine if you see those clips and you say, I don't need any other context. That's how it is, That's how he is. That's fine. I don't have a problem with that. Again, I think the power isn't understanding what you're looking at and understanding the point of view that it comes from. And that is what we have to do with headlines as well. We have to understand headlines are are designed for you to click. You heard Taylor Lorenz talking about the the collapse of mainstream media, of legacy media. Part of that isn't their fault. A lot of this comes down to bad reporting, bias reporting. People don't feel like they're getting what they need from the news. You're not serving the customer and it's showing in your numbers. But some of it's just not anyone's fault. Some of it is simply the evolution of digital media and how media has changed over the years. We're all struggling to keep up with how to fund media. You need clicks, that's just that is. It used to be you had to sell subscriptions to your newspaper. Now you have to get clicks. So that means making headlines that people want to click on. We do this. We did this at Red State all the time. It still happens. It happens in conservative media, happens in liberal media because we all need your clicks. So just understand that the headline is designed for you to click. It's not really designed for you to share, because we don't get money from your shares. We need you to click through. I always tell this to my Babylon Bee friends or audience. Those headlines are so funny and they are designed to share, but the site doesn't get your money unless you click through to the article. So if you want to support the Bee, click through to the article. It's very helpful, all right. I don't want to beat this dead horse too much, because if you go back to that episode, episode ninety, I'll talk a lot more at length about this, but I did go find some headlines to give you some examples of why it's really important. One of the keys to finding good media is asking yourself, is it too good to be true? Is this headline too good to be true? If it confirms your bias, if it makes you go, what these people? That's probably an article you should click through and read. I'm going to give you an example here, hot topics, the news of the day, in depth interviews, and a whole lot more. This is the Outlaws radio show. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts today. That's out Laws, The Outlaws Radio Show, NFCB podcasts. Right, this is recent. This is from January twenty fifth, twenty twenty four, and the same headline was actually repeated across many legacy media outlet. This is from Scientific American in particular, it's said the headline reads, sixty four thousand pregnancies caused by rape have occurred in states with a total abortion band. A new study estimates, all right, you read that and you say to yourself, oh, whoa what And it's the same headline that was on MSNBC and CNN. You think, oh my gosh, what Well if you are vehemently opposed to the Dobbs decision, vehemently opposed to the Texas abortion band, yeah, that's a headline that's going to make you go. See I told you me my first thought, and this is probably a result of being in this industry for so long. My first thought was, how do they know? So I read it. I didn't depend on the headline. I read it. And by the way, this was I found this article because someone shared the headline with me as proof of my cruelty as a pro life advocate. So you have to read. You have to read down. And first thing I see is a new study estimates that more than sixty four thousand pregnancies resulted from rape between July one, twenty twenty two, and July first, twenty twenty four in states where abortion has been banned throughout pregnancy in all or most cases. Of these, just more than fifty five hundred are estimated to have occurred in states with rape exceptions, and nearly fifty nine thousand are estimated for states without exceptions. Are you noticing something already. The number of times the word estimate has been used in a journalistic report. If this is supposed to be information for you, where's the information? These are estimates already, the tone or the intention of the headline shifts just a little bit. I'm going to read on now. I'm about seven paragraphs into this article, a place where most of you will never get. The researchers obtained their findings by combining data from multiple sources because state level data weren't available. The team analyzed national data from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Survey on Intimate Partner Sexual Violence from Are You Ready for This? Twenty sixteen and twenty seventeen next paragraph, The authors generated state level rape estimates by partitioning the national data according to state level information from FBI crime reports, which include rapes that were reported to police in twenty nineteen. Nothing in this quote study has anything to do with current numbers. It is all pre jobs, and it's all estimated. You heard me read it right here. The state level data wasn't available. That's in this article. But you got to scrawl all the way down to the bottom to hear that. To see that to read it. The author this is all. This is a paragraph number ten. The authors acknowledged their study has some limitations. Their numbers are based on rape data from national surveys that they extrapolated to the state level. As noted, the CDC survey attempted to account for this under reporting. But as noted, the CDC survey attempted to account for into reporting and it's data, but other sources suggest the rates of rape and sexual assault may be higher or lower. So this whole headline, this entire article in Scientific American is bunked. It's meaningless. It is it is designed for nothing then to get your hackles raised if you're a pro choicer, and to get you outraged. So that is how media creates divisiveness because you are now looking at pro lifers. I'm talking to you pro choicers