Tangled Up In Chaos

A few days ago, I received a plea in my normal email from the media outlet Tangle.

The last six months have been a difficult time for media outlets. Overwhelmed by the news, many readers and listeners are tuning out. Those who are staying up to date are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence round-ups to get their news, which has caused website traffic to fall.

I feel bad about the situation that Isaac Saul, who founded Tangle, and his crew find themselves in. They have a publication that does a wonderful job balancing perspectives on the news of the day. They are trustworthy and thorough. Yet, I find myself deciding again and again not to upgrade to a paid subscription when I consider the option.

With so much admiration for Tangle, why don’t I just support them? The problem is that I don’t always read the newsletters they send. It’s not because I don’t have faith in them to introduce me to viewpoints that I may not have considered on my own or read elsewhere in publications with clear biases that drive coverage. It’s that I’m worn out by the news. I’m fatigued by constantly reading of the shifts in the political landscape. I have a subscription to the New York Times gifted to me by my employer, and the number of emails I get from them claiming to carry “breaking news” is breaking my brain. In other words, my response to the good folks at Tangle would be, "it's not you, it's me."

In my feed reader service (Feedbin) I have a rule to filter out mentions of our president. For some time, I wondered if The Atlantic was even still publishing, so few were the pieces that made it through the filter. My sister—who gifted me a subscription to the publication every year for my birthday—quit doing so this year because of the cost increase. At first, I was bummed, but now I find that I hardly miss it. Similarly, I enjoy the perspectives from The Dispatch, but my paid subscription to that site didn’t even last a month because I just didn’t want to read about politics any more than is reasonable.