You’ve likely seen the books of the Eat This, Not That franchise; today we’d like to suggest that the same concept applies to our media consumption. Much as the culinary world provides healthier alternatives to the deadly (but delicious) foods that we all love, the news world provides intelligent alternatives to the intellect-killing mediocrity of the most popular media outlets.

They say that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Unfortunately, mainstream media (by which we mean the more popular media outlets of the Fox News and Time magazine variety) provide a dangerously small amount of knowledge. Most of the media seeks higher ratings by creating controversy. They stoke partisan anger by featuring editorials in place of actual news, by disguising opinions as facts, and by distorting information in order to support an ideological bottom line. The media seeks profits by playing to the lowest common denominator, a practice that can be traced back to the 1950s research of Rudolph Flesch and Robert Gunning. These men studied the correlation between reading level and circulation of American newspapers and concluded that the lower a paper’s reading level was, the higher its circulation. This research convinced the newspapers of the day to lower their reading levels from about a 12^th grade level to a 9^th grade level. Today, the average newspaper is written at an 6^th to 8^th grade reading level. Continue reading →