Editorial: It's time for readers to sharpen our skills before clicking "share"

I have been a newspaper reader since I was in grade school, sixty some years ago. My mother subscribed to a national news weekly and the small local paper published in our home town. In high school and college, I was on the debate team and spent countless hours in libraries reading newspaper stories in search of all the different views on a particular topic. In a classic debate, teams don’t know until the last minute whether they will argue for a proposition or against it. My team and I had to be prepared to make a solid case either way. 

Later I became a reporter and worked hard to include more than one viewpoint in a story, regardless of how I personally viewed that particular topic. And all the time I was writing the news, I was reading: newspapers other than the one that employed me, magazines, journals, books. Reading was every bit a part of my life as was my job.

Things are different now. I suspect that journalism students and news media veterans still read a lot, but I am not sure about the rest of us. More and more, studies tell us, we restrict our consumption of news to media sources and platforms that reflect our own opinions or philosophies. “Silos,” they are often called. It is more comforting, we are told, to read news that supports our personal viewpoints rather than challenges them. I get that.

But in the wake of “alternative” facts, labels so broad they have become almost meaningless, long-simmering policy differences that are boiling over, and power dynamics flexing muscles that summon comparisons to the worst parts of human history, we, the readers, the thinkers, the speakers, the voters, we all need to do more reading. 

The prevalence of social media has exacerbated one too-human tendency. Back in the day, reporters groused about readers who consumed only headlines without reading the attendant articles and then jumped immediately to proclaim  their personal opinions. But these days, social media platforms like FaceBook, digital news and opinion sites and networks of individual users (X and BlueSky, for example) allow people to “share” news items and then allow the readers to decide whether to share them or not – based on the headlines without reading the whole story. 

One 2024 study reported that 35 million public FaceBook posts published between 2017 and 2020, which listed both headlines and sources, were “shared” without clicks about 75 percent of the time. In other words, people read no further than the headlines before they passed along the story, without regard for its content, context or accuracy.

Clearly, we readers need some pointers. Experts on the media and mental health at the University of Washington have created an excellent list of seven suggestions to help “cultivate a healthy news diet.”  And here are a few tweaks of my own.

1. Think of news consumption as you ought to consider your food consumption. The goal is to eat a healthy diet and not fill up on ultra-processed or empty calories. 

2.  Be deliberate about how much news to consume on a daily basis so you don’t burn out or collapse in a heap. The amount you “eat” will be different from anyone else’s ideal diet.

3. Eat a variety of foods: some straight-forward news from a few different sources. Remind yourself of the difference between fact and opinion, and then don’t be afraid to fold in an opinion or two (especially if they are different than your own or, perhaps, inspire you to change your mind).

4. Be skeptical. As many an editor has told me, “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” In other words, check the facts of the story against SNOPES, an online source that checks the credibility of news reports, or consult another fact-checking service. At the very least, search online for stories on the same subject and read several of them.

5. Slow down. Mindfulness, whether in eating or reading, takes time. Know that you may read more stories about fewer topics before you decide to share them. No need to apologize. The truth matters.

Finally, make yourself read the whole story. Please. And then think about it. Remember the old Buddhist teaching about “right speech” (an old-fashioned, quaint way to describe “sharing”): Ask yourself, is what I want to share true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? 

And then decide whether to share it or not. 

– Nancy Haught