We, as humans, have basic needs for several things. One of them is food. Another is information. We are always, by necessity and want, taking in both. 

It’s fair to say we even love both food and information. But we also, as humans, have a propensity for indulging in too much of a good thing to the point that we turn it into a bad thing. It’s easy for us to develop bad habits around any of our basic needs. This is especially true when indulging provides some kind of instant gratification but long-term damage.

I believe that generally, our American habits around food consumption are highly analogous to the habits we have around news and information consumption. Similarly, the resulting problems we have because of those habits are highly analogous.

We love junk food and we love junk news. And they are both wreaking havoc on our individual and collective physical and mental health, and having detrimental effects on our whole society.

Our current media landscape is analogous to the American food landscape during the proliferation of fast-food restaurants and highly processed foods. Note that I am distinguishing between “food” generally and certain subsets of food — unhealthy fast food and processed food, which are characterized by poor nutritional content and low cost.

There are certainly benefits to fast food; it’s convenient, inexpensive, and tastes good, which provides people with the ability to spend less time and money feeding themselves and their families. There are certainly benefits to processed food, too; it lasts a long time on shelves, is less prone to food-borne contaminants, it is inexpensive, and it tastes good. 

However, since the ‘50s, we have become acutely aware of the drawbacks of both unhealthy fast food and processed food; namely, that a lot of it has too much stuff in it that is just bad for you, like fat, sugar, and salt.

For the last 35 years (when cable news began), the last 15 years (when smart phones became available), and the last 12 or so years (when social media really proliferated), there’s been a similar explosion in the availability of all types of news and news-like information, the latter being characterized by high levels of opinion and analysis and low levels of editorial review.

In the realm of “news-like information,” we now have multiple 24-hour cable news channels, thousands of online news sites and blogs, and thousands of YouTube channels and podcasts — and the information being shared by these is constantly showing up on our social media feeds.

On a basic level, more people are able to know more things than ever before. However, we are now becoming acutely aware of the drawbacks of too much news-like information; namely, that a lot of it has too much stuff that is just bad for you, like misinformation and bias.

Bad Habits and Monetization

The reasons we are drawn to fast/processed (and generally “unhealthy”) food and opinionated and biased news-like (and generally “unhealthy”) information are similar.

We like fat, sugar, and salt because they taste good and because parts of our brains derive pleasure and reward from eating them. This is a feature, and not a bug, of how our brains work; we’re naturally drawn to eat good-tasting, high-calorie food for sustenance and survival. 

We also consciously know that we need to eat these foods in moderation, and that we need to eat stuff that doesn’t taste as good, like vegetables, because we have this intelligence and capacity to learn this information from our own and others’ experiences.

We like opinionated and biased news-like information because being right feels good. Our brains are wired for confirmation bias, which is being more open to receiving information that comports with what you already believe. 

This is, again, a feature, not a bug, of how our brains work; it makes it easier for us to make sense of the world around us. We also consciously know that we should regularly seek out new information, including information that challenges our existing beliefs.

However, it’s easy to over-consume unhealthy food and unhealthy news in part because each provides instant gratification, and the drawbacks are not immediately evident. The drawbacks, if any, come from long-term, sustained unhealthy consumption, not from one-time or infrequent unhealthy consumption.

It’s even easier because those who produce food and information are well aware of our desires and are monetarily incentivized to exploit them.

Food companies, of course, make more money when people buy more food, especially when that food is cheap to make. Unfortunately, it is easy to make food that is cheap, delicious, and terrible for you. Even worse, making it that way often increases both its addictive qualities and the maker’s profit margin.

Media companies, of course, make more money when they attract a larger audience. Media companies have always relied on both subscription and ad revenue, but news production and distribution used to be limited to large organizations who had invested significant resources in journalists and print, TV, or radio distribution. But now, because of technology, there are thousands more sources available, and each is incentivized to monetize their source by driving clicks and views. 

Unfortunately, highly biased, opinionated, low-quality, and “clickbait” headlines and content drive revenue even more easily than high-quality, least-biased headlines and content. Not only have newer sites of questionable reputability supplied plenty of low-quality, biased headlines and content, but their proliferation has, unfortunately, caused historically reputable outlets to start providing some lower-quality, biased content just to compete for audience share.

Our predispositions to unhealthy food/info consumption and the monetary incentives for food/info companies to exploit them creates a vicious cycle in which many well-meaning consumers fall into patterns of more and more unhealthy consumption.

We’ve come to the collective realization as a society that the consequence of unhealthy food consumption is an obesity epidemic. I believe that the consequence of unhealthy information consumption is an extreme polarization epidemic. We are polarized because so many of us are consuming such high quantities of low-quality, biased information.