who may have who may have shared this headline with your outrage. You are now looking at pro lifers. Look how cruel you are. Look at all these rapes, these pregnancies that have resulted in raped. By the way I think we have, I think we have something like a million abortions a year, So even still sixty four thousand, if that were even a true number. Is that doesn't account for almost all of abortion. That being said, you've used this now to solidify your disgust or repulsion for the pro life side, and that discussed and repulsion is not warranted, at least in this case. This doesn't prove that. This doesn't prove anything. It's simply a headline. So but I had to get to the bottom of the article to discover that this was just an estimate. Well, if this, then that based on extrapolating extrapolating numbers from pre twenty twenty. I'm not a math genius. I'm not a statistics genius. I understand, but I do understand the the the concept of extrapolating, but I don't know that it it Well, no, it doesn't apply here at all. To say that this many number of women have been raped is when that's not true at all. Anyway, here's another headline. This is from twenty fifteen. I've actually used this. I went to look for the original story, but I couldn't remember the paper that I read it in at the time, So I did a search and I pulled this up. But same kind of thing. This is from twenty fifteen. It's on the Today Show website. In decent exposure, ACLU sues Missouri town over public breastfeeding, hot topics, the news of the day, in depth interviews, and a whole lot more. This is the Outlaws Radio Show. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcast today. That's out Laws, The Outlaws Radio Show, NFCB podcasts. Okay, you read that, and what is your response. Probably some Republican prudes want to want to ban breastfeeding. That is how the original headline was shared with me by a friend many years ago, and she said, see, Republicans are a problem. This is why they hate gay people, they hate transgender people. I don't know if we were even talking about the transgender thing like this in twenty fifteen, but really she was connecting it to LGBTQ issues and saying, see, look what they're doing. They're banning breastfeeding. That is how sexually suppressed Republicans are. To me, that looked like a headline that could that was too good to be true. So I've read the report and I'll read you what this report says. After reading you this headline, a new indecent exposure ordinance in Springfield, Missouri is prompting legal action from critics who say it could be interpreted as banning women from openly breastfeeding children who are no longer small babies. Part of the issue is language that prohibits residents from showing certain body parts in public, but makes an exception for women who expose their breast to nurse quote an infant. That's the exception in the law. That's not enough because why the story goes on to say that worries women who breastfeed older kids. I'm not going to get into the breastfeeding wars over when you should stop breastfeeding, but just no, it's not Just keep that in mind. I had to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the article, last three paragraphs. The controversy began after this pro breastfeeding group Free the Nipple rallied in a Springfield public park in August. Members of that group believe it's a double standard to allow men to walk around bare chested in public while women cannot do the same without facing legal consequences in most communities. For the rally, female activists showed up topless with opaque tape covering just their nipples. The goal was to demonstrate the frivolity of Springfield sex based regulation of nipples. Okay, okay, So we go from a headline that says, this Missouri town wants to ban breastfeeding in public. I gotta scroll all the way down to the bottom of the article to find out it was a response to topless protesters at the capitol where children go on field trips and I'm not even sure, and families go to visit their legislators and all kinds of family activities happen. So from that they extrapolated there's that rule that this is prejudice against women who want to breastfeed their five year olds. See, the headline does not match what the story is. The headline doesn't tell you what the story is. The headline tells you what it thinks it wants you to hear. The headline tells you what it thinks you're going to click on and share with outrage. One more headline again, another how we share headlines headline from the Miami Herald. This is back from August of twenty twenty one. The headline said, Florida COVID update nine hundred and one added deaths largest single day increase in pandemic history. Wow, that's scary. And think about where we were in twenty twenty one. It's not where we are in twenty twenty four. We were still really in the heat of the pandemic, and everybody who was still buying the government narrative, the legacy media narrative on everything. Everyone was mad at Florida because Florida was doing their thing. Everyone's still mad at Florida. So every report that was negative about Florida and their pandemic numbers was going viral. This is a headliner. Now, who's going to share this headline with you? While somebody who is looking at what's going on on in Florida and looking at their spring breakers and looking at their full beaches and looking at Disney World and going, oh, they're killing all these people, here's a headline that proves it, and it certainly is scary. Geez, Maybe Florida, statistically speaking, again, not to sound insensitive, insensitive, statistically speaking, nine hundred people dying in one day in the middle of a pandemic. That is a lot. That is bad. But it's not black plague numbers, that's for sure. But a single day increase nine hundred and one in one day. There's a tweet included in the article. The tweet says, we have more We have had more deaths in Florida from COVID nineteen in the first twenty