Thought of the Day

I concluded quite a while ago that the purpose of the news is no longer to inform you about what's going on. The purpose of the news seems to be to mislead people and make life seem entirely more dangerous than it actually is. It's all scare tactics. I'm paranoid by nature so it's becoming increasingly more difficult for me to watch the news, especially the local news. International news programs don't bother me as much because at least I know they'll be reporting on dangerous things occurring in places too far away to make me lose sleep at night. But I usually avoid local news broadcasts in fear of seeing a report about a local male serial rapist whose victims are all young, blonde, freckled men with tattoos. Or a new medical study which unveils that mint-flavored floss actually damages your teeth. Or a sleep study that has found a link between sleeping on your side and the development of aneurisms. I tend to think all of those studies that conclude seemingly innocuous things are actually life-threatening are made up by mischievous scientists and researchers who couldn't get enough funding for legitimate experimental pursuits so they made up ridiculous reports to make their jobs more interesting. Of course, distracting people with scare tactics is the mainstream media's modus operandi. It's good for business. As long as people are preoccupied with fear they won't start questioning the ethics of the media conglomerates who hand-feed them bogus, partial journalism. The last thing Viacom, News Corporation, and Time Warner want is to have a well-informed public who might start questioning the socioeconomic and political agenda of said news sources. I usually turn to alternative sources when I want to know about important issues, or satirists like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Unlike "real" political pundits, at least it's explicitly known Colbert and Stewart are caricatures.