A media diet (1993) is made up of the things you regularly take in from the mass media: newspapers, magazines, websites, television shows, music, books, etc.
Examples:
Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975- ), blogger for The Atlantic.
In 2010:
- news: The New York Times, The Washington Post
- Internet: Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Talking Points Memo, Slate, The Root, PostBourgie, Alyssa Rosenberg, The Atlantic Wire
- magazines: The Atlantic, The New Yorker
- books: in the evenings, like Claudia L. Bushman’s “In Old Virginia: Slavery, Farming, and Society in the Journal of John Walker” (2001).
Sheryl Salomon (c. 1966- ), managing editor for The Root and, before that, AOL Black Voices.
In 2012:
- news: The Root, The Washington Post, MSNBC, New York Daily News, Sunday New York Times
- black life: Essence, Ebony, Parlour Magazine, Urban Cusp, Color Lines, Richard Prince’s blog, Crew of 42, Crunk Feminist Collective, Black Web 2.0, Black Snob
- opinion: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Charles Blow, Jonathan Capehart
- Twitter: Roland Martin, Rachel Sklar, Melissa Harris-Perry
- podcasts: Confab, Tavis Smiley
- magazines: New York
- television: The Voice, Mad Men
Malcolm Gladwell (1963- ), staff writer at the New Yorker and author of “The Tipping Point”, “Blink”, “Outliers”, etc.
In 2011:
- newspapers: The New York Times at lunchtime on weekdays. On Saturdays: The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times
- Internet: The Awl, ESPN.com, Crookedtimber.org and whatever his friend Jacob links to on his Twitter feed
- magazines: Car and Driver, Road & Track, and, best of all, CAR
- academic journals and databases: once a week at the Bobst Library at NYU
- books: in the evening, like Keith Richards’s “Life” (2010)
Al Sharpton (1954- ), reverend, activist, radio and MSNBC host.
In 2011:
- news: The Huffington Post, Politico, The Grio, The Root, Yahoo!, News One
- Google: “Al Sharpton”, “National Action Network”
- newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Post, New York Daily News
- Twitter: heavy user
- Facebook: two to three times a day
- magazines: read on planes, especially Time, Newsweek, Ebony, most of the nationally-circulated black magazines, Fortune, or BusinessWeek
- television: Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart
- books: in the evening, like Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” (2011) and John Julian Norwich’s “Absolute Monarchs” (2011)
Terry McMiillan (1951- ), author of “Waiting to Exhale”, “How Stella Got Her Groove Back”, etc.
In 2010:
- newspapers: USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday New York Times
- radio: when she is driving: NPR
- Internet: CNN and sometimes Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, NPR (loves Terry Gross), Daily Kos, Salon (loves Joan Walsh). Reads news websites mainly for the comments
- Twitter: addicted
- Facebook: feels she has to
- magazines: in the evening
- television: “Entertainment Tonight’, “The Insider”, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann
- books: in the evening, like Mary Ann Shaffer’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008) and Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (2010)
Listed by two or more:
- newspapers: The New York Times, New York Daily News; Saturdays: The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times
- news: The Root, The Huffington Post
- magazines: Ebony
- Twitter: heavy use
- Facebook: yes
- television: Rachel Maddow
- books: in the evening
Listed by three or more:
- newspapers: The New York Times
- news: The Root
- Twitter: yes
- books: in the evening
See also:
- The Atlantic Wire: Media Diet - The Atlantic asked over 100 people from the media about theirmedia diet. The source for this post. Click on the pictures above to see their write-ups. I also want to (or did) check out these:
- Moby
- Sasha-Frere Jones of the New Yorker
- Jenna Wortham - tech reporter for the New York Times
- Christiane Amanpour
- Chuck Todd - political geek at MSNBC
- Joan Walsh of Slate
- Terry Gross of NPR
- Margaret Atwood
- Ann Coulter
- Andrea Mitchell
- Gary Shteyngart
- Joseph Epstein, essayist
- Chris Anderson of WIRED
- Lewis Lapham
- Jay Rosen
- David Brooks - Republican Kool-Aid drinker
- Terry McMillan
- Writers and their private libraries
Aba:
That’s why my TV has been off for about 4 years now…
“The Single Story” in action. The news media (national) primarily deals with educated/”race conscious” black people, the news media (local) primarily deals with uneducated/”race conscious” black people and the entertainment industry primarily deals with black athletes/entertainers/criminals (hey, drugs don’t buy themselves!) Therefore, black images are either portrayed as indignant (CNN level), insignificant (local level) or indolent/depraved (Hollywood level.) They don’t portray work-a-day black people (as in our burgeoning middle class, our seniors or our majority *non-criminal* youth) because they’ve streamlined their thought processes re:black people to conform with their prevalent points of contact (AA Studies graduates for the “big boys”, high school dropouts and baby mamas for the small timers and “that guy who spins records and gets that good dope/piff/E” for the producers.) If it wasn’t so stupid, it would be funny.
