I'm Swearing Off 24 Hour Media

We're weird. I'm not talking about Democrats or Republicans, I'm talking about people who consume too much cable news. The 24 hour news cycle, the constant spin, the "crisis style" reporting we watch, it effects our very view of society and the world we live in. It makes us believe weird things, things that aren't true. It makes us "over-interpret" things that are true, and perhaps read too far in them. More than anything, it makes us less and less capable to talk to the general population about things that matter, because our interpretation of reality is not the same as their's.

If you watch too much cable news, you start to believe the best of your own, and the worst of others. Republicans are irrational racists who want to turn over our country to corporations and Christian idealogical loonies, make women get back in the kitchen bare-foot and pregnant, and want every psychopath in America to have a gun. Democrats want to hand money out on the streets to lazy people, force your daughter to have an abortion, force your son to have a gay marriage, close your church, make you house members of ISIS, and elected a non-citizen who might be a terrorist to be our President. No one rationally says they believe these things, but when you listen to what many politically active, cable news driven voters say, it's clear that it's internalized in them. When you walk the streets of New York right now, you see people going about their lives, living happily and not fearfully. When you watch cable news, everyone is on some state of high alert, scared to death that ISIS is in every alley way and subway car. Every "crisis" in Washington is proof of how our government doesn't work, our country is screwed, and the end times are near if we don't win that next election.

I guess at 32, I'm just tired of living in a reality that doesn't really exist. We live in a great country where most things work every day. Our people usually get along, our cops, fire fighters, sanitation workers, and civil servants go to work, do their job, and try to help people. Our roads get driven on, our schools teach, and our hospitals heal. People go to work, then come home and watch sitcoms, have dinner with their families, maybe have a few nights a week they go out and get entertained, and try to live happy lives. More people are decent, caring individuals than not.

I'm not trying to lay all of the blame at the feet of the 24 hour cable news channels, or all at the feet of the tens of thousands of communications professionals in Washington and their talking points and messages, or at the feet of the public. It's a mix how we got here. Our political culture though is fairly toxic. Are there problems? Sure. Can we have clear-cut views on right and wrong in our political debates? Yes. I guess for me, it's just become much. The America that most of the public lives in, the America that is in front of me when I go out, is not nearly as ineffective, divisive, or in crisis as the one we debate about, see on TV, and imagine in our political debates. I want to live in that real America.

This is not to say that I'm not going to watch any political TV, I am. I'm just not going to have it on all day. Not MSNBC, not FOX, not even Bloomberg, as much as I love them. It needs to stay off most of the day. Part of the reason I think our grandparents generation was so capable of compromise and negotiation was their news came once in the morning and once at night, and in between they lived real lives. I'm never going to live in that world, but I'll at least try to de-compress the world the 24 hour news cycle gives us, as best I can.