> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://mehrankhalili.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # We’re all reading the same five things - URL: https://mehrankhalili.com/media-diet/ - Published: 2026-09-07T17:31:08.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-07T19:36:15.000Z - Description: The most useful info about your opponents is published by your opponents, and almost nobody reads it. - Author: Mehran Khalili What are the sources you actually rely on to stay informed right now? Over the summer I listened to “[What’s The Plan](https://indivisible.org/wtp/)” from the US organising group Indivisible, which is a fantastic podcast for activists. They asked their listeners that question, and plenty of people wrote in. [The result](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yH-X62cR5UAy5ZZrMK8r0dYw9UYVRc67G2gcrtWqXJI/edit?usp=sharing) was a list of 38 named sources — legacy outlets, emerging ones, and individual creators. Ezra Levin, one of the hosts, noticed something. He said the categories weren’t really how people think about this stuff. What they’re doing instead is filling *functions*: facts and news (NYT, Guardian), analysis (Robert Reich, Rachel Maddow), history (Heather Cox Richardson), legal (Democracy Docket), action items (Indivisible themselves), and emotional regulation (Hopium). Ezra’s right about the functions. But the thing is, all those functions are downstream of the news. Each one is somebody telling you what to make of something that already happened. It’s a narrow list. An organiser’s media diet can be much richer than that. We live in a world of near-infinite information. There’s so much more out there that can sharpen our work. ## The underlying problem The result from the podcast caught my attention because it chimes with what I see every day. My organiser friends, almost without exception, depend on just a handful of media sources. And those sources usually sit in the same place ideologically. Why does this matter? Because our media diet decides what we think is important to work on, which tactics we reach for, how we react, what we say. It’s the raw material for our work. A narrow diet makes us reactive to the outrage of the day, rather than helping us play the long game. It happens all the time: the conclusions of last week’s planning meeting go out of the window the moment some big news lands. It’s also a strategic failure, because all the arguments come *pre-refuted*. If we only meet an argument after someone on our side has taken it apart, we’ll never learn what makes it attractive. And we’re not organising against the argument. We’re organising [against the attraction](https://mehrankhalili.com/left-fear/). Of course, a better media diet is no substitute for the rest of it — the right people, a real plan, the slow work of building a base. But it gives us something none of those can: our opponents’ weak spots in their own words, before anyone else has processed them for us. And setting this system up is easier than you’d think. One caveat before I go on. I’m talking here about organisers, not everyone. Not people just trying to get by — harried parents, exhausted workers. A narrow diet is a perfectly reasonable response to having a job and children. No, this is for the people who read this newsletter, who are building power, and who depend on information to inform their strategy and their choices. OK? Let’s go. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/d8/9bd8fd25-48d2-4fa3-a886-68d4f5a37a2b/content/images/2026/09/DSC_0162-2.jpg) Plaka, Athens (April 30, 2014) ## Six slots I’ll give you the system I use, and which I advise for others. Normally I don’t like getting too prescriptive, because everyone’s situation is different. All I can say is I know this can work, and you might be able to get something from it. For me an effective media diet for organisers is made of *slots*. The slots come first, and the sources go into them. I’ll zip through them with some examples. What goes in will always depend on what you’re organising against. But you’ll see what I mean. ### 1\. Primary sources The raw documents that relate to your campaign — not coverage of them. Like your council or municipality’s agendas and minutes. Press releases direct from government departments. Court filings and dockets. Parliamentary and committee schedules. This is the only slot where you get an edge. The information is unvarnished and unprocessed, and your campaign will know what’s coming before it’s news. It’s all out there. There’s a campaign here in Athens to stop a public space being commercialised for tourism, which I’ve been reading into. The planning application and the legal filings are all published, and they’re a goldmine for working out which buttons to push — everything the authorities intend to do, put out in advance, and read by almost nobody. Yes, sometimes reading this stuff is heavy going. AI can help with translation, and with