It's not a personal preference situation. You're making a decision that affects those close to you, those you work with, and those you encounter in a grocery store aisle.
It's been so many years since polio and earlier vaccines that people have forgotten the power and importance of collective action. Hope we can turn that around.
"Bias" in terms of reporting (as opposed to journalism) isn't even a thing. When you do reporting right, you tell what happened. Who, What, Where, When, How. These are observable facts. You don't choose to report whether an explosion happened in Beirut or whether the President of the United States said X or Y in front of cameras. These are observable facts. You report all of it. "X number of people marched in Portland." That's a fact, report it. "X number of police killed people they were arresting in 2019." Another fact.
VOA & S&S did a fine job of this, as well as NPR, CBS, NBC, and the smaller parts of Fox News and CNN that report things versus get talking heads in boxes to talk about things.
"Both the Military Times and S&S suffer from the same bias as MSM" <- not an observable fact.
"Most people that serve are conservative leaning." <-that's not an observable fact.
"Orange man bad" <- ALSO not an observable fact, although reports of his criminal acts in and out of office may very well be. You get to make that judgement. The health of our society REQUIRES a free press to get those facts in front of all of our eyes so we can vote in an informed way.
The southeastern portion of the state has (in what I’ve read) traditionally been considered part of Appalachia. Geophysically, it’s simple: the one-third or so of Ohio that wasn’t flattened by the glaciers. It’s rolling, increasingly hilly as you get down to the Ohio River. I went to school at Ohio University in Athens, and a bunch of classes there consider Appalachia a part of their studies and focus.
I read Hillbilly Elegy when it came out and my first reaction was “hey, wait, Middletown is really more blue collar, rust belt.” My second reaction is “boy, Vance sure is willing to speak for a huge geographic area that he’s at best only on the edge of.”
But to the Bitter Southerner piece, I want to say that the whole “you have to be from a place to talk about a place” thesis has, for me, been as wobbly as anything Vance puts out. So, what, born there? And the deeper inside the geographic boundaries, the better? Nah. But maybe the author (of the Bitter piece) makes a stronger point that ANY generalization of people tied to a geographic area is weak, shallow, insufficient by definition. People will surprise you. (That’s my generalization.)
Also, Dartmouth bulldozed the Kiewit Computational Center (one of my favorite building names) several years ago, so no marker there. My college in Vermont had a ASR33 teletype hooked up at 300 baud to Dartmouth's Time Sharing System, and because it had 'talk' and 'mail', we were connected to students at a dozen or more schools—a great, mind-expanding experience, chatting in text. And, yeah, we cobbled together strange not-particularly-useful programs in BASIC and saved them on paper tape. This was...1975.
It's been so many years since polio and earlier vaccines that people have forgotten the power and importance of collective action. Hope we can turn that around.