Another installment in my media navel gazing: cable news is mostly garbage. I don’t want to both sides this too much, but even if your cable news source is on the side of the angels, politically speaking, it’s still probably toxic. The cable news business model relies on keeping you engaged through the commercials. Pushing emotional buttons of various kinds, many of which are anxiety inducing, is the way to do that. Cable news ends up being a kind of fun house mirror in which you are asked to see the world through a particularly stress inducing filter. I think it tends to worry more than it informs.
Cable news is not the sole offender. I think even the most straight forward news outlet is guilty of this to one extent or another. Even if their editorial bias is simply toward novelty (e.g. they’ll run a “man bites dog story” but not a “dog bites man story”), there is still a tendency toward warping your perception of the world. (“Hmm, the ratio of people biting dogs compared to dogs biting people seems more skewed toward the former than I would have thought. That’s troubling.”) Social media is getting pretty terrible as well. Algorithms give you more of the kinds of stories you engage with. You, me, and pretty much everyone else is more likely to click on the junk food than on the vegetables.
This isn’t to say “don’t worry, be happy” or to encourage you to disengage from news altogether. But, we all have to be mindful of whether our anxiety is well placed or in proportion to the actual threat. We have to pay attention to how much of our anxiety is being caused by viewing the world through a skewed lens.
Well said about anxiety and skewed lenses! I had dinner with friends last Friday, and one person lamented about a certain topic and said that it caused her to lose sleep. I suggested that she pull back from cable news and social media for awhile. Or at minimum, skim headlines but don’t delve deeper.
My friends mother, a trump conservative and racially biased, watches Fox News all day. She is in her 80s and still mobile and sharp. What a said thing to see as she becomes more enraged by every segment and shuts out all other parts of her later years. Another friend’s father did the same thing. My dad watches CNBC. I was talking with a friend who was a fellow kid of the 1970s. We read the newspaper and usually caught 1/2 hours of national news in the evening. If we were particularly gamey we might watch the one-hour PBS. We felt as if we were well informed and could be part of a good conversation in high school government class.
I wasn’t terribly well informed, I suppose, but I read the previous day’s local paper (Palladium-Item) more or less every day with breakfast. I paid more attention to the basketball box scores and the Mike Royko columns than to the actual news. Another favorite were the letters to the editor from perennial crank, Verna Cohee. I call her a crank, but given the average Indiana voter’s slide into Trumpism and the rage and disinformation to be found on most Internet comment sections, she was probably more representative of the paper’s readers than I was.
It’s obvious the Russians have gotten to you. Just as they did Mueller. Only Rachel Maddow can save us now!
You are off your rocker. Cable News is COMPLETE garbage.