The Cable Effect
I got to the office a bit before 9AM today and within 20 minutes I felt incredibly agitated. I was pissed off. I also had a feeling of despair about the prospects for health reform. I was mad, and I also felt helpless. What was wrong? Was it just a bad case of the Mondays? Regrets for being back in the cubicle after so many weeks on the road?
Then it hit me. I wasn’t unplugged by any means over the past three weeks. I kept blogging and kept reading blogs. I read the newspapers and I even watched the news on television. But what I watched was CNN International and BBC World News. There’s a world of difference between those networks and even the relatively staid domestic version of CNN. And at the office they had the sound on for Fox News. Bill Hemmer & co. were spinning half-truths, deceptions, and outright falsehoods at a staggering rate. Meanwhile you could see frenetic action on MSNBC and CNN and if I felt like really making myself dizzy could even follow the action on closed caption.
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Matthew Yglesias The Cable Effect
I agree with him! I noticed it last week, we were in Canada and my news was CBC and The Globe and Mail. I was reading more of the paper, and the news was not a bunch of URGENT BREAKING NEWS and back and forth 'this side', now 'that side'. There was actually discussion of stuff.
Of course, I was busy doing other stuff, so my daily news diet was considerably less, but the freaky quotient was missing.
I do remember an article asking wtf is wrong with Americans getting pissed at Obama for the IOC Committee's voting. They talked about the messed up, secret voting and how it should be reformed. I guess in the States all there was was stupid yelling about how Obama diminished America and got his ass spanked. So dumb.


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