Why A City That Won’t Read Shouldn’t Trust Its Own Opinions
The Counterintuitive Problem: The “Information Age” Hates Information
For a country that never stops talking about being in an “information age,” it quietly avoids the one habit that actually delivers information: reading.
The surprise is not that people are busy. The surprise is that in a year when Charlotte voters have detailed candidate guides, transit explainers and a full election portal sitting a click away, a huge slice of the audience still treats a paragraph like a hostile witness. The less we read, the more certain we sound. That is not a quirk. That is a civic hazard.
A city can have excellent journalism and still fail at self-government if no one slows down long enough to read it.
Reading Habits As A Broken HOA
Think of our reading culture as one of those homeowners’ associations that everyone complains about, but no one attends. The rules exist. The meetings are posted. The agendas are online. Then the same handful of people show up, read everything, and quietly run the neighborhood forever while everyone else fumes in the group chat.
Our collective reading habit works the same way.
A small group reads the long pieces on CLT Mercury. They dig into the explainers on transit taxes and the candidate breakdowns in Politics. They actually open the election guides in Poll Dance 2025. The rest of the city lives by screenshots of headlines that somebody texted out of context at 11:47 p.m.
A Short Charlotte Story: Three Voters, One Ballot
Picture a Saturday in October. Early voting is open. Three Charlotte voters are standing in the same line.
- Voter One spent 20 minutes the night before on CLT Mercury’s news section, reading a district guide and a transit explainer. That is it. Twenty minutes. Two short articles. Specific facts. Clear tradeoffs.
- Voter Two skimmed the headlines, scrolled the comments, and let a stranger’s all-caps Facebook rant stand in for research. Total time: maybe 8 minutes.
- Voter Three watched an outrage clip about “taxes” that never mentioned what the tax does, who controls it, or how long it lasts. Time spent: 90 seconds. Emotional impact: volcanic.
All three will cast the same ballot.
All three will go home feeling “informed.”
Here is the case study outcome one year later:
- Voter One may be annoyed with how things turned out, but at least the surprise is “the plan was flawed,” not “wait, there was a plan.”
- Voter Two feels betrayed, even though the information was in the first three paragraphs of the guide they never opened.
- Voter Three is convinced something sinister happened because reality did not match the video’s vibe.
Same city. Same election. Completely different relationship with reality, all because of how much actual reading happened before ink hit paper.
What A Local Publisher Sees Up Close
From the vantage point of a local outlet, you see the same pattern over and over:
- People say they “just want the facts,” then ignore anything longer than a caption.
- Stories that clearly answer hard questions (“What does the one cent transit tax actually do?”) are shared by the people who read them and misquoted by the people who did not.
- The readers who make time for long explanations are the ones least likely to fall for the latest viral oversimplification.
None of this is theoretical. You can see it in traffic patterns, feedback emails and the kinds of questions that show up in the inbox after a new piece runs. The ones who read an entire explainer will ask about details. The ones who only saw the headline will ask for a summary that is already on the page they did not open.
Reading Versus Scrolling: Same Phone, Different Outcome
This is not an argument for everybody to start hauling Russian novels onto the bus. It is an argument for five extra minutes with the same device already in your hand. The phone is not the problem. The habit is.
Scrolling is dessert. Reading is the meal. A feed of hot takes can be entertaining, but depending on it for context is like trying to live on frosting. Once in a while, sure. Three times a day and you start confusing sugar rush with understanding.
A single 1,200 word explainer about Charlotte’s transit tax, read start to finish, does more for civic sanity than a week of tap-and-swipe outrage. That is not a sentimental claim. It is simple math. More words means more room for tradeoffs, numbers, and sentences that contain both “good” and “bad” in the same paragraph.
The Unexpected Analogy: Literacy As City Plumbing
If you really want a picture of how strange this is, imagine a city that stopped maintaining its water pipes. Not in a dramatic way. Just small decisions over time.
A council vote delayed here. A maintenance budget shaved there. Plenty of talking, plenty of press conferences, very little wrench-on-metal work. For a while, the faucets still run. People complain about the taste and tweet pictures of brown water, but the system holds. Until one day it does not.
Reading is that hidden plumbing. It carries the facts and nuance underneath all the noise. You do not notice how much you depended on it until your civic conversation turns cloudy, then toxic, then undrinkable.
Why “Poll Dance 2025” Needs Readers, Not Just Voters
Charlotte is heading into another noisy election cycle. Poll Dance 2025 exists so nobody has to guess what is on the ballot. There are full candidate lists, side-by-side comparisons, and plain language guides to what each tax, bond, and office actually does.
It works only if people read it.
A city that votes without reading is basically filling out Scantron bubbles based on vibes. That might work on a reality show. It does not work for transit systems, school boards, or nine-figure budgets that decide whether your kid rides a bus, a train, or a parked car in traffic.
What To Do, Starting Tomorrow
The fix is not dramatic. It will not trend. It will look boring in a screenshot. That is the point.
- Before sharing a story, actually read it to the end.
- Before explaining an issue to a friend, read one full explainer from a source that publishes corrections.
- Before walking into a voting booth, set aside twenty minutes with a candidate guide and a piece on whatever tax or bond is confusing.
Twenty minutes of reading can do more for Charlotte’s future than twenty hours of arguing about something half remembered from an image post. That is an unglamorous truth. It is also how grown cities behave.
If a community wants better politics, better coverage, and better outcomes, it has to do something far more radical than yell. It has to read.
About the Author
Peter Cellino publishes CLT Mercury and tries to keep Charlotte’s attention long enough to get through at least one full paragraph before the espresso wears off. Fueled by strong coffee and mild disbelief, he is usually reachable on Bluesky at petercellino.com, where readers are invited to argue politely, send stories, and, occasionally, admit they actually finished the article.
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© 2025 Mercury Local / Mercury Local
This article, “If You’re Not Reading, You’re Not Ready To Vote,” by Peter Cellino, is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0. “If You’re Not Reading, You’re Not Ready To Vote”
by Peter Cellino, Mercury Local (CC BY-ND 4.0)