What I've Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News

[hunter]

54. Sorry, all television news is FUBAR.

Television is the worst possible medium for daily news because there are parts of our mind that can't distinguish between whatever is on the television and reality; can't distinguish television personalities from someone sitting in the room, or television from horrible things seen out the window.

Television news can't be boring or nobody would watch it. This applies to less commercial news services like PBS or the BBC as well. Every story is edited to provide that bong hit, to keep you sitting there in front of the television. Yes, Fox News is vile, but MSNBC or CNN are still delivering the same sort of couch lock.

It's impossible for television to deliver the news in a fully rational, objective way because it has to appeal to the more irrational parts of the human mind, and it has to do so in a way that little imagination and mental effort is required.

I read all my news. While reading news on the internet I rarely play any embedded videos, and usually it's for things like science news; asteroid fly-bys and such.

For a little over a decade our family television has been a commercial free movie player, DVDs and Netflix, that's all it does. I have no exposure to "traditional" cable or broadcast television and I feel much happier and better informed for that. The only television commercials I see are some of the more clever ones sometimes posted by people here on DU as Youtube videos.