Kill TV News

I'd like to issue a challenge for my lefty blogger brethren: no TV news for a month. Nothing. Nada. Rien. Who's with me? It might seem difficult at first, but I don't see why this wouldn't be the easiest thing in the world. After all, we're liberals! When we don't like something, we boycott it. Why have we taken the complete opposite approach with TV news, watching it almost religiously, hoping to harvest the latest media scandal from Wolf Blitzer, Tweety, Joe Scarborough, Brit Hume, and on and on and on and on? Just stop watching! If it feels good after a month, try another month. Then try forever!

The truth is we don't need to watch TV news. We don't need them, they need us. We get virtually nothing from them, while they get precisely what they want from us. They get ratings, ad dollars, prestige, legitamacy and we get...mad. Just stop watching. The audiences for those cable news broadcasts aren't very big. The 500,000 of us (man, that's a lot) who log on to DailyKos every single day would make an enormous impact on ratings if we stopped watching altogether. Let's hit them where it hurts.

We don't need to watch speeches - we can read the transcript the next day. We don't need to watch the Sunday morning shows - if anyone says anything slightly interesting/controversial, it'll get reported. What about the context, you ask? Screw the context. Elections are won and lost out of context. It might do us some good to quit arguing that what Joe and Jane Sixpack heard at the watercooler is wrong because they didn't hear the context. And we certainly, absolutely, positively never have to watch CNN, Fox News, MSNBC ever again, for any reason whatsoever. We can get our news from newspapers, blogs, radio and Internet newswires. The non-stop speculation and "loaded questioning" that goes on during 23 out of 24 hours on the major cable news networks is utterly worthless tripe that isn't worth a minute of our time.

There is not one reason someone could come up with to keep watching television news that is not ultimately subordinate to the benifits of bringing those bastards to their knees via a good old fashioned boycott. Media Matters is handling the watchdog thing just fine. The rest of us really don't need to add to the problem by tuning in. Let's put Ann Coulter out of work. Stop watching TV news.

Crossposted at DailyKos.