cutting through the language. Read the source yourself where you can, and double-check anything before you use it in a campaign. But you knew that already. (More on using AI in a future piece.) ### 2\. News Current events. This is the slot Indivisible’s listeners were filling, and we need it. I go for a mix of reporting and analysis from different places, because every outlet has a point of view – even in news – and it shows in which stories they surface and how. The Guardian, yes, but also Drop Site, Politico and the FT. The last two aren’t written for me. Which is the point. One rule: I don’t read the articles on their websites. Chosen outlets, in my reader, a few times a day. More on that below. ### 3\. The other side, in their own words Your opponents, writing for their own supporters. Not commentary about them. This is where it gets interesting. I’m talking about party press releases. Trump’s Truth Social posts. Their think tanks’ *actual publications* (yes, that 108-page PDF). What their pollsters are saying. Full transcripts of their press appearances (not clips put together by our own side). The employers’ federations and trade bodies on the other side of whatever you’re fighting about. You read this to work out what they prioritise, what language they use, and where they disagree with each other. That last one is where the leverage is. To be clear, I’m not saying ‘follow your enemies’ or [hate read](https://embedded.substack.com/p/you-are-what-you-hate-read). Digesting your opponents’ content reactively, scrolling and getting wound up, [just makes us more polarised](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1804840115). I’m talking about reading patiently, with [curiosity](https://mehrankhalili.com/shock-strategy/), to hone your strategy. For example, over the summer I looked into Germany’s far-right AfD party, for a potential campaign. Their [press](https://afdbundestag.de/presse/) [releases](https://www.afd.de/presse/) are a window into their world. You can see where their spokespeople contradict each other, which areas they’re pushing and where, and which of their promises are falsifiable. And, usefully, what they never comment on. ### 4\. Sector press Whatever you organise about has an insider press. In my PR days, we called them verticals. Housing has the development and property trades. Energy has the utility and grid press. Defence has Janes, Defense News, Breaking Defense and Shephard Media, as well as [Defence-Industry.EU](https://defence-industry.eu) for Europe. These outlets write for people inside the industry, so they’re unembellished and outrage-free. They assume the reader needs to know what’s actually happening, because their job depends on it. And almost no organiser reads them. A lot of this sits behind a paywall, it’s true. But their daily newsletters are usually free, because they’re the shop window for the expensive stuff. That’s the bit you want. And when you do need to pay, one subscription per campaign is a reasonable line in a budget. Reading the sector press gives you the power structures and the dynamics. You see what people in the industry prize the most. And from that, who holds the power – and where their soft spots are. I’m working on a long-term campaign against the militarisation of Europe. Reading the defence trades tells me which contracts are wobbling and which programmes are behind schedule — the things the industry worries about among its own. [SIPRI](https://www.sipri.org/) and [ENAAT](https://enaat.org/) then give me the numbers to put in their faces. ### 5\. Craft Organising practice, campaign strategy, case studies. I’m talking about things like this newsletter, outlets like [Waging Nonviolence](https://wagingnonviolence.org), and others like it. This is the slot that puts everything else in context. You read that a mobilisation drew a hundred thousand people and then nothing happened. Was that a failure, or just what the first year of a campaign looks like? You get the answer here, not from the news. Weekend reading, mostly. No obligation to finish. ### 6\. Off-topic Photography. Culture. Whatever isn’t politics. I follow a lot of photography blogs, like Fstoppers and LensCulture, as well as blogs on meditation practice. There are two reasons this earns a slot. If it’s all politics, you’ll burn out. And [the](https://mehrankhalili.com/revolution-through-meditation/) [parallels](https://mehrankhalili.com/photography-and-impact/) you find elsewhere will do more for your work than another take on the same argument. ## How to read it: an RSS reader Instead of checking news sites, relying on social media, or signing up for newsletters — sign up for this one, though! — I use an RSS reader. For both finding the sources and for reading them. Sometimes I’ll come across an article on the web or on social media, and with one click it goes into my reader from the browser. This deals with the reactivity problem almost immediately. Nothing arrives