Understand COVID media engagement with a simple mental model

Throughout the pandemic, the most reliable source of information has been the scientists and medical community, and yet we continue to get two levels of filtration between the best source and ourselves. The first filter is the government and the second is the media. The government distorts it one way, the media distorts it another, and in the worst-case scenario, the media distorts what the government has distorted about the science.

As a reaction to this societal failure, people are being told: if you want to be intelligent, you have to put in the work yourself and do your own research.

Though I started the pandemic keeping a close eye on the media and proactively shed light on the flaws through social media, this came at my own cost. My sanity started to dip and my anxiety started to spike. Since December 2020, I don’t consume a single line of news outside of what friends and family send me through messages. Stepping back and receiving news filtered exclusively through personal connections, I have had the time to reflect on the patterns of news consumption during COVID.

Below is a graph I have landed on after playing with a few different classifications. I call it the COVID Media Consumption Matrix.