On occasion, I reference my background of exposure to news and/or my view that it is a myth that, say, everyone who does not vote for a Leftist party/candidate would be ignorant of mainstream news. This text serves to give some information on my own background and to simultaneously demonstrate how contrary it is to this Leftist view of non-Leftists. (Also note several other texts on similar and/or related topics, e.g. [1] and [2]; as well as my repeated observation that the non-Left is usually highly aware of the Leftist angles and arguments—it is the Left which is ignorant of the non-Leftist ones, because Leftists usually remain in their echo chambers, where various viewpoints, arguments, whatnot, either go unheard or are grossly distorted.)
As a bonus, this page could give younger readers and later generations a better idea of how the (at least, technological) news landscape has changed over just a few decades. (In a bigger picture, I note both a drop in quality of news and a continual Leftwards drift in the countries that I am familiar with—topics that might or might not be taken up in some later text.)
The purpose of this page notwithstanding, I consider it of greater importance to read more in-depth texts (typically, books) that deal with matters of politics, history, economics, and what else might be relevant, than to stay up-to-date with the news. Staying up-to-date is beneficial, no doubt, but what truly matters is to gain a deeper understanding. If in doubt, someone who reads the news without such an understanding is unlikely to draw the right conclusions from the news—and will often be off by a mile.
My main point with understanding is to gain depth on general principles, historical precedent, and other more abstract or general issues. However, in-depth texts are also more beneficial for an understanding of more specific issues/events/policies/whatnot, once they have actually been written. (There is the rub when it comes to too recent or ongoing events—the in-depth texts usually come much later than the newspaper articles.)
The failure to do such in-depth reading is, I suspect, one of the two largest reasons why Leftists (and many newspaper fans, more generally) tend to be the ignorant ones. The other is a failure to listen to voices outside Leftist echo chambers—including that what in-depth reading does take place is too limited to “approved” authors and viewpoints.
As a special case of over-reliance on the news, I suspect that too many (not limited to Leftists) fail to understand how low on competence, insight, ability to think critically, whatnot, the typical journalist is. Reliance on journalists often amounts to the blind leading the blind. (Also note complications like Gell-Mann amnesia.)
Because of the nature of this text, I make strong reservations for memory errors (including things left out and things put at the wrong point in the chronology). However, while the details might need a grain of salt, the big picture is correct and the right impression should come across.
References to Sweden and Germany should be seen with a big switch in 1997: From January 1975 to September 1997, I lived in Sweden; from October 1997 to the time of writing (March 2025), in Germany. While I will only rarely discuss political angles, I note that news in Sweden, unsurprisingly, tended strongly Leftwards even during the 1980s, while German journalism likely was somewhat Left-tilted even in 1997 (but this issue is hard for me to judge) and has definitely tilted ever more strongly Leftwards over time.
For the clear majority of my life in Sweden, I watched the two main news casts (Rapport, 19:30–20:00; Aktuellt, 21:00–21:30; in both cases with reservations for variations over time) of the public broadcasters on a daily basis. This (a) with very few exceptions, most of which related to vacation travel and stays, (b) for as long back as I can remember. (One of my very first news memories related to the 1980 U.S. POTUS election, when I was five. However, it is very possible that an early bedtime limited my viewing at such ages, especially, of Aktuellt.)
In addition, there were:
Shorter and/or alternate news broadcasts at other times, which I often watched.
Exactly which and when varied over time, but one or two shorter versions of Rapport/Aktuellt were commonly available, as well as a, maybe, 15-minute program with sports news. Weather news was sometimes integrated in the longer newscasts, sometimes separate. At least as a pre-teen, I often watched Barnjournalen, a weekly news show with adult news adapted to children and/or child-centric news.
Occasional “specials” on various news topics that I sometimes or often watched, depending on what else I had to do.
Countless documentaries, educational programs, and whatnots that took up much of at least my childhood TV watching. Only a small minority, I suspect, were relevant to the topic of news in a narrow sense, but many of them did have some “news adjacency” and/or met the approval of the Left through attempting to instill Leftist attitudes and a Leftist worldview into the viewers.
(This approval also extended to a great many clearly off-topic programs—children’s fiction, in particular, where some type of Leftist moral or moralizing was quite common.)
Apart from the two public channels, other TV content only became significantly available to me in the 1990s—and the non-public competition usually had little to offer in terms of news. They can safely be ignored for the purposes of this text.
Radio news also occurred, but was usually limited to a few minutes “on the hour”. Radio is interesting, however, in as far as I remember hearing radio news as far back as four or five years of age, including how weather and sea-conditions at Skagerrak and Kattegat[t], somewhat close to where we lived at the time, were always reported during breakfast. (Something that I remember strongly through my fascination with these “funny names”.)
When I moved to Germany, this largely stopped (and the programs to choose from were different): During my time as an exchange student, I had no TV at all. (While radio was so infested with hyper-annoying advertising that I stopped listening to radio altogether.) Once I had a TV, the reception was often astonishingly poor and the quality of the programs, as such, worse, leading me to abandon TV watching in my home entirely—waste of time. Some minor watching has taken place when visiting others, when living in hotel rooms, and similar, but a news watching in the systematic manner that applied in Sweden never followed. If in doubt, Internet news soon developed into a superior choice to news broadcasts.
