Reading British News
19th February 2019
In the newsreader I use (Feedly) I have a ‘category’ called ‘British News’ that contains feeds from the various British newspapers and online publications that tend to have stuff in which I’m interested.
Ordinarily this would be an overwhelming amount of information to work through every day, but I’ve developed a method of filtering that gets rid of all the uninteresting stuff merely by looking at the accompanying photograph (British news sources are pretty conscientious about including at least one photograph in their stories).
- Skip anything that has a picture of athletes (typically football/soccer players, but also cricket and American football–not the games, but the Colin-Kaepernick-style controversies).
- Skip anything that has a picture of a member of the Royal Family. (Usually just ginned-up clickbait gossip; the Daily Mail and Express are especially bad about this.)
- Skip anything that has a picture of a British politician that I recognize. (Theresa May and Jeremy Corbin are the poster children here, but I recognize a somewhat-frightening number of British political players;Diane Abbot proves that the ugly-fat-black-female-diversity-politician disease is starting to infect the Old Country.)
- Skip anything that has a picture of crowds carrying protest signs in English. (You’d be astonished at the number of ‘demonstrations’ occurring in places that don’t speak English but carry English protest signs; Arabs and Africans are pretty dependable about that.)
This weeds out about 90% of the junk, and the rest is pretty manageable. (I must admit that I’m a sucker for a Trump Derangement story, and The Independent, despite its name, is a fruitful source for those.)