RE: Why does the news want so much theatre?

|I dunno...I read War and Peace once. I dunno if that had any conflict in it, |because it was so boring that I could barely get through it.
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|I'm sure I've read plenty of books without conflict in them. Most of them were |on computers. :P

Simply because you don't know what the conflict is in a book doesn't mean it has no conflict :) But I congratulate you on getting through that monster. I read Atlas Shrugged once... parts of it were interesting but Rand made it more about explaining her philosophy than leaving it to the reader to figure out.

But I'm betting you didn't choose to read War and Peace, did you? Was that for a class or something like that?

We do only see what is on the television or on the Internet or in a newspaper -- but it's not the politicians who decide on what gets on tv. Not many people sit down and watch C-SPAN on a regular basis.

I think that we -- meaning all people -- need to acknowledge that our news is skewed by perception and bias and we need to learn to watch the news with that in mind. Critical thinking is something that should be taught at every level of education because, you know what? I don't think it is right now and we're merely putting out sheep for the machine to keep going.

But I'm betting you didn't choose to read War and Peace, did you? Was that for a class or something like that?

Sadly no, it was my choice. It was horrible. So long and boring. At the end I had no idea what it was about, because it was so long and boring. Like one of those movies where at the end you have no idea what you just watched and can't say anything really about it, because it's like it was just a long drone.

I think that we -- meaning all people -- need to acknowledge that our news is skewed by perception and bias and we need to learn to watch the news with that in mind. Critical thinking is something that should be taught at every level of education because, you know what? I don't think it is right now and we're merely putting out sheep for the machine to keep going.

Yeah...you're right.

One thing I've been hoping for a while with the internet is that we'll get a lot more choice in who we watch and what we get for the news. It's a little better than it was. Now I can watch news from multiple sources one after the other and skip the stories I don't want to hear about, but it's still a bit hard, because they don't want people to be able to watch every story from the day instantly on YouTube or wherever, because the advertising isn't there fully yet, so they don't get as much.