six days of August than the US has had among uniform military service members in Afghanistan since October of twenty twenty one. Oh my gosh, oh but wait I read further on. As it turns out, those nine hundred and one deaths did not happen on one day the bottom of the report. Florida on Thursday reported twenty one thousand, six seven hundred and sixty five more COVID cases and nine hundred and one deaths to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to Miami Herald calculations of CDC data, all but two of the newly reported deaths occurred after July twenty fifth, with seventy eight percent of those people dying in the past two weeks. According to Harold calculations of the data published by the CDC, the majority of deaths happened during Florida's latest surge in COVID nineteen cases, fueled by the Delta variant. Let me translate for you. Those nine hundred and one deaths took place over a period of four weeks, not one day. That's not what the headline said, though, is it. Headline says this just to reiterate Florida COVID up, Florida COVID update, Florida COVID update nine hundred and one added deaths, largest single day increase in pandemic history. Well, it was just an increase in the reporting. We were doing that in California. We're still doing that actually, and in Los Angeles it's still happening where they'll take they'll hold the numbers and then they'll drop all the numbers they do in the heat of COVID in our county, in Orange County, we did a numbers drop weekly, so I think that was every Friday. It was a new number Friday or Monday, a new numbers drop. So that gets reported as one thousand depths on a single day. Well, no, that was the reporting from last week or two weeks ago, or it consolidates three weeks of reporting from from hospitals. And then let's not even talk about this is not the COVID episode. Let's not even talk about the difference between dying of COVID and with COVID. So again, here is another thing, and that headline. Of course, a headline out like that fuel's hatred towards people, right, because you're looking at that and you're going, you're killing people, You're putting people in danger, You're you're intentionally injuring them, and you're out there screaming my riots and my riots, and you don't care about people. So I hate you. I hate you because you hate your fellow Americans so much that you're willing to let people die so you can go to the beach. So yeah, a headline like that absolutely does fuel divisiveness and hatred. But if you read down further on, that's not what the headline says. Now, maybe you still choose to hate those people. My thing is, just choose to hate them based on the right information, not the wrong information. Is there a way then that you could possibly look at that real information and say, you know what, I disagree with people who think it's okay to be out and about without masks in the middle of this pandemic. I disagree wholeheartedly with those people. Is there a way that you can still say that and not say those people are murderers because I read that nine hundred people died in a single day. Maybe you don't have all the information, Maybe none of us do. That is the scourge of this information age. I say it over and over again. We've never had access to more and we've never been dumber. Again. I know I said this last week, but it's kind of been sticking with me through this whole week. It makes me think of the story of Adam and Eve, and I always used to wonder, what does it mean? What difference would it make if we knew what God knew? Now that is a very naive statement coming from a mortal human being, but I think that that's a question a lot of people have. God says, don't eat from this tree, because the serpent says, then you'll be like God. Basically, what he meant is you'll know what God knows. Well, if this is how we act when we know almost all of the information that is available to us through human history, where all of that is a click away, this is how we act when we have this amount of information, who would would be if we knew what God knew? If we had all his information? Doesn't seem to trend in a positive direction. Information is king, but information is not God. We must be careful about that. I do believe we're living in an era where people have made information their God. But it's not always the right information, and it's never the right thing to make an idol of anything that's biblical. It's in the commandments, you shall have no other God before me. Information is not your God. You have a brain. So I think this is the other thing that all of this is causing us to do. All of the way we look at media nowadays and social media and click bake culture, we're not required to engage our brains anymore. It's laid out in the headline right here for me. Headline Republicans hate breastfeeding in Florida's killing people with their open beat, sixty four thousand pregnancies due to rape in Texas. These are all headlines that have been formed to deliver the story to you as you're supposed to see it already in the head like you're not supposed to be doing any other thinking. That's why when I talk to my kids, I always I mean, they hate it. I hope someday, maybe when I'm gone, But someday they'll look back at all of all of these conversations I have and realize that they did receive some wisdom from it. But I always require my children to engage with a thought. So if they tell me something that they saw on the news or saw on social media, the first thing I always do is ask them what the whole story said, what do you think of it? I if you go and listen to my episode with Batya, you'll hear me tell the story about my daughter telling me something she saw on social media about a feud between two actors that she liked, and one actor said something very cruel to the other actor. So now cancel culture was stepping in and social media was doing its thing. And the thing that was said, I thought, wow, that sounds like something I might