Why, Exactly, Many Smart People Avoid News

Smart people are important. And they like to think, they like to be challenged, they like to learn new things.

This article explains perfectly why modern news bores the heck out of them, and, sometimes, gets them interested in following, oh, RPGs and other challenging forms of media stimulation instead.

A quote, put perfectly, what a great writer, what great observations:

"...Television news had lost its most basic journalistic instincts in its search for the audience-driven sweet spot, the "emotional center" of the American people. Gone was the mission of using technology to veer out onto the edge of American understanding in order to introduce something fundamentally new into the national debate. The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know. Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn."

Too bad this is the case, because, logically, the smarties are often bored, and tune out. Bad for democracy, if you ask me, I mean, shouldn't a nation's intelligent people be the ones really working for change? Not if they never get interested in change, because they never get interested in politics, because their sources for current events bore them by talking down to them in a tone normally reserved for 6th graders.

(Personally, I know many very intelligent people who do not pay attention to news, or at least not very much, for various reasons. This would explain why. Too damn boringly delivered, it teaches them nothing. I avoid most TV news and read basically nothing but the New York Times, news magazines and many, many online sources- for this reason.)