Auditing Your/My Media
A practical guide to auditing the news you consume
Last week I spoke at a local Democratic club about something I think we all need to take more seriously: auditing the media we consume.
The talk went well, so I’m bringing the framework here. I’ve been inside modern media for a long time. I’ve been around podcasting and independent media for about a decade.
I started my own show back in 2016, watched it grow fast, and for about six months it was in the top 20 globally. Eventually, I sold the podcast, the newsletter, and the rights to a company. After that, I kept working in the space, producing and hosting for smaller outlets, running my own projects, and even helping the local county party with a podcast for about a year.
TLDR:
We no longer live in a shared media environment, and that fragmentation is reshaping how we think, argue, and vote. Here, I lay out why auditing your media matters, how ownership and incentives shape what you see, and provide a practical checklist and grading system you can use to evaluate your own news diet. If you do not actively examine your inputs, they will quietly shape your worldview without you realizing it.
We No Longer Start From The Same Place
When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, most people were pulling from the same basic set of inputs. Local TV, a few national networks, and a newspaper on the table at breakfast. The kids, mom, dad, and grandparents all read pretty much the same things, You could argue about spin, you could argue about interpretation, but you were still starting from roughly the same pile of news.
That is not the world we live in now.
Media has splintered into a thousand pipes: cable, websites, YouTube, independent journalists, newsletters, podcasts, social media, and even different species of social media depending on whether you’re living in short-form, long-form, or crowd-driven feeds like Reddit.
The result is not just “more options.” The result is that two people can follow politics every day and still have almost no shared starting point. Even when the topic is the same, the framing is different, the omissions are different, and the emotional cues are different. That gap is why conversations feel impossible sometimes. It is not just polarization. It is informational and cultural drift.
Why Auditing Your Media Matters
This is the core idea I tried to communicate in the presentation. Auditing your media is not about telling people what to watch. It’s about teaching yourself how to examine what you are already consuming, and why you are consuming it.
First, misinformation is rampant across all platforms.
Auditing helps you identify credible sources versus misleading ones. And I’m not saying that as a cheap shot at one side. Misinformation shows up as outright falsehoods, as selective context, as emotionally loaded framing, and as headlines that are technically “true” while still being designed to push you toward a conclusion before you even read the first sentence. Auditing forces you to slow down and ask: is this outlet credible, consistent, and transparent, or is it an engagement machine that happens to report news sometimes?
There are practical tools that help with this. Platforms like Ground News aggregate how the same story is covered across outlets and assign bias ratings using independent evaluators such as AllSides, Ad Fontes Media, and Media Bias Fact Check.
Sites like MediaBiasFactCheck.com allow you to look up specific publications and review their factual reporting history and ideological lean. And when you are dealing with viral claims, manipulated images, or AI-generated content, fact-checking resources like Snopes can provide verification before you share something that simply feels true.
The point is not to outsource your thinking. The point is to give yourself instruments to test what you’re being told before it quietly becomes part of your worldview.
Second, ownership matters.
Different platform owners and political contributions influence content. That does not mean every article is propaganda. It means incentives exist. If a platform’s business model is ads and engagement, the incentives will lean toward outrage, certainty, and tribal language. If an outlet is owned by a corporate conglomerate or a billionaire with political interests, that does not automatically invalidate everything they publish. It does mean you should understand the ecosystem you’re swimming in. And it also means you should be skeptical of the idea that any outlet is “above” bias just because it uses the right vocabulary.
2024 Presidential Campaign Cycle – Major Donors & Inaugural Contributions
From Chat GPT
• Elon Musk — ~$291M to pro-Trump/GOP super PACs & campaigns in 2024 cycle; $0 reported to Harris; (no separate inaugural number needed to show scale)
• Jeff Bezos / Amazon (PAC ecosystem) — ~$11–17M in federal PAC giving that leaned Republican (not itemized by Trump vs Harris); $1M Amazon corporate donation to Trump inaugural fund
• Larry Ellison — ~$15M to GOP-aligned super PACs in 2024 cycle; no public itemized Harris amount; (inaugural not reported)
• Mark Zuckerberg / Meta — $0 direct to Trump campaign reported; no clear Harris campaign total reported; $1M Meta corporate donation to Trump inaugural fund
• Sam Altman — $0 direct to Trump campaign reported; no clear Harris campaign total reported; $1M personal donation to Trump inaugural fund
• Tim Cook / Apple — $0 direct to Trump campaign reported; no clear Harris campaign total reported; $1M personal donation to Trump inaugural fund (reported alongside other CEOs)
• Alphabet / Google — $0 direct to Trump campaign reported; no clear Harris campaign total reported; $1M corporate donation to Trump inaugural fund
• Murdoch family — No consolidated public 2024 presidential campaign figure (influence mainly via media networks; not publicly itemized for Trump vs Harris) — (inaugural not reported)
• Sinclair family — No consolidated public 2024 presidential campaign figure (influence mainly via media ownership and PAC activity; not publicly itemized for Trump vs Harris) — (inaugural not reported)
Third, diverse inputs protect you from getting trapped.
