May I be a wee bit superpretentious for a moment and quote myself? (Hey, if Madonna can do it…) This is from my New Year’s Eve post a couple of weeks ago, in which I suggest various ways you can alleviate feelings of loneliness, helplessness, alienation and depression:

Turn off fucking CNN. No, wait…

TURN OFF FUCKING CNN!!!

And that goes for any other 24-hour news network, too. News networks are toxic, they are liars, they are distorters, they are fearmongers, they are devoted to maintaining the status quo of you not knowing what’s really going on, they are nothing but mechanisms for getting you to consume more and watch more and fear more and feel more inadequate and more helpless and more hopeless. And they make you stupider! If you think you’re more informed by watching CNN or having it on in the background of your life you are sorely mistaken and have drunk their koolaid and seriously need to detoxify.
No, seriously.
Stop watching for a week and I absolutely guarantee you’ll feel so much better. You’ll feel better able to make yourself healthier, you’ll feel better able to meet the indignities of modern urban life head-on, you’ll be untethered from a constant feeling of dread about the events of the world unfolding.

So it’s been, what, ten weeks I’ve lived without CNN? I quit the day before Champ and I left for India (thank u India) and have been fairly pure in my abstinence. Oh, sure, at the gym I’ll occasionally be privy to the caption crawl on the televisions in the cardio area but, fortunately, my sight isn’t terrific when there’s sweat in my eyes. There’ve been a couple of other slip-ups, too, but I’ll get to those in a mo.

What I want to tell you is that quitting CNN — and all cable television news networks — is probably the single most significant improvement I’ve made to my life in the last five years. Because I read newspapers online, I am no less-informed than I would be if I watched CNN. I do not need to be apprised, every twenty minutes, of “startling new developments” in whatever natural disaster is befalling the United States. I do not need to be apprised, every twenty minutes, of every celebrity misdeed. I do not need trivia presented as news and I do not need soundbites presented as reportage.

Watch with a critical eye a typical CNN story. There will be no more than three pieces of information presented because you are deemed incapable of processing any more than that. Two of those informational tidbits will be facts of which you are already well aware. This functions to reassure you that you’re knowledgeable, worldly and informed. The third “fact” is really the only new information presented and, seriously, can only one fact be enough to describe a news story?

Better and more articulate critics than I can tell you that soundbites are the dominant form of informational exchange over the news networks and that these soundbites will spin and distort and obfuscate the real story. I don’t need to tell you that because, like the typical CNN story, you already know that.

You also already know that it’s necessary for the news networks to never field stories critical of their advertisers, so don’t look for stories on Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Banks or, fuck, Big Anything. (When was the last time Dr. Sanjay Gupta criticized Big Pharma or Big Insurance? When was the first?) Here’s another thing you know: there’s a subtle reinforcement of your status quo on news networks. For every five stories in which YOUR FAMILY IS AT RISK, there’s a heartwarming item intended to tell you that, despite the terrifying world outside your living room, your family is just like every other family, doing family things in your homogeneous, family way.

And you also know that any news item with a question slug — “Are Retailers Gouging You?” — no matter how important that question might be, you absolutely — guaranteed! — will not receive an answer to that question in the story.

Take, for example, recent story repeated, ad infinitum, on Canadian news networks: a New Brunswick school team’s van crashed on an icy highway this past weekend and eight people were killed. This is an awful, awful story, and my heart goes out to the families of those who died. But I do not need to hear about it every twenty minutes and I do not need to see footage or hear statements from grieving families in order to understand how utterly tragic this story is. I do not need to be told that the families were waiting, five minutes away from the crash site, to understand the cruel twists of events in this world.

As heartbreakingly tragic as this story is, it’s really no more tragic than, say, a couple losing a baby in childbirth in New Jersey. And if you think it is, please try finding the words to tell that to the New Jersey couple. We’re not hearing about their very private grief. Nor do we hear about the grief of families mourning the death of their cancer-stricken patriarch. And I seriously don’t want to hear about the degree to which the New Brunswick families are grieving. It simply does not add, in any way, to the story. Again, my condolences to those families and apologies for using this particular story about their tragedy to illustrate a more general point.

And this, as you might have already guessed, was one of the slip-ups I mentioned earlier. I wasn’t being vigilant and we accidentally left CTV NewsNet on in the background while we prepared lunch on Sunday. Our sadness markedly grew, our fear of highway driving increased and, more than anything, our loathing for the tactics of the news networks went from zero to sixty in five seconds. Fuming.

There are hundreds — thousands! — of examples to share but… you already know them. News networks keep you glued to their stream by couching their fare in reassuring, heartwarming stuff that reinforces the way of life you’ve chosen for yourself, then frightens you by telling you the life you’ve chosen for yourself is under constant threat, from within and without, and, oh, by the way? The only escape? Is to buy these products from our fine advertisers.

But you already know that. Of what you might need reminding, though, is that you can turn it off completely and still lead a very informed and very much happier, less-stressed and more-confident life.