This week's newsletter from the Skeptic's Society has a great feature article on why the US TV news media sucks, and how it is harming the country. It's a quick read, well written, with lots of illustrative points. Here's just one example:
On June 9, 2005, as part of its ongoing series of “Security Updates,” CNN airs a special report titled “Keeping Milk Safe.” Over shots of adorable first-graders sipping from their pint cartons, CNN tells viewers that the farm-to-shelf supply chain is vulnerable at every point, beginning with the cow; with great drama, the report emphasizes the terrifying consequences such tampering could have. Nowhere does CNN mention that in the history of the milk industry, no incident of supply-chain tampering has ever been confirmed, due to terrorism or anything else.There are many, many others -- all following the same pattern of grossly misrepresenting reality for no other purpose that to keep the sheep (that would be us) watching. American broadcast news has completely and utterly become at best irrelevant and at worst a danger to the health of our society. Turn it off. Even the worst print or online news sources at least give us the time to pause and contemplate the information we're receiving.
I have this idea called the proportional news, where you only report on types of events with the appropriate frequency that they occur in nature. Of course this is sort of the opposite of how news gets reported, and you'd end up with a lot of reporting on people arriving safely home from soccer practice, the house not burning down after the grease fire is safely quelled… basically a non-funny version of the Onion.
How about a warning label that has to at least state the approximate odds of anything happening on a reported story, sort of like cigarette warnings and ingredient labels?