Gotta be honest:
I’m very glad I don’t have access to cable news right now. Inordinately thrilled, in fact. Life is just so much better when you can control and adjust your punditry intake.
For a while I was worried that I just didn’t care about the Massachusetts Senate race like I used to care about elections, but that’s not true. I’m following a few people on Tumblr and on Twitter as they deliver updates (@fivethirtyeight, in particular) and watching the results stream in at nytimes.com. I’m invested in the results, have numerous opinions on the matter, and theories on the future of health care reform. But I’m at ease. I don’t feel anxious, don’t feel this compulsive need to drink hard liquor every time I hear a pundit shouting, don’t want to throw myself off the balcony. From what I can tell, cable news is doing its standard thing where it develops a narrative about this being: a) the end of the world; or b) the new dawn — depending on your perspective, of course.
Canceling cable was great. Long live new media.
This is pretty much where I am, too, though it might have something to do with this election taking place during the thick of college basketball season, when pretty much every non-college basketball related thing I do falls under the occasionally cross-pollinating categories of “drinking” and “video games.” But the effect is the same: I haven’t seen a minute of cable news today, and whatever angst I might have felt at the result of the election is made all the easier by knowing that I’m currently missing out on Chris Matthews yelling at Rachel Maddow, and vice versa. It feels good.
