How to stay well informed

As a person who likes, and works at, being informed on the major issues facing our country, I am having a really hard time knowing what to believe from the news we are getting. And now, on top of all of that, we have a White House team that has been the source of major false reports — from the significantly wrong and repeated statement that there had been a terrorist attack in Bowling Green never happened to the less significant but still blatantly false claim that Trump had won more electoral college votes than any president in recent history not true. As people who want to be informed and engaged one of our biggest challenges just now is staying genuinely informed without getting sucked down the vortex of sensationalized, crazy-making media coverage. Here are a few tips for staying informed and somewhat sane in the process. Take the news in doses.

Being well-informed is not the same as being a know-all. The former is about being able to ask intelligent questions in seminars, engage in debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and realise that two of your tutors are having an affair. The latter is about passing on information on all of these subjects to everyone you know, even if you are not entirely sure the information is true. Also, being well-informed involves knowledge about lots of different things, while being a know-all can mean knowing all there is to know about an obscure period of Latvian history but not about how to tie your shoelaces.

Thanks to our phones and free Wi-Fi, information is accessible within seconds. We no longer have an excuse to be ill-informed. By being familiar with current events, you can have conversations that are not just centered around superficial topics.

Here's how to inoculate ourselves against negative ones. Verified by Psychology Today. Automatic You. I was trapped in an endless pull-to-refresh cycle of consuming more news, tweets, posts, and videos than was good for me.