NP: XTC, "Senses Working Overtime"

Kevin Drum makes some good points about cable news, and his argument about the relative size of the Fox News audience, in particular, stands out. This ends up of a piece with earlier comments about how extremely vocal minorities have a bigger effect on the current state of political discourse than the normal "squeaky wheel gets the grease" formulation would have you expect.

In what I would consider a different tack of the same argument, Andrew Sullivan flags a piece that speaks to the utter uselessness of cable news. The point here, I think, is that the availability of individual news items on the Internet obviates the need for some blowhards arguing back and forth over what that news item actually means. Sullivan's comment is that "All I see of it now is on the web, The Daily Show or Colbert. I feel far more informed because of that choice."

This sort of pulls the argument in two different directions at the same time, but they're not really contradictory. People like their filters. Sullivan either wants a smart filter (which is more like a meta-filter, but I'll get to that in a minute), or no filter at all. He'll just drink from the firehose.

Chicago DJ James Van Osdol made an interesting observation that's pretty essential to this while talking about travel writing, saying:

I've made my peace with both the nightly news and the watered-down and politically safe album reviews that Rolling Stone publishes. I treat radio "travel times" as educated guesses, rather than fact. I'm an information consumer, circa 2010, who uses the media as a "gateway drug" to further learning.

Beats listening to NPR 24/7.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell. It used to be the reporter's credo that "if your mother says she loves you, check it out," but now the onus falls on the consumer of that reporter's work. That percentage of people who live on Fox News don't even consider that they're not seeing the entirety of the story. So it comes to these sort of meta-filters like Colbert or the blogosphere to interpret the interpretations of what actually happened, and not everyone realizes that this extra semantic layer (a) exists and (b) has become necessary to cut through the bullshit.

Of course, none of this even addresses the quality of the meta-filters, which, on the Internet at least, can vary wildly, since any jackass with an Internet connection can write a piece on how meta-filters sit on top of filters that sit on top of...hey, where are you going?