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After two months without blogging, I break my silence to complain about... cable news. (posted 03 Jun 2011)

I don’t normally watch TV.

I’ve been spending time with my family, though, and they all watch TV. Both my parents and my grandma leave the TV on all day. A lot of that time is on news networks: Fox News for my parents, CNN for my grandma.

Am I the only one that finds news networks completely inane?

I mean, I try to keep track of the news, but I tend to read it online, through reddit and twitter. I heard about the Middle East protests/revolutions before a lot of other people, for example.

On this old-fangle teevee, though, it feels like the news is fake. I mean sure, they do report news, but that’s only like 10% of it. The rest of it is canned outrage from various “personalities,” brain-dead ideologues “debating the issues” (don’t forget that it’s “both sides”), and then acting like they’re hip with today’s kids by reading off terrible comments via Facebook and Twitter.

I think part of my issue is that I’m used to being able to mentally filter content when reading. For example, CNN reported on Jack Kevorkian’s death. If I had ran across anything about this event on Reddit, I could’ve just read the headline and moved on. On CNN, however, I was basically stuck listening to them reminding us about who he was, why he was controversial, and what stupid people on the internet think about him.

Here’s something I’d be interested in, though:

Cable TV has closed captioning, right? So, why not scrape the captions (my understanding is that they’re ASCII-encoded) to build up a web page linking to relevant articles? That way, I can get my CNN while being able to filter content as I normally do. Plus, tag clouds would be an interesting way to compare the contents of different networks (such as CNN vs. Fox News).

Friends:

ALL THE BLOGPOSTS STANDING IN THE LINE FOR THE BATHROOM: