Our Two Minutes Hate is half-an-hour long

I avoid television. I hate it. But my wife and daughtet are junkies. I am exposed to it on a daily basis and I hate it. It's like having a crowd of rude, arrogant jackasses invade my house everyday, and I can't kick them out.

Last few days as I've overheard the evening news, it occurs to me that we really do have our two-minutes hate. Ours, however, is a full thirty minutes long. I hear rantings about how dangerous the world is, how we should fear these people or those people, how our enemies are, how the gummint is going to protect us.

We've nailed it. The world is becoming more and more Orwellian every day and it's making my head spin.

a reply to: incoserv

It is really hard to listen to even local news these days. I feel like it is your daily indoctrination and programming session. I have even had to back off of ATS lately because of all the negativity. It starts affecting my mood after awhile.

I do respect that there was a time when the more informed citizens made a point of reading a newspaper or watching the news for current events, but I don't believe that those sources are all that trustworthy anymore (if indeed they ever were).

I don't think it's particularly conspiratorial (although the virtual elimination of independent broadcast news services definitely leads one to wonder who decides what constitutes truth anymore) but more likely it's just the natural progression of things, with the media businesses reflecting the wants of their customer base rather than the need for unfiltered truth.
Thus we have things like openly biased reporting which is applauded by folks who love to hear what they're already thinking; which is pretty much everybody.

Frankly, it's the information age and information is a commodity like any other.

thats why i have a 1Tb hard drive full of my quintessential movies and tv shows. king of the hill, game of thrones, south park and a plethora of non reality tv. i see no commercials i dont have to see any BS news local or national or global, no dr phils or dr oz's telling me how to live my life and the only right way to live it is to buy their products and whatnot. cable tv is mind numbing garbage. starting to feel like 1984 redux lol

a reply to: incoserv
I can truely say you are not on your own. I very rarely get to watch TV as my wife controls the controller. But coming from the other angle there is a political program in the UK called "Question Time". For the life of me I cannot watch this program as I would end up putting my foot through the screen and as we've just bought a new 50 inch screen TV it would be disasterous.