Auditing diverse media sources helps us avoid one-sided narratives or political silos, especially when algorithms are optimizing your feed for what keeps you scrolling, not what makes you informed.
This has a real demographic component.
According to the Pew Research, 87 percent of Americans age 65 and older still consume news through television, while only 47 percent of those ages 18 to 29 do.
That is a 40-point gap.
At the same time, 93 percent of 18 to 29 year olds consume news on digital devices, compared with 71 percent of those 65 and older. That means tens of millions of younger Americans are operating in a primarily digital news environment, while older Americans remain anchored in broadcast.
Then layer on social media: roughly 55 percent of TikTok users say they get news there, about 48 to 49 percent of Rumble users rely on it for news, roughly 50 percent of Truth Social users do the same (right wing), and around 30 percent of Bluesky (left wing) users say it is a news source for them.
Platforms that barely mattered as distribution systems a few years ago now function as primary news pipelines. That changes what people see, how quickly they see it, and what gets filtered out entirely.
It also means that when two people discuss the same issue, they may not just disagree. They may have consumed it through entirely different informational ecosystems.
How does that change how we even communicate about the SAME news?
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet/
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/
Fourth, auditing your media safeguards your mental clarity.
Sometimes the stress is not coming from “the news.”
It’s coming from the volume, the conflict, the emotional manipulation, and the constant urgency. Too many headlines, too many takes, too many contradictions can lead to analysis paralysis, where you stop forming your own view because you are stuck in the churn of other people’s views. Or you stay loyal to a source out of habit, even as the tone, ownership, or incentives shift over time.
Auditing is how you catch that before it starts shaping you.
The Practical Audit Checklist
Here’s the checklist I gave people. It forces you to stop consuming passively and start interrogating what you’re being fed:
❏ Who is this made for? Demographic targeting: age, race, gender, income, education
❏ Who owns it? Independent vs. corporate vs. political ties
❏ Who funds it? Ads, subscriptions, donors, VC’s, sponsors
❏ What are the incentives? Ratings, clicks, outrage, access, influence
❏ Political alignment? Explicit party support or consistent ideological framing
❏ What’s emphasized vs. ignored? Headlines, omissions, framing, tone
❏ Original reporting or recycled? First-hand sourcing vs. commentary, or opinion news
❏ Timing matters! Before election, after election, during controversy. Ambulance chasers?
❏ Emotional manipulation check! Fear, anger, tribal language, moral panic
❏ Who benefits if you believe this? Political, financial, institutional gain, ads
My Media Ranking Exercise
One of the most useful things I did was rank my own media.
I pulled up the political outlets and personalities I read, watch, and listen to. I literally grabbed their thumbnails, dropped them into the program, I linked below, and forced myself to grade them using the checklist. Not based on whether I agree with them, as I listen to plenty of people I do not agree with, but based on trust, incentives, transparency, ownership, consistency, and whether I clearly understand what they get out of me believing what they are saying.
I kept the grading simple and disciplined:
S Tier: Fully transparent ownership and incentives, consistent editorial standards, clear separation of news and opinion, prompt visible corrections, and a mission that prioritizes informing over provoking. I know exactly what they are and what they are not.
A Tier: Strong long-term track record, mostly transparent incentives, predictable and manageable bias, and generally reliable corrections. Reporting is prioritized over engagement tactics.
B Tier: Useful but inconsistent, with solid reporting mixed with engagement-driven framing. Standards vary, and incentives sometimes influence tone or emphasis.
C Tier: Frequently inconsistent, emotionally framed, and blurred between reporting and opinion. Engagement incentives often feel louder than facts, and correction culture is weak.
D Tier: Opaque incentives, manipulative framing, outrage-first business model, minimal accountability, and low commitment to factual integrity.
The point is not to eliminate everything that is not an S. The point is to know where everything sits.
That exercise forces honesty. Some sources moved up. Some moved down. Some surprised me. And the biggest benefit was clarity.
This Is Not About Loyalty
We are not going back to a world where everybody watches the same evening news and reads the same front page. The ecosystem is expanding, fragmenting, and speeding up. That means the only rational response is literacy: understanding incentives, understanding framing, understanding ownership, and understanding how distribution shapes perception.
Audit your media! The companies already audited you.