But just like your friends are glued to watching the corporate media, there's too many people who do the same and this is why the media is airing the stochastic terrorism 24/7.
As I wrote in the essay below, the goal of covering these types of events is to keep the populace scared with the government's propaganda.
I read an article last night where Morley Safer was told by a general when he was covering the Vietnam war that the goal of the government is to lie to the media and that they are to repeat the lies.
And after the telecommunications act where we are down to 6 companies owning all the MSM, we have seen it gotten worse.
The press is basically stenographers for our government.
And remember during the Iraq war when it came on that the government was sending military officers to give the propaganda of how the war was going and what the goals were.
It's too bad that people don't understand this fact.

and in co$t-cutting, unplugged the DVR and the boxes from DirecTV and sent them home. So when I see TV images, especially those background graphics now, they are shocking. Even that stupid moving banner on TYT is disturbing to me. Too much sleight-of-hand or ear or eye. Rarely read the "news" except local stuff, trying to read below the spin. Not that FB is an answer, but there are groups trying to deconstruct and reconstruct events in group work, a poor substitute for old-timey good journalism which was often slanted but with caveats of the slant.

It is much nicer this way. I became low-level alarmed at the volume of bark popping off my oak trees (danger signal?) but it appears to be a normal healthy sign that the trees are increasing in girth, therefore taking into solid more CO2. So there.

We discussed it at length, yesterday. We can't do it anymore. What does teevee offer? Fear, consumerism, and distraction. I'm no longer interested. I'm wasting my time on my ass. I can get any info I want on the net. Teevee is over for me.

edited for stupid typo

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea pointed this out in their 1975 book Illuminatus! (that's a pdf of the entire book BTW!)

That calmed me a little, so I set out the toast and coffee and fetched in the New York Times from the hallway. I turned the radio to WBAI and caught some good Vivaldi, sat down, grabbed a piece of toast and started skimming the first page.

Then I saw the fnords.

The feature story involved another of the endless squabbles between Russia and the U.S. in the UN General Assembly, and after each direct quote from the Russian delegate I read a quite distinct "Fnord!" The second lead was about a debate in Congress on getting the troops out of Costa Rica; every argument presented by Senator Bacon was followed by another "Fnord!" At the bottom of the page was a Times depth-type study of the growing pollution problem and the increasing use of gas masks among New Yorkers; the most distressing chemical facts were interpolated with more "Fnords."

Suddenly I saw Hagbard's eyes burning into me and heard his voice: "Your heart will remain calm. Your adrenalin gland will remain calm. Calm, all-over calm. You will not panic. You will look at the fnord and see it. You will not evade it or black it out. You will stay calm and face it." And further back, way back: my first-grade teacher writing FNORD on the blackboard, while a wheel with a spiral design turned and turned on his desk, turned and turned, and his voice droned on,

IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T
SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . .

I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords.

I remember as a kid in the 1970s seeing this trilogy on all the drugstore bookshelves in Westchester where I grew up, and looking back it kind of shocks me that this sort of thing was so mainstream.

The back story on the book is that the authors were the letters editors for Playboy in the 1960s, right after all the assassinations. People would write in with all the conspiracy theories, and they just threw them all in a box. When they left Playboy, they decided to write a book about what the world would be like if all these theories were true simultaneously. The results were both hilarious and prescient.

So you won't notice what is going on

Combination of Fear and Happiness

The annual big confab for the oligarchs at Davos

Since the World Economic Forum (WEF) was founded in 1971, its annual meeting in Davos has served as a useful indicator of the global economic zeitgeist. These conferences, which last a few days in late January, bring together corporate executives, senior politicians, representatives of NGOs and a sprinkling of concerned celebrities to address the main issues confronting the global economy and the decision-makers tasked with looking after it.

In the 1970s, when the WEF was still known as the ‘European Management Forum’, its main concern was slumping productivity growth in Europe. In the 1980s, it became preoccupied with market deregulation. In the 1990s, innovation and the internet came to the fore, and by the early 2000s, with the global economy humming, it began to admit a range of more ‘social’ concerns, alongside the obvious post-9/11 security anxiety. For the five years after the banking meltdown of 2008, Davos meetings were primarily concerned with how to get the old show back on the road

The oligarchs know there are finite resources, and they have known for some time that the "globe" of "globalization" does not exist and have gone to this new tactic

At the 2014 meeting, rubbing shoulders with the billionaires, pop stars and presidents was a less likely attendee: a Buddhist monk. Every morning, before the conference proceedings began, delegates had the opportunity to meditate with the monk and learn relaxation techniques. ‘You are not the slave of your thoughts’, the man in red and yellow robes, clutching an iPad, informed his audience. ‘One way is to just gaze at them . . . like a shepherd sitting above a meadow watching the sheep’. A few hundred thoughts of stock portfolios and illicit gifts for secretaries back home most likely meandered their way across the mental pastures of his audience.

And participants were equipped with electronic device to give them happiness measurements during the day

I guess that when you are on a path to destroy the earth for your own gains, you need to be diverted. And us, the masses, need to be diverted as well.

So not just fear, but fear + happy is delivered by the media

The Happiness Industry: How Corporations Want to Manage Your Mind

And will probably stop my cable TV soon altogether as i rarely watch anything on it..much less news. I would watch BBC world except it is only offered on a more expensive level.

The enemy is corruption of our government and legalized bribery of our legislators. (campaign contributions, lobbying and revolving doors) It is the root of almost all our issues. If we keep going after the issues we are caught in a frustrating loop of uselessness. We have to kill the root.

Our corporate media is but one manifestation of the corruption of our government.

I typically would record Schultz, Ratigan & Rachel (sometimes Lawrence & Hayes) and listen while I did chores. Ever since they purged their slightly progressive lineup & started broadcasting wall to wall Trump I can't stomach it. I may start using Telemundo/Univision and/or BBC but right now it's just silence for me.