One main difference between food and information in this analogy is that the causal links between unhealthy food consumption and poor health effects have been studied and are now somewhat well known. For example, we know that diets too high in fat, sugar, and/or salt, are linked with heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and a host of other illnesses.

In contrast, we’ve only recently started to study and realize the detrimental effects of overconsumption of low-quality and biased information. Many of us intuitively attribute our increased political polarization to this cause, but it is also highly possible that other detrimental effects are due to this overconsumption.

For example, people’s personal levels of anger, isolation, radicalization, or bad decision-making, I suspect, may be attributable to overconsumption of unhealthy information. Many people are blissfully unaware that they are suffering any ill effects from what they read, listen to and watch, even though they are consuming intellectual equivalents of donuts and fries at every sitting.

What To Do About It

The bright side of the food/information analogy is that for the unhealthy food problem, we have created and implemented some effective solutions, although we still have a lot more work to do. One of the first steps in addressing unhealthy food consumption problems was making knowledge available to consumers. For example, nutrition fact labels were added to the food that we buy in the mid-1990s.

There has been no equivalent “nutrition label” for information, although I and my team have spent the last five years creating one. We’ve now rated more than 4,000 news and news-like sources for their bias and reliability, with marketable data on more 11,000. These include websites, podcasts, videos, newsletters, blogs and more. All of our work is shared regularly on our Media Bias Chart®.

Another thing we can do to combat unhealthy eating problems is to exercise! Exercise actively combats the adverse effects of any past or current unhealthy food habits, and has a whole host of other health benefits. 

The analogous “exercise” people can do to combat a bad information diet is to participate in civic engagement, which we can call “civic exercise.” These can include having face-to-face conversations with your political opponents, working on your own business or projects that you are passionate about, learning facts about law and government, voting, volunteering for political causes and campaigns, attending town halls, donating to causes you care about, and calling your elected representatives. 

While consuming lots of unhealthy information can make you feel angry, sad, and powerless, engaging in civic exercise can make you feel powerful, give you a sense of purpose and meaning, and create the feeling that you are making a difference, because you actually are.

The big question facing our society is how to address this polarization epidemic caused by our unhealthy information diet. I propose that we do everything we can to promote lifestyles of “information fitness.” As a society we’ve recognized the importance of “media literacy” and “information literacy,” and many states are now implementing them into their schools (we can help with that!).

But I believe we need people to be not just competent to manage the information landscape (i.e., not just be “literate”), but that they can actually thrive in it. That is, we need to create opportunities for people to be Info Fit if they so choose, to combat this polarization epidemic caused by too much unhealthy information consumption.

I don’t think we need to define a “perfect” model for a healthy information diet and civic exercise, but I think we can identify some of the big things that are way out of balance in many people’s information diets. If you look at the Media Bias Chart®, you’ll see it goes from fact-based reporting at the top, to analysis in the middle, to opinion down below that, and outright misinformation below that.

In this analogy, I believe that analysis content is like carbs in many ways. The vast majority of information available for us to consume are various sources of carbs (analysis). Now, you definitely need carbs (analysis) in your diet — they are (it is) important. But what you need is moderate portions of high-quality carbs (analysis), like whole grain bread (or an article from The Economist). 

However, many of us are consuming vast quantities of white bread, mashed potatoes, and cereal (like watching a ton of CNN, listening to biased podcasts and reading all of your favorite partisan online sites every day). Too much of this, I assert, is unhealthy.

What should we probably consume more of instead? I believe that balanced and fact-based articles are like your vegetables and lean proteins, so we should probably focus on getting more of those. Most shows on MSNBC and Fox News are donuts and fries. They are OK in small quantities every once in a while, but for the love of God, don’t sit and consume those all day!

Social media is candy. Scrolling through our feeds and seeing comments and memes that reinforce our beliefs and opinions (thanks to the algorithms) is gratifying and addictive. But if you consume too much of it, you feel sick. We should probably limit our social media to small doses.

In addition to cleaning up our information diets, info fitness as a lifestyle requires structures, tools and resources. I’m proud that Ad Fontes Media provides many of these, from our online Media Bias Chart®, to our free mobile app for iPhone or Android, to our many online resources, such as our Topic of the Week.

With a combination of 1) knowledge of what we are consuming, 2) choosing to consume mostly healthy information, and 3) engaging in civic exercise, people can become info fit, and fight against this extreme polarization epidemic. 

We’re doing what we can to help people become more info fit, and I hope you’ll do the same.

This blog post is an update to one Vanessa published in 2018.