Media Consumption Tips For Geopolitical Crises

Just a little ranty: Context Collapse #125

Hey there.

Well…. it’s been a not-good week for global news, hasn’t it?

While there are approximately one million places to get better news and insight into the Ukraine situation than your humble Context Collapse, I do know a few things about journalism and media literacy.

So let’s talk about that, and only that.

Without further ado, five media consumption tips for geopolitical crises:

1. Turn that b@#!ing cable news station off!

This goes for all of them. The one with the screaming liberal people, the one with the screaming conservative people, and the one with the screaming moderare people. All of them.

News as entertainment is great entertainment, but not necessarily great news.

2. Constant news consumption = not great.

As a longtime journalist turned corporate comms consultant person with a vested interest in making as much money as possible from the media industrial complex, I’m gonna say this: Continual news consumption isn’t good for your mental health OR your understanding of complex military conflicts.

3. ‘Here’s What Happens Next’ articles are useless.

So, so, so many outlets run articles predicting the next step in the conflict or saying “if war happens, this is the form it will take…” No, no, no just no. The whole problem with unpredictable global conflicts is that they are unpredictable. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. You don’t want to f**k with the unknown unknowns in military conflicts, because there are way too many of them.

4. Take Journalist and Pundit Twitter with a grain of salt.

This is an important one. From my little corner of media Twitter, I see a whole of a lot of pundits at a whole lot of publications with a whole lot of opinions on Ukraine/Russia. Many of them appear to be engaged in some weird performative social media combat that’s aimed more at amping their follower count/engagement or putting them on the road to a lucrative tv gig or book deal. Minimize exposure to this sector.

Blah. Anyway, war sucks. People being made homeless or losing their lives or getting seriously injured or separated from their family sucks. I wish I had easy answers but hahahaha damn it of course I don’t.

Do you need a chaser after that? I could use one.

Is Google Slides just trolling us?

See you soon.