Trying to fill a 24-hour news cycle requires a lot of bullshit, and Fox, NBC, CNN, CBS, and your favorite news outlet are happy to shovel it.
Stop watching partisan, billionaire-owned news outlets and start consuming international news and non-partisan sites. (Like the AP and Al Jazeera)
Also, watch moderate people on the other side of the political divide. It may annoy you in some ways (like how I can’t listen to Maher when he gets on the topic of Israel), but you’ll learn more and you’ll have more nuanced views, which will benefit you in ways you can’t fully understand until you’re able to think about things in a different way. I’m a leftist, so for me, it’s been Bill Maher, Chris Williamson, or Jon Stewart. More people need to learn what they don’t know that they don’t know.
I started working in local TV news 17 years ago. I figured out pretty quickly there’s enough actual news happening to fill the 24-hour cable channels, but sending out reporters and photographers (maybe even producers) is expensive. It’s much cheaper to just have somebody in the studio blabbering on about a few things and trying to stoke reactions from the audience. It can even build a bigger audience than actual news.
Sports radio and TV is an even bigger (though less damaging) example of this. They have a lot of time to fill when games aren’t on, and a lot of times they just put someone on who will give the dumbest take possible just to get the audience mad and have an argument with someone else in the studio or even let the audience call in to argue.
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