Stop Watching Cable News

I'm a news junkie. I read around 150-200 news articles and blog posts every day. I listen to NPR pretty much all day long. (Except during Baseball season, when I tend to spend quite a bit more time listening to Cubs games and sports radio.) But a few years ago, I made the conscious decision to stop watching cable news. And I have not yet regretted that decision one bit.
Cable news (or any television news, for that matter) is biased in a way that I don't care to be biased. And I'm not necessarily even talking about the rather obvious political bias of Fox on the political right and MSNBC on the political left. I'm talking about the bias towards stories that involve great video clips or huge death counts. Stories that allow commentators (and every news outlet has those non-journalist now) to declaim the excesses of government, or major corporations, or lazy people that buy houses with too many bathrooms. These types of stories and commentaries grab people's attention, and so all of the major outlets play them, over and over again.
The problem with these types of stories is that they are generally negative and generally have little to do with the day to day lives of the people watching them. At the same time time, the constant repetition is a near perfect mechanism for psychological reinforcement. It plays directly into the hands of the various political and corporate spin doctors. And it simply doesn't allow for any investigation into the nuance of a story.
And all of this doesn't even start to take into account what I have started to call the 9/11 effect. Even though I wasn't anywhere near New York at the time, didn't even personally know anyone killed in the 9/11 attacks, I still feel in some way scarred by it. For weeks afterwards, I was glued to cable news. I watched documentaries about the first responders, documentaries about the world trade center, documentaries about the passengers on the various airplanes. And in seeing them, I somehow came to know them. The tragedy became personal.
Sometimes it's good for tragedy to become personal. It allows you to empathize with those effected, drives your desire to do something about it.
The problem arises when the "tragedy", or at least the thing that the 24 news cycle has decided is the latest "tragedy", isn't. Isn't a tragedy, or isn't something that you can actually so anything about. On a personal level, even on a societal level, all that empathy turns into anger, directed at corporations, organizations, religions, whole classes of people... or even, sometimes, members of congress and nine year old girls who happen to be in the way.
Print and radio, on the other hand, can still elicit empathy. But they usually do so in ways that allow real emotional distance. Distance that often allows for more nuance, more detail, and less damage to your own psyche.