Once again, once Tom Tomorrow stops trying to do electoral politics and focuses in on the news industry, he’s right on.? And once again, I have to wonder whether there’s actually any good reason to have 24-hour news networks.? I don’t watch any of them very closely, but the Fox News I watch on occasion reminds me how little I’m missing.? Between federal elections, I see a lot of hourly updates on the latest seventeen-year-old girl or twenty-five-year-old woman who’s gone missing, and during federal elections (that’s most of the time now that we’ve got 24-hour news) I see Barack Obama bowling and endless speculation on what people are thinking rather than any sustained analysis of why they might think it.
I realize I’m becoming a grumpy Neil Postman conservative, but I do notice that, when I’ve been reading newspapers and doing occasional (not obsessive) Internet research instead of watching TV news, I often come out ahead of people who call themselves “news junkies” when it comes to knowing the facts of various matters, and losing AM radio in the last few months has allowed me to think a little longer and a little less frantically about such things.? I still listen to Morning Edition when I commute to work, and I still read Cal Thomas and other Republican pundits in the morning papers, but I’ve listened to a total of 10 minutes of AM radio and have only watched Fox News when I’ve stopped to grab a sandwich, and the absence of the noise is kind of nice.
I’m sure I’ll read up a little more closely on the candidates’ platforms and records when October comes, and I’m sure I’ll show up at Statham Elementary School after work on November 4, but that’s about it this time around.? In the meantime, I’ll concern myself with teaching political thinking through Plato, governing as just a polity as I can in my classroom, reading about the rise of the Roman Republic in Livy, and being a good neighbor to those whose neighbor I am.
I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me sooner.
Hey! There’s actually a Tom Tomorrow that is actually pretty good.
I might be able to enjoy him more if he toned downed the partisanship…but then again that might alienate many of his fans. (That’s not a shot at you because I know you are a equal opportunity kind of guy…like how you liked Rush when Clinton was Prez). 
Well, as I’ve said before (or if I haven’t, I should have), actual policy should be the territory of print media, places where arguments and rebuttals can actually take place. When comic strips and radio shows try to take them on, they’ll necessarily muck things up.
On the other hand, radio is quite good at poking fun of pretense (that was the best Limbaugh stuff in the nineties), and cartoons are quite good at mirroring and calling attention to the absurd. As I’ve said before, these pop-culture-protest forms just work better from below than from above. I know that some folks like their own politics mirrored no matter what, but I do think that certain media work better from certain positions.