A particular point of interest is how I caught several episodes of a “Tagesschau vor 20 Jahren” during such a hotel stay. This was effectively a re-run of the Tagesschau (think “Aktuellt of Germany”) from 20 years back—and the quality of the show was quite a bit higher than its modern replacement. There was less flashiness, fewer graphical effects, whatnot, but there was also a greater focus on actually informing and on substance, instead of news-as-entertainment. This, except for the news being old, made the re-run more worthwhile and something that the current Tagesschau would have done well to emulate. (And while my key point is that a focus on informing and on substance is better, I also find less flashiness and whatnot to be an advantage—presumably, much unlike the decision makers.)
Beginning in my reasonably early childhood (somewhere in the age range 6–8), I took an interest in the comics section of the local newspaper to which my mother and grandmother each subscribed (“Bergslagsposten”), the sports section followed within one or two years, and the rest of the paper within another one or two years. I certainly read most of it by 10-or-so, after which I gradually became more discerning, skipping over much boring local news and whatnot, to focus on the national and the international. (In addition to sports and comics, of course.)
This paper played a surprising large part in the daily activities, through not only having several readers in the family (and what, between them, accumulated to hours of reading), but through having some secondary activities—most notably, crossword puzzles. For some time every year there was also a “tulip hunt”, during which the paper contained small printed tulips on some pages and those who identified the right pages could win something. When I was very young, this tulip hunt was a bit of fun and my grandmother participated almost religiously even in her sixties.
This during most of the year and all school phases, which I spent at my mother’s and/or grandmother’s. Much of the school-free periods, however, I spent with my father, in Stockholm, who subscribed to Dagens Nyheter/DN.(DN is/was one of the two leading morning papers, with a similar status in Sweden to e.g. the New York Times in the U.S.) This paper I read closely every day during such stays, which likely exceeded ten weeks per year.
Simultaneously thinking back and proof-reading, I suspect that claims like “read closely”, here and elsewhere, need a qualification for the exact section of the paper. I did read e.g. international and political news closely, but probably only paged through the “culture section”, leaving actual reading for the rare occasions when I spotted something unusually interesting.
First year in college, also in Stockholm, I lived in a dorm (or something halfway between a dorm and a pension) which subscribed to both DN and Svenska Dagbladet/SvD (the other leading morning paper). I read them both every day. (From here on, with a reversal in that I spent college-free periods mostly at my mother’s and/or grandmother’s, and was, then, back with Bergslagsposten.)
After this dorm closed, I was forced to move elsewhere, sans paper, but still read at least one DN per week, while dropping by my father’s on Saturday or Sunday.
After my move to Germany, there was another interruption. I bought the occasional paper, but it was a comparatively rare event, through the combination of cost, a busy life, and various magazine readings (cf. below). (With an obvious return to Swedish papers whenever I visited Sweden and could draw on the various existing subscriptions.) In due time, again, Internet readings came to dominate: in part through convenience, lower cost, and greater international spread; in part through the dropping quality of newspapers (not limited to Germany); in part through my being fed up with the common Leftist angles and the pseudo-intellectualism of many German papers. During times of weekly commutes, I usually bought a paper (often Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung/FAZ, which might be the leading paper in Germany) on each of the two travel days to fill most of the train ride or took whatever was handed out for free when I flew.
Beginning at some point in the 1990s and ending in the early 2000s, I subscribed to and read in detail some internationally oriented and English-language magazines with a strong news orientation. I cannot give an even remotely exact chronology, but I had some years of each of Times, Fortune, and the Economist. (Only partially concurrently, however.)
In addition, I went through a period in the early or mid 2000s when I bought many individual issues of German magazines of a similar character, usually “Der Spiegel”.
Outside the news area, other magazines have been relevant. The most notable case is the German computer magazine C’t. While C’t does contain a fair amount of news, this news is computer- and/or technology-focused to a degree that mostly makes it off-topic to the current page. Exceptions include some reporting on issues like dangerous trends in government use and abuse of technology and the societal impact of new technologies.
As noted, the Internet grew to be my most important source of news. (My first ventures into the Internet took place in 1994, but it took quite a few years for the Internet to catch up and exceed “traditional” media as a news source.)
Here, both my sources and my amount of reading have varied widely over time, be it online newspapers, more opinion-piece-y sites, blogs, whatnot, and with additional variation between sites geared towards news in general and those more towards specific topics, as well as between sites from different countries and different languages. I have, in particular, tried to get information from very different sites and, unlike so many others, to not get stuck with just the mainstream sources. (Indeed, even apart from the issue of single perspectives and echo chambers, these are often inferior in reporting, analysis, insight, whatnot, to more specialized sites, because the latter tend to have actual experts and thinkers—not just journalists.)