My primary source of media is the internet and radio and even radio is becoming obsolete to me,I rarely listen for the music and i know the news is bias ,i even have favorites that say this (although that’s not esp way their some my favorites).
What delights me is how much more inclusive,informative ,lower cost and versatile the internet is – for example where else in public can you comment on a topic of interest(with no wait and minimum censor) ,have a permanent copy of your statement(s) and even setup your site where your the editor/producer of content and you control who gets to comment what(at lease at your site).
Now extrapolate that to some of our social problems and I’d say Utopia is not far off.
My news media is pretty limited. I read the New York Times & Economist and watch Al-Jazeera daily. If I have the tv on it’s usually on whatever MSNBC is playing at the moment.
I used to watch Rachel Maddow, Bill O’reilly, Journeyman Pictures and The Young Turks (TYT)
I would read The Guardian, BBC news, Huffington Post, Black Voices, Yahoo news!, The Gleaner, AllAfrica.com, Crooksandliars.com, AJC, and Freakonomics blog
Somewhere along the line I got lazy and caught off a lot of my media sources.
•I don’t read what I used to read.
•I always thought The International Herald Tribune was a great paper. For someone who lives in North America but does not want to feel cut off from Europe it was excellent.
•Wall Street Journal Asia seems pretty good. I read a few issues shortly after ’08; I wanted to see what was happening with China.
•I used to read The Economist. My favorite sections were the international sections. I miss getting information on Latin America.
•I used to read Le Monde Diplomatique. It was good for discussion of international trade talks and generally interesting. But too hopeful and anti capitalist in a childish sort of way. Probably to understand LMD culturally speaking, I would need to spend time in France.
I don’t read what I used to read.
My concerns turned from the secular to the spiritual. When this occurs secular pursuits can vanish to nearly nothing and for some vanish completely to nothing. It took sometime before I felt like reading a paper again, or being curious about what is or isn’t occurring somewhere in the world.
Don’t feel guilty, attend to whatever is most important.
• Andrea Mitchell’s media diet is no joke, in terms of volume of material.
• Coulter’s media diet looks tailor made not only to not inform her of the world in a substantive way but merely to keep her able to speak merely at the level biased pundit.
I went through many of the people in The Atlantic’s Media Diet Survey. (Admittedly somewhat quickly and I did not read each entry in toto.)
Surprises:
• I only saw one person (a journalist named David Brooks) mention viewing Charlie Rose.
• Many, many, many of the interviewees read The Economist. ( A subset of respondents also read The FT. )
• I saw no mention of Der Spiegal.
Unsurprising Observations:
• The journalists and many of the others have a media diet that is mostly ‘beltway’; good for their careers and for the status quo, not good for informing the public.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_the_Beltway
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/the-propaganda-model/
• No one mentioned reading human rights publications.
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Mitchell’s media diet is high volume but it is all high volume beltline. She is one connected cookie.
– Moby and I have The International Herald Tribune in common.
– Bulanik and I have The FT in common (it is also a used to for me.) Single most entertaining thing in the FT were Lucy Kellaway’s descriptions of corporate working life.
Sometimes at the newsstand, I stare at the cover of the latest Town & Country and wonder, “What the fuck is going in there?”
We regularly reach out to prominent figures in media, entertainment, politics, the arts and the literary world, to hear their answers. –The Atlantic Wire [Sheryl Solomon page]
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• There isn’t a single public intellectual in their survey of approx 100 people.