One of my friends limits his TV news-watching to 45 minutes a day. Anything after that is repetition, and it makes his nose ache.
The problem is that the all-news stations have 24 hours to fill with blabber. The news hosts repeat their blabber over and over, often interviewing one another or running clips from preceding programs. Rachel Maddow often starts her show with a 15-minute anecdote about the fall of Sumer. Amy Goodman can always find a genocide--if there is no current genocide (unlikely), she will describe one from the last century.
News hosts have tough jobs, hour after hour of empty time to fill with superficial comments. Imagine doing that five days a week. It takes skills: the ability to repeat genuine astonishment and outrage, the knack of seeming fairness, physical strength in the buttocks needed to sit all day long. These are talking heads behind desks, and in most cases we never see them standing. For all we know, they have short, bowed legs.
I control my time by ending my watching the moment the host says something truly ignorant, maybe a quote from a rap singer. Or it might be something to wake up his slumbering panel, something along the lines of "Now the President has told us that he is highly intelligent. Shouldn't we, in fairness, consider that he may be telling the truth?"
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