A Week Without News -- Day Two Cont'd.

I'm getting better at this thing. Now that I'm on guard, I've found it fairly easy to "not make eye contact" with the headlines. I know my way around my "My Yahoo!" page, so I know precisely where to look and where not to look. Yes, I feel a little silly (borderline OCD, in fact) making this much of an effort to prove a point I already believe. Yet as I said previously, this exercise is as much of a protest as it is an exercise designed to test my own will and conviction. If I'm successful, my next move will be to avoid TV for a month (I'll make an exception for rented movies, but I might insist they be classic movies and not the rash of Hollywood's less-than-lasting moments).

I think what I'm finding here is there's a fine line between harmless entertainment and vacuous junk, informative reporting and editorial garbage. And what I've always known about my dislike for the media is that it's quite difficult to separate the good from the bad and illustrate what's valid and what's grossly inappropriate. Sure, some news is just so blatantly sick and wrong, it's not even worth pointing out. But it's the less-obvious stuff that I find most frightening, because it's the kind of thing that floats below the radar and cleverly influences us without notice. I know -- here comes the conspiracy theory, right? No, because the toughest part about all of this is there isn't just one perpetrator behind all the unethical reporting, so you can't just single out an organization.

In American politics, it always comes back to the president. In football, the quarterback is usually the hero or villain. In baseball, you either knock in the winning run or you're the pitcher who gives it up. The media doesn't offer that level of black-and-white clarity. And ever since the New York Times scandal of a few years back, nothing is sacred and no one is immune to shoddy journalism. I recognize that I often generalize in my rants, and I don't really dig generalizations at all. So about the best I can do is to simply call out the sins as I find them, rather than merely piss all over the industry without concern for the few folks who actually adhere to a higher standard of journalism.

It's late, and I'm starting to cover old ground here.