Podcasts I listen to indicate that the Trump re-election campaign has made Facebook and television ad buys. I confess that I do not remember seeing any of these ads. I assume Fox News would be a likely outlet. I very, very seldom watch Fox News, but I do watch Fox sports because some of the teams I follow sometimes show up there. Maybe the ads show during the news programming and not the sports. I do spend some time each day on Facebook and nothing from the Trump campaign shows up. Why?
I am genuinely interested in Trump ads. Really. My motivation may be different from true believers. It bothers me if false statements appear in political ads and I tend to want to respond. Offer policy positions all you want, but don’t blatantly lie in a way I can identify and because I feel that I must respond.
The fact I don’t see these ads bothers me in a different way. If you see these ads and I don’t, we have each been categorized politically and this is not a good thing. Elected officials, especially those elected at the highest level, end up representing us all. In such cases, hidden agendas that play to some and are not apparent to all are a serious problem.
If you rely on Facebook for your news, you play right into this problem. You need to diversify your inputs. My suggestion is to pay for access to a quality local paper (paper or digital) and follow a quality national paper. My suggestion for a quality national paper would include the NY Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. My definition of quality is basically that the paper employs actual journalists and is not primarily a source for opinions. Read opinions if you respect the author, but include in your reading journalists would report stories based on facts. See facts can be twisted or contextualized in different ways, but it helps if the opinions that follow start with facts. There are certainly many sources for opinion online and my attitude toward such sources is the same. Test the opinions you read against your best effort to read factual accounts.
You may regard these recommendations as outside your price range. You can access some articles from these sources through online sources (Google or Apple News). You will have to decide if these offerings cover a broad perspective – I can’t say. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post allow you to read a fixed number of articles each month without paying for full access. I typically reach my limit and expend this limit on articles I encounter in other ways (e.g., Twitter and Facebook).
We pay for an Apple+ news account. This is a reasonable way to obtain the Wall Street Journal and a range of other news magazines. If you read much, this is a pretty good deal.