A particularly enlightening exercise is to read about some news topic in sources from different countries, including those on different sides of various conflicts and controversies. If nothing else, the different takes point to a strong possibility that it is not just the one site which is putting journalistic integrity, objectivity, whatnot, in the backseat.
During the height of the COVID-countermeasure era, I literally spent several hours per day (on average) on various news and news-related sites. During the later days of the COVID-countermeasure era, I went through a period of very little reading, through sheer “news fatigue”. Post-fatigue, my average might have varied between half-an-hour and an hour per day, which might also match what I did for some years before 2020. (My memories of even earlier days are increasingly vague and there has been a great variation over time.)
For some few examples of sites, see a partial listing in a page on some Trump related matters.
A twist, however, is that I read comparatively little about Germany, the country in which I live. A strong reason for this is that German news sites are disproportionally likely to be paywalled, refuse access without JavaScript and whatnot activated or whenever they believe that someone uses an ad blocker, and/or otherwise be troublesome to access. Other reasons include poor writing and an often absurd Leftist tilt. Spiegel Online (which I will not dignify with a link) is a good example. I used to visit it fairly often in earlier years, because it was one of the few free sites with reasonably extensive coverage, but I was ultimately so disgusted that I concluded that “geschenkt ist noch zu teuer” and never returned. Translated into U.S. terms, it made the likes of the New York Times look Republican.
As I have noted repeatedly over the years (including, to some degree, above), the news comes with dangers caused by the common incompetence of journalists, political (in particular, Leftist) biases, legitimate changes to knowledge as a situation develops, and similar. Correspondingly, the news must be taken with a grain (better: a few grains) of salt.
However, as many seem to be firm believers in the near-infallibility of, say, public TV and the printed press: Even those who deny issues around incompetence (and so on), have to acknowledge not just occasional blunders but occasional deliberate-but-non-malicious misleads and occasional great-but-understandable misinterpretation by the audience. A prominent example is the famous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast by Orson Welles, portions of which were staged sufficiently realistically that many took the contents for live reporting of real events. (Exactly what to understand by “many” is a bit uncertain, however, as there are disputes over the proportions of actual effect and later exaggeration. This, in turn, might well make for another example, as the effect has been mentioned on numerous occasions in news, history books, and similar contexts long after the event it self.) An early own example was a Swedish children’s TV show, “TV-piraterna”, which had the premise of a (fictitious) takeover over of the scheduled programming by a “pirate” broadcast. This, however, was not limited to the contents of the show it self, but included supportive statements by the continuity announcer/“hallåa”, who apologized and promised that the “real” program would follow the next day.
With reservations for the exact details—I was eight at the time.
I do remember something very pertinent to this discussion, however: That it was the hallåa that made me a believer, because she was from outside the actual show and even when a show took liberties with the truth (as works of fiction invariably do—or they would not be fiction), the “framework” of announcers and whatnot was, in my mind, supposed to stick to the truth. (Fortunately, my mother set me straight after the first episode, when I related the claims of the hallåa.)
Similarly, with an eye at newscasts, I knew perfectly well to draw the line between the claims of e.g. Rapport and those of the “news flash” segments on the “The Muppet Show” (which aired on Swedish TV when I was of about that age).
A whole family of cases can be found around various April fools’ jokes, as with those published by the aforementioned C’t (cf. [3]). While the likes of newspapers likely should not engage in this type of humor, there have indisputably been many cases over the years.
Likewise, even those who believe strongly in, say, a competent press cannot deny that the press, it self, is sometimes tricked by lies and hoaxes, as with the infamous Hitler diaries (a hoax that fooled the considered-quality German magazine Stern into a multi-million D-Mark purchase and an intended publication, and was, at least for a time, taken seriously internationally by the likes of Newsweek), as with the severely fraudulent and still often award-winning works of Claas Relotius for Der Spiegel (another considered-quality German magazine), and as with the “A Rape on Campus” hoax that fooled Rolling Stone and had side-effects like protest marches because of the alleged crime, police investigations of the alleged crime, suspensions of fraternities motivated by the alleged crime, and, in the continuation, defamation suits and court proceedings against Rolling Stone for alleging the crime.
With “A Rape on Campus”, there is some uncertainty, to the last of my knowledge, about who carries what level of blame among (a) the alleged rape victim, (b) the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and (c) Rolling Stone more abstractly and/or individual other persons at Rolling Stone. Regardless of who-is-guilty-of-what, an indisputably faulty and immensely harmful article was published as if it had been the truth—and it was immensely harmful exactly because so many readers relied on Rolling Stone as a truthful source.
(Also: If someone does argue that the hoax resided solely with the alleged victim, leaving Erdely and Rolling Stone mere patsies, so great deficits in their journalistic methods/competence/whatnot have to be assumed that they still come off extremely poorly. Ditto, for Rolling Stone, if the line is drawn between Erdely and Rolling Stone.)
Formulations like “considered-quality” refer to typical opinions among others, not necessarily my own, and underlie some fluctuation over time—especially, with regard to the “before” and the “after” of revelations of major hoaxes and screw-ups.