Moderately Confused by Jeff Stahler for March 02, 2024

If you don´t follow the news, you uninformed. If you follow the news you are misinformed.

Or you can just play Bobby McFerrin backwards.

Don’t know that I’ve ever been too happy.

No news is good news.

Yeah, that ALWAYS works for me, too. Unfortunately, I need that fix waaay too often!

Excessive happiness is rampant in society.

I go to the grocery store and gas station.

Don’t watch news

You worry about being happy? You’ve got more issues than the news.

I like chocolate. I consume it in moderate amounts. I don’t stuff myself with it.

So it is with cable news. I tolerate one or two hours of it a day. Mostly, it repeats itself anyway. Even the so-called evening news on the traditional channels are 15 minutes of commercials, interspersed with 15- and 30-second sound bites of “in depth news coverage.” The only exception is the “flavor of the week” item that they choose such as pothole management or some other pet peeve.

I get my news from a news feed that provides stories from a number of agencies. This gives me the opportunity to see a story by several different agencies and not just one source. I do have to be careful to “tune into the opposition” routinely otherwise the bot will ignore them and feed me only what it thinks I want to see.

The other advantage to reading the news online as opposed to TV is that I am good at ignoring ads. On TV, we have every Republican candidate in our area of the world telling us how slavishly devoted to Trump he is and that he supports Trump’s plan to close the border. One of them is basing his campaign on showing Joe Biden tripping on the steps of Air Force One. For some of the others, I wonder how much it costs to have your picture taken with Trump? You don’t think Trump does this for free, do you?

The New York Times has the motto: “All The News That’s Fit To Print,” which is a blatant admission of their editorial content: They get to choose what THEY see as fit to print. Cable networks are worse, for them it’s “All The News That Will Get Us Ratings.”

Then read any comments section and get the “real” news.

I’m not happy enough to do that.

not something I ever have to worry about

I’m reminded of the line from the original Ghostbusters, spoken by Winston Zeddemore – “I’ve seen $#!t that’ll turn you white”!