A few ideas in search of a connection.

I don't have cable, so mainly I avoid the wasteland that is 24 hour news channels. I can still remember in the days when I had cable that I would turn to CNN only to flip away in disgust as the hairdos tried to talk and talk...and talk...in a vain attempt to convince the viewer that something was actually happening. That was even before FOX and before CNN turned into nothing but a heavy rotation of crass punditry.

There simply isn't enough news to fill 24 hours.

Or, more closer to truth, there simply isn't enough news Americans care about to fill 24 hours.

We could be vastly better informed about these entities called "foreign countries" than we are. For instance, Canada is in fact another country. Our knowledge of Europe might go beyond which nations have a distaste for deoderant and a love of body hair. We might actually be able to tell whether Kenya is on the west or east coast of Africa and understand some of the complex history involved in the formation of modern African nations. Or that Australia is more than the Outback Steakhouse and in fact isn't entirely like the Mad Max movies depicted it.

Fortunately, I have only been exposed to the ideology factory that is Fox News in small doses -- like in waiting rooms and occasionally at my parents house. However, Fox is only a manifestation of the larger rot that is the cable "news" format. Gasbags with very little dedication to journalism or evenhandedness are brought in to spout the most noxious bile because that's what brings the ratings (or at least the networks hope...it hasn't exactly worked that way for also-rans like msnbc). Racism and homophobia are excused as "edgy." Downright lies are spun, even in misnamed places like "no spin zones," as "entertainment."

Now the Washington Post has done a puff piece on Brit Hume, the one-time ABC journalist who now anchors a Fox News program. Here's the conversion moment, as Hume presumably turns from a "garden variety liberal" -- which the article assumes epitomizes the news corp -- to a conservative:

Hume became more conservative as he saw how much money Congress wasted, and found the coverage of President Reagan "so biased," including the use of the derisive term "trickle-down economics."

When you have a train wreck for a President, it isn't biased to point it out. When a President presides over the greatest health crisis in recent memory and refuses to utter the name "AIDS," then you have a duty as a journalist to report on this seeming ignorance. And for Christ's sake, "trickle-down economics" as a phrase had existed since the 1930's and in economic circles described fairly accurately Reagonomics (although I liked George H.W. Bush's description of it as "voodoo economics" a bit better). Reagan should be happy Bush the Second came along, because it makes him look relatively sane.

Anyway, poor Brit Hume -- a conservative castaway stranded in a sea of liberals -- he's so hard core that, according to Fred Barnes:

"He doesn't go to the Kennedy Center," Barnes says. "He doesn't want to have dinner with Cabinet members or hang around with other people in the press. It's
not normal for a person at the top of the heap in Washington."

So he doesn't like his peers, check. Unlike Larry King, Sam Donaldson, and Tom Brokaw he isn't constantly dragged out to dinner with the Secretary of this or that, check. And finally, he doesn't attend cultural events -- he's a philistine (actually though, much of what the Kennedy Center puts on would qualify for philistine...oh well). Apparently, conservative credentials means you're a misfit loner who hates the Arts.

It still doesn't change the fact that cable news is bad for your health.