How to fix your news diet and lead with Lincoln's empathy

Executive overview

Constant news consumption breeds anxiety, but full disengagement is civically irresponsible. The answer is a curated, diverse news diet anchored in local journalism, trusted independent voices, and a few high-quality publications.

Lincoln shows how to hold both the timely and the timeless: he read telegraph dispatches obsessively while rooting his judgment in Shakespeare, the Bible, and human nature unchanged across centuries.

The leader who wins the war must already be thinking about winning the peace.

Building a healthier news diet

• Marinating in news is not a civic duty — selective, deliberate consumption is.
• Subscribe to local press first; Trump won 91% of news deserts, a direct consequence of local journalism collapse.
• Algorithm-driven feeds fragment reality and are increasingly weaponized for political ends.
• Support individual Substacks directly — creators now own their audience and are compensated at scale for the first time.
• Vote with your eyeballs: prioritize outlets doing fact-based, multi-perspective work (The Economist, The Atlantic, the Bulwark).
• Avoid the "news flume" — commodity, 24-hour flow adds noise, not understanding.

Media capture and the Orban playbook

• News divisions are rounding errors for their parent conglomerates — economically vulnerable to political pressure.
• The Trump administration is exploiting regulatory leverage over broadcast licenses and mergers.
• Editorial independence eroding: the 60 Minutes executive producer resigned under direct editorial pressure.
• Civic journalism was historically a loss leader tied to public airwave licensing — that social contract has broken down.

Lincoln's approach to leadership

• Lincoln was a political entrepreneur: the Republican Party was an upstart third party with no presidential precedent.
• His core insight: you cannot win the war without winning the peace — he was planning reconciliation before Appomattox.
• He balanced obsessive real-time intelligence (sleeping at the telegraph office) with deep historical and philosophical grounding.
• His superpower was empathy — he distinguished between people and their cause, seeing Confederate leaders as humans shaped by circumstance.
• Humor was self-medication and a political tool; his jokes were always at his own expense, never weaponized against others.
• He invented a form of leadership built on reconciliation, not moral superiority.

What the Lincoln counterfactual reveals

• Andrew Johnson replaced the reconciler with an avenger: vain, egotistical, immediately corrupted by power.
• Within months, black codes passed; Jim Crow replaced slavery for a century because character failed at the top.
• Lincoln's martyrdom strengthened his legacy — the South created the thing it was trying to prevent.
• His instruction to leave the hated Richmond POW camp standing ("leave it as a monument") applies directly to today's debates about statuary and historical memory.
• The River Queen meeting — Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Porter — is the clearest window into what reconstruction could have been.

Applying historical wisdom now

• Read historical figures as people living in what they saw as a brand-new future, not figures frozen in amber.
• Stoicism was already ancient philosophy to Marcus Aurelius — he didn't treat it as a dead relic.
• Lincoln didn't know he was living in the decline of the American experiment; that uncertainty makes his composure more remarkable.
• A successful pro-democracy movement must be positive, patriotic, inclusive, and joyful — humorlessness signals a movement losing its human connection.
• Write more love letters to the good America; reclaim the tradition of patriotic, fact-based optimism.