Dave Winer and I were talking about journalism, politics and the upcoming Bloggercon session I’ll be leading, and I mentioned to him that I have not regularly watched television news in 20 years. He seemed more than a little shocked by that statement and suggested it required disclosure, so here it is: It’s true, I don’t watch TV news on any regular basis, never have. From my teens on I got my news from newspapers and magazines; once the Web came along that became another center for my personal information flow. Our house has only one TV and we don’t even get cable.
Of course I turn the TV on for earthquakes and terrorist attacks; of course I watch the presidential debates, and the TV is on for election night. When I’m traveling I’ll sometimes turn on the hotel TV for a taste of the cable news networks and the local broadcasts. That’s about it. For me, TV simply feels like an inefficient way to learn what’s happening in the world; it takes too much time to tell you too little, and it’s pretty much hopeless when it comes to any subject of any abstraction or complexity, particularly economics.
So there it is. I completely understand that this information diet seems alien to most people and marks me as peculiar and even un-American. Oh well. And I know that by not watching much TV I’m disconnected from the central arena in which our politics are (temporarily, I believe) forged. But I will not hand over the hours of my life to a medium I neither trust nor enjoy.
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