how useful is their opinion? Now you could say that my ego has gone a bit mad here and I'm assuming my own ability to overlook a global event is just my own foolishness, but I still read a LOT of news and feel
quite well informed (whatever that means) about my own areas of interest and expertise
frankly, being over-engaged in current affairs was ruining my mental health. I don't watch broadcast news, but I work in a field that is changing all the time so I'm always monitoring a lot of trade and informal sources, blogs etc - keeping up with that plus current affairs is like a full-time
job
Anyway, the lesson here is not that I'm an idiot (amazingly) but as this is a relatively low-key World Cup, it makes it easy to miss if your tribe is not a football tribe. I feel like a lot of ppl assume that everyone knows the same things about relatively niche topics but that is obvs not true
And obviously the problem is fragmented media landscape/targeted algos/social media echo chamber/I don't know anyone who likes football etc but the secondary impacts of that for stuff like public opinion polling are not to be sniffed at. If someone knows literally zero about something...
Re-upping this, even though it makes me look like an idiot, because it's worth saying I digitally subscribe to 4 national newspapers, 2 weekly magazines, and a bunch of specialist publications but I've consciously shifted to being a more passive news consumer this year, because...
Oh well this makes me feel a bit better about it
Yes, I absolutely cannot bear Today anymore and I've not done any casual radio listening since long half-term road trip. Been head-down researching something so not distracting myself too much with other reading.
I mean, I am aware it's weird I didn't know, but I'm not totally surprised.