text to my best friend when I'm being saucy or silly. So I said, well, what did the what did the text message say, and what did the two actors themselves have to say about it? And she said, well, oh, let me go look, and so she looked at the threads and then she said, oh, yeah, it was a joke. They are telling everyone to lay off, that they're good friends, and it was a joke between them. So just an example of how just one question caused my daughter to go look at the full context and it shifted her view of the argument right and again, so me not willing to just let that lie. I said, That's that's why I always tell you you can't just believe a headline. You can't just believe a post. You have to think for yourself. If something looks too good to be true, if something looks too outrageous, it probably is. But I do that because I want my kids to engage with the information that we get. That's why I do this show. We need to engage with our ideas, not just take it for granted that this headline is giving us all the information. It's giving almost none of the information. And again to reiterate, that is not a left or a right issue. That's probably a digital media issue period. We all have to engage with it. That is why I tell you there's not one place to get reliable information. The best you can do is recognize that you're not getting all the information, and then if you choose to have more information, go find a competing source. I do that all the time. Actually, when I'm confused about the details of a story, because sometimes I don't know if this ever happens to you. But sometimes I read the headline, I think, Okay, I know how to frame this story. I read the story, and then I don't feel like the headline matched what I got, or I just felt like I wasn't intelligent enough to understand the analysis. My first move is always to go to a competing source. So if I get that information from Red State, I'm heading over to the New York Times. I do have a subscription, but that's because I like the crosswords. I'm heading over to the New York Times or the LA Times. I do have a subscription, but that's because I live in California. That's how I keep an eye on the state media, and I see what they have to say about it, and oftentimes, because I know that they're a liberal source, the way that they frame it will also tell me how to look at it right because I have a narrative about how they're going to frame things. It's the best you can do. The problem is that most of us don't have time to do that or the willingness, and frankly, I don't want you to spend all day with your head in the news. That's a recipe for outrage and disaster. So what can you do? Understand that all of your media that you're getting, yes, even CNN, even MSNBC, especially those places, they're all curating your headlines, and they're all only giving you a small fraction of the story. The best advice I have for you, though, is to always scroll to the bottom of the story. That's where the real information is. And typically these journalists and reporters, they will dump all of the information and the facts and the statistics at the bottom. Beginning is set up, middle is framework, and bottom is information. That's basically how all of society is operating these days. That's the best thing you can do for yourself. I'm gonna end this here because what I want you to do is I want you to go find that interview with Batya. I want you to wait on that it'll be posted after we post this, and listen to it because she had some really good insights. She actually wrote a whole book about that. She had some really good insight as to why mainstream or legacy media has become so unreliable. It's fascinating for me. It was an AHA moment and as you know, I've discussed this issue at length and I hadn't even known what she had to tell me, So I'm gonna tease that for you. She she gave me real like pause. You know. I had that moment where I just sat there thinking, WHOA, I've never understood this before, and it shed a whole new light on this topic. So highly recommend that. Also, I'll say this if you didn't catch my interview with Renee Bolton. She wrote that book that's a blatantly Christian episode of Christian parents. You'll want to hear. That was really good. Another interview where I had a couple of aha moments where I thought, oh gosh, I wish I'd had this book for my kids when they were small. It's called I Don't Want to go to Church, and she just had some really good practical perspective and advice on how to engage your child in church life and why that's important. I ordered the book. I love it, so I hope you'll order it too, And as always, don't forget to subscribe to this podcast. If you haven't subscribed, please do so. Hit that subscribe button. Here's what it does. It counts for the downloads. It means that my show gets downloaded to your device automatically, and maybe you don't want to listen to it, fine, after that, delete it. But what that does is it helps my number. So that's an easy, free way for you to support this show. Please subscribe as Owa's rate and review the show. Happy Black History Month. I'm looking forward to digging into some stories that maybe I hadn't heard or hadn't thought of in a long time, and I hope you'll enjoy hearing those things that well as well. We live in a great country, don't we. As crazy as everything is right now, there isn't a place I would rather be, at least not permanently. Right now, it's cold and rainy here in southern California, and maybe there are a couple of other places I'd like to visit. The home is home, all right, everybody, until we meet again, don't forget every once in a while, just stop and listen to yourself that we won't we pay and then we won't to say, oh we gott it does get dig that? Oh okay, that we won't we say? Then we won't we say it all we gotta does no long get take that ow it. This has been a presentation of the FCB podcast Network, where real talk lives. Visit us online at fcbpodcasts dot com.
