What am I missing?

Maybe you're the kind of person who is kept up at night by what you don't know that you don't know. Maybe you're the kind of person who wants to see the "big picture" and also get some finer-grained details, but it all seems too overwhelming to manage.

What you "know" is a function of your education, upbringing, expectations, and disposition, but it's also a function of the information you expose yourself to daily. It's particularly easy to succumb to only "knowing" whatever is most available and at-hand now that we have curated social media platforms and algorithmic search, although it's always been true that biased media, inadequate coverage, and outright propaganda shape so much of our conceptions and political actions.

Addressing the quality of your information environment is not an individual task, but it is something that directly benefits from individual action and responsibility. You both cannot personally overcome the deficits of the modern media environment, and also will be better off for trying to exert some effort in that direction.

So the first question to ask is, what's missing? It's an almost impossible ask, since if you knew something were missing already, you could simply go find it 🤠 Nevertheless, it's possible to critically evaluate the news you do have access to, and evaluate its shortcomings: whose perspectives aren't included, what areas (geographic, topical, etc.) don't get coverage, what implicit argument is laid over the "facts?"

Media consumption and information access is a criminally under-discussed aspect of community preparedness and political action. Your sense of possibility and strategy are directly informed by what you know (or what you think you know), so increasing your access to information and not just noise is paramount.

Media literacy isn't just reading what you find, it's also finding what to read

Last week I made a post about how Iran is a litmus test for where your media diet has gaps. If you hadn't heard anything from inside Iran in weeks, you wouldn't be alone in that, and it's not an accident. (Indeed, the fact that that post was not shown to a single person who doesn't already follow me on Instagram is a testament to this very fact.)

The architecture of news media right now is shifting toward even more structural consolidation than before, and our access to information from places with strict censorship regimes is heavily contingent on internet communications that we take all too much for granted. And while there are additional measures you need to put in place to ensure some access to information in the long-term that we'll surely talk about in a later essay, for now the encouragement is just to notice where gaps might exist.

If you were following news from and about Gaza, this isn't your first rodeo. But if Gaza was the first time that you really took notice of how news is shaped by nationalism, how perspectives are omitted for political expediency, how access to information relies on people and systems finding that valuable and worthwhile: I'd like to gently suggest that your education is just beginning.

Like many challenges discussed on this page, this is a problem that requires effort and time investment to solve—not one that has a quick and easy answer. There's no self-satisfaction or some kind of "gotcha" here like "simply follow Al-Jazeera on the internet and you will have access to knowledge." News flows are challenging, media literacy is at an all-time low, and in an environment saturated by content, it's hard to encourage people to take on the hard work of seeking out perspectives that typically have required well-resourced news rooms to pursue. Nevertheless, I do honestly believe that's the cost of living an informed existence right now.

A taste of what's missing

It would run extremely counter to my general ethos to issue this call to action and effort, and then simply provide you with what I think are obvious, easy answers to the problem. So no, I don't have a cute little listicle of outlets with reliably good coverage on Iran or Lebanon or the Middle East that you can simply add to your feeds. And I'm not going to point to a few creators, influencers, or news rooms that get to be mouthpieces for entire populations.

What I do want to offer, though, are some small tastes of what you might be missing if you're looking only to a few major news outlets, or if you're relying on algorithmic feeds entirely for your information. Not to shame or punish you, either; rather, to show you what might be left out in your current media strategy, and to encourage you that it's worth the effort to seek out more and better information.

