I notice you put "news" in quotes. Online discussions of news and aggregators are a terrible, bubble enforcing way of engaging with the news. And I would be cau

I notice you put "news" in quotes. Online discussions of news and aggregators are a terrible, bubble enforcing way of engaging with the news. And I would be cautious to call our online news (and cable news) 'traditional media.' They are a different animal. Even quality print publications have vastly different standards for what they publish online vs what gets printed. That said, while I'd agree that spin may be a bigger problem now due to this, spin has always been a problem. However, I think the way we engage with the news, as consumers, has made spin more detrimental than it has been in the past and perhaps more dangerous. To me, this consumerist model is the "news," but there are still great ways to engage with the news - you don't have to give it up. As a high-schooler I was lucky enough to take a news focused civics course, where we received a subscription to Time Magazine and the local paper. Every day we'd get together and discuss the news, differing viewpoints in different media sources, and try to ferret out the "Orwellian language and fact bending" you discuss. To do this we had to engage with different news sources and actually _read_ the articles. Not just five or six mutually reinforcing headlines and a bunch of reddit comments. As I sad, there are still good ways of engaging with the news media. There are plenty of publications still producing quality journalism, and publications that provide a thoughtful aggregation and discussion of the news. The Week comes to mind immediately and has continued to act a little bit like that class for me. I would not read David French without it, but I'm glad I do. Similarly, I keep a subscription to the local paper so I can read the local news (The rest of the paper is mostly wire trash, so I don't make a point of reading all of it) High Country News to keep up with regional news, and a few other monthlies for in-depth thinking and analysis of the news. There's a stark difference in what the "news" is once you disengage with the 24-hour-cycle-driven consumerist news model - which the internet is incredible are reinforcing- and choose to engage, rather than consume, with news and analysis. The spin starts to fall away, and partially because it becomes more explicit. The monthlies I subscribe to have a very open, very clear agenda. To put it in a much shorter way, we all need to stop reading "news" stories with headlines of "...and the internet blew up" or "...caused a tweet storm..." and instead engage with (vs consume) media about the macro in quality publications where you can identify the viewpoint and then seek out opposing view points.