How To Be Informed

Exit the warm, cozy comfort of your personal echo chamber and challenge your own reality paradigm!

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” – George Orwell

“When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.” – Yevgeny Yevtushenko

**Fun Fact: The term “public relations” was actually coined as a euphemism for spin and its deception by American journalist Edward Bernays, who was the nephew of psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud. Bernays is often credited as the man who invented modern propaganda.

*Don’t forget to check out our Links page for some outstanding alternative, independent, and non-profit media sources and watchdog publications!

SNEWS.NEWS proudly presents this exclusive guide:

How To Be A Responsible, Informed Citizen in the Global Village Hyper Oblivion While Avoiding Toxic Meta Abstract Redundancy and Delusional Artifice

by Vivien L.

Always employ a healthy and sufficient level of critical skepticism — without succumbing to cynicism — while approaching each report, video, article, or photograph. Do not cross the line into dogma, paranoia, or speculation.
Focus solely on raw facts and empirical data. Briefly recognize but assign no value or regard to mere anecdote, theoretical supposition, assumption, or conjecture. Strip away all biases, rhetoric, descriptive prose, and subjectivity.
Use multiple search engines. Disable tracking features such as auto suggestion and spell check. Do not log in or save searches; do not allow them to collect enough search or browsing data to shape into an algorithm to personalize search results based on behavioral patterns. Obsessively clear cookies, sessions, cache, and browsing history,
Anonymize your web browsing. Run an ad blocker or privacy service like Privoxy. Circumvent DNS censorship and ISP filtering by configuring your DNS servers to a free, anonymous, and uncensored DNS provider such as CensurfriDNS.dk or DNS.watch. Anonymize browsing even further by encrypting your traffic using Tor or a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Click here or here for free OpenVPN providers that do not log. Randomize your browser fingerprint and other metadata if technically savvy enough.
Follow a variety of different foreign media outlets that aren’t just satellite publications for western press owned by the same mega-conglomerate, especially consulting their outsider perspective on domestic affairs. Check if content is different between the “English” or “U.S.” edition and the original foreign edition. If one or the other must be selected, always opt for the original foreign edition, even if you don’t know the language. You can translate the entire site to your preferred language for viewing by pasting the URL into an online translator service like Google Translate, Bing Translate, or World Lingo.
Verify multiple diverse sources. Compare various accounts and comb for inconsistencies.
All media is biased, even when they claim to be objective. Check ownership and funding sources. Recognize the vernacular of propaganda and what it aims to sell (e.g. for wars of intervention, words like “regime”, “dictator”, “freedom fighters”). Attempt to pinpoint and define what the overt agenda and covert agenda are for all content providers.
Be consistent and objective in your standards and expectations of others and yourself. Do not legitimize or pander to divisive partisan rhetoric or hypocrisy.
Knowledge is power. Keep digging, and when you feel you’ve reached the bottom, dig some more.
Learning about the lives of others helps one connect with humanity, and gain a greater understanding of our world and how one relates to it. Always step back to see the bigger picture. Strive to embody compassion, wisdom, tolerance, and empathy. Do not fall victim to fear mongering, bigotry, hatred, pity, flattery, or sappy sentimentality.
Determine what is not being reported. Relentlessly seek to discover the stories that are purposely neglected, denied, or distorted. Tip off various media outlets to investigate or lend their resources. Amplify the truth any way you can so that it becomes contagious.
Stay well-grounded, reasonable, and open-minded; don’t lose touch with reality. Yet be creative and visionary: allow yourself the fortitude and courage to dream, and dare to imagine a better, transformed world that is more free, open, and just.
Never lose the capacity to find sheer fun and amusement in the absurd and surreal, still laughing even in the bleakest, darkest, most troubling of doomed days.
Always be prepared and willing to concede to the possibility that everything you hold dear and everything you thought you knew was completely, irrevocably, and devastatingly wrong.
❤