• An overview on the strategy (or lack thereof) in this war, written for a lay audience with limited historical/geographic/political background. And a little glimpse into how talks went (or didn't go) this past week.
• I don't support or subscribe to the New York Times or Washington Post, but they remain relatively more well-resourced in the news media space (even after WaPo gutted their newsroom and international coverage in particular), and selectively have useful coverage:
  • Interactive coverage of US sites damaged
  • Image evidence of US landmines in Iran. Corroborated by Bellingcat
• An analysis of the bombing of the school at Minab
• A refutation of the idea that we can blame AI for bombing children at the school
• A joint report on human rights and civilian harms in Iran, one month into the war
• Iranians don't have a missile alert system, so volunteers are stepping up to create a warning map
• Voices from Lebanon about the impacts of Israel's incursions (plus links to additional readings and resources)
• My critiques of Human Rights Watch aside, their investigation into Israel's use of white phosphorous in Lebanon, and coverage by The Guardian of the same
• An explainer on maritime trade and news about passage through the Strait of Hormuz

What's the cost of missing bits of your media diet?

You might not immediately notice or bear the costs of missing key "nutrients" in your media diet—it might even feel comforting to only hear from certain voices, or to tell yourself that the perspectives you're already engaged with are the "right" ones. But acting politically and strategically requires not just an awareness of the material world. It also requires some awareness of others' perceptions of that same world, their sense of facts, their expectations, their narratives.

The liberal and leftist internet sphere have been obsessed with finding voices from the global majority, or marginalized perspectives, to address shortcomings and pitfalls in our political understanding. This is perhaps half-right: you absolutely should seek out information that fills in your deficits, that challenges your beliefs, that expands your understanding. But it's also incomplete.

Especially when you're unfamiliar with a history, a place, a culture, or an environment, you're susceptible to narratives that already align with your latent expectations, even if they're coming from the mouths of people with credentials or authenticity or lived experience. It's easy to cede intellectual territory and abandon critical thinking in favor of finding some "true representatives" of a people or a cause. It's easy to tokenize voices rather than including them and synthesizing them.

On the flip side, it's also easy to exclude and eschew perspectives you know you disagree with. It's easy to insulate yourself from fascist rhetoric or white supremacist perspectives, and make the gap between your understanding and that of whole swaths of people even more challenging to bridge.

The cost, though, isn't about what you understand. It's about the actions you're able to take as a result of that understanding.

Strategic interactions are often modeled as games of perfect information: all parties involved know what they want, know what's at stake, and pick the best option that maximizes the probability that they get the outcome they want. But that's almost never true. It's almost never the case that we'll have perfect information, or even share a vision of consensus reality with the people and institutions we're engaging with politically.

It's why shoring up our information environments is so important. When we have less information, we're less able to act quickly and decisively. When we have a lot of uncertainty, we're less able to act in accordance with our desires, visions, and values. And when we don't actively seek out information and other perspectives, we're subject to whatever is easiest to come by: "facts" or narratives that are curated and propagated by institutions with time and resources to do so, for aims that are theirs, not ours.

Iran is just one example of where this deficit in your media and information environment might show up, especially if you're here in the so-called United States. Decades of Islamophobic rhetoric combine with the challenges of internet access restrictions and a repressive regime to starve you of details and keep you invested in your preexisting (mis)conceptions.

Iran is also just one example of where the benefits of seeking out "missing" narratives and information may not seem obvious, but accrue over time to your political detriment. You might reasonably think: "but I don't have any power to do anything about Iran. I'm not a country or a military power, I'm not being drafted into service, I can't make the US or Israel stop sending bombs, I don't speak Farsi, there's enough problems here at home, etc. etc. etc." And you would be right about lacing an individual ability to intervene.

At stake, though, is reinforcing the separation between yourself and others, between "our" struggles and "theirs." There's a huge benefit to be gained from confronting exactly how oppression operates elsewhere: the role that the military-industrial complex plays in the world order alongside domestic repression, and the danger that arises specifically when we aren't connected to each other, when information and aid flows are interrupted, when we're alienated and atomized. Yes, confronting these realizations comes at the risk of doubling down on a feeling of powerlessness, but I'd argue it's a necessary step toward solidarity and action.

Because you do have the power, every day, to choose something different. To put in a little bit of effort to go searching for more information, to draw parallels, to understand and feel how shared struggles exist across time and space. And it starts with asking yourself: what's missing?