One of my most firmly held beliefs is that TV news — cable news, in particular — is terrible for democracy.
Television is a medium that often prioritizes being entertaining over being informative or enlightening or even helpful. What the networks want is to grab your eyeballs, and keep them. Viewers can always turn to the next channel, after all, to watch Friends reruns or some home-improvement show. The problem, of course, is that it's much, much easier to get viewers' interest with drama and outrage than with eat-your-spinach coverage of politics and policy. So drama and outrage are what we get.
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