until I pull it in. It comes in the way I want it, sorted into the slots I built, without ads, pop-ups or related links. And it waits until I’m ready to read it, calmly. I use [Unread](https://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/unread/). There’s also [NetNewsWire](https://netnewswire.com/), which is free, and [Inoreader](https://www.inoreader.com/) and [Feedly](https://feedly.com/), among others. It’s an open secret that nearly everything has a feed you can follow, even when it doesn’t advertise one. That means Substack and Ghost newsletters (like [mine](https://mehrankhalili.com/rss)). YouTube channels. Bluesky profiles, Subreddits. Google Alerts can be delivered as a feed instead of email. If a site has nothing, [RSS-Bridge](https://rss-bridge.org/bridge01/) will generate one. It’s an amazing way to obtain information and stay in control of it. It feels like cheating. How many sources should you follow? Say, five to eight in news, three to five opponents, two or three sector, a handful for craft, and as many off-topic as you like. Around twenty-five in total. I have 500, but I’m strange that way. ## How often **Daily, twenty minutes.** Slots 1 and 2\. Scan the headlines, open what matters, close the reader. Once, twice at most. **Weekly, an hour.** Slots 3 and 4\. Neither rewards checking hourly and both reward reading in one chunk. **Weekend, open-ended.** Slots 5 and 6\. Long-form, no obligation to finish. | Slot | What goes in it | How often | | --------------- | ---------------------------------------------- | ----------------- | | Primary sources | Agendas, filings, dockets, schedules | Daily | | News | Reporting and analysis, mixed sources | Daily | | The other side | Their press releases, transcripts, think tanks | Weekly | | Sector press | The trade press for your issue | Weekly | | Craft | Organising practice and case studies | Weekend | | Off-topic | Anything that isn’t politics | Whenever you want | ## Take the wheel Every new technology — cars, TV, the internet — outsourced a human function. But always, we kept the deciding part. Now we’re quietly handing that over too. First what to think about. And before long, with AI, we’ll be outsourcing *what to think*. The fix isn’t to withdraw from the information, because you need it to organise. It’s to own it. Choose the sources, sort them into slots. Pull instead of push. So have a look at what you read this week. Count the slots. And if you’re filling more than three of them, I want to hear about it — hit reply. Also in this dispatch ## Five things worth reading Yes, I know how this section looks now, after telling you to do your own curating. Consider it a sample, not a diet. 1. [Vincent Bevins](https://www.northsouthnotes.org/p/the-vibe-shift-was-a-leveraged-buyout) on the vibe shift as a leveraged buyout. His argument: the rightward turn everyone detected in 2024 was partly the result of a media class still hanging out on Twitter after Elon bought it. Interesting – and related to the idea that sources choose our priorities for us. 2. [Ross Barkan](https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/ross-barkan-on-the-dsa-and-mamdani), an hour into conservative Andrew Sullivan's podcast, has a vital point on messaging: the culture no longer rewards accountability for anything. Trump taught the lesson and it works — plough forward, ignore it. Barkan then turns it on his own side and lists the things nobody on the left has gone back to. Note what he says about silence, too. When you stop talking about an issue, that’s you conceding it. 3. [Politico](https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/brussels-playbook/your-social-feed-is-the-eus-new-battleground/)’[s Brussels Playbook](https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/brussels-playbook/your-social-feed-is-the-eus-new-battleground/) (login req) on the EU putting paid influencers into your feed to fight anti-EU narratives, with two former Commission spokespeople running the operation. The flagship success story is a commissioner going from 5,000 followers to 19,000\. And one official, anonymously: some of them have so little to do that they can spend the time trying to be celebrities. You only get quotes like that in the sector press. 4. The late [Jane McAlevey in Current Affairs](https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2019/04/jane-mcalevey-on-how-to-organize-for-power) on organising for power. Her word for only talking to the people who turn up to your meetings is *self-selection*, and she says it’s what most of the progressive movement does. 5. [Cass Hebron](https://graceblakeley.substack.com/p/the-left-needs-to-cut-jargon-to-build), writing for Grace Blakeley, on the left’s jargon problem. Spot on. ## From the archive [If you’re easily offended, you’re easily manipulated](https://mehrankhalili.com/offence/). From four years ago, on why the Establishment wants you distracted, and what taking the bait costs you.