Longtime So Cal resident Charles Carr is a nationally published journalist and playwright. His award-winning "Southpaw" column has appeared in college textbooks published by Macmillan, St. Martin's Press, Bedford, and others.

Cable news is making us dumber

I hate cable news. It's the worst 6+ hours of my day. I keep it on in my office, droning at low volume as I write. Generally CNN, MSNBC, and FOX. If I'm planning to replace my monitor soon anyway so it doesn't matter if a keyboard gets thrown through it, I'll watch Newsmax or OAN. Here are a few of my pet peeves. See if I've included yours.

First, enough with the emotional vampirism. Cable news spends too much time making arguments by anecdote. Sure, for every point of view there's an intimate personal story which appears to back it up, but arguing from the specific to prove the whole almost always results in lopsided, emotional conclusions that are better left to dramatic TV shows or movies, not supposedly fact-based news.

Provide context. Stop citing statistics without giving us a sense of the entire picture. Sure, a 500 point drop in the Dow is never good, but these days it's only a couple of percentage points. Let's tone down the flaming red 96-point fonts. Also, when it comes to money, yes, a billion dollars is a lot of money but relative to America's $5.5 trillion annual budget... not so much. And when a graph is shown, show the complete graph from top to bottom, not just a small segment of the area where differences appear to be sensational.

Just ask the question. Anchors should stop listing all possible responses to the questions they ask before they finally allow the guest to speak. It's an interview, not a multiple choice test.

You've already got a pretty good job. Stop allowing news anchors to appear in fictional movies and TV shows, often showing the network's logo. Too many people are already having enough trouble separating fact from fiction without intentionally blurring the lines.

A little yelling and screaming is okay. It's often during the more heated exchanges that we see politicians exhibit their true positions as they are forced to break away from tired, scripted lines. It's the job of a good moderator to keep the conversation moving in a fruitful direction, allowing the occasional spark. Also, hosts should never separately interview persons representing opposing points of view. Buy an extra chair, put them next to each other (remove all sharp objects) and make them SPEAK to each. If things are getting somewhere, lock the doors and preempt the next show.

Similarly, the sentence, "I'm sorry, but we've run out of time" is utterly ridiculous  coming from any moderator at a 24-hour news channel. Frustratingly, it all too often seems to be said just as things are starting to get interesting. It's almost as if the networks are terrified that an issue might actually get resolved. Who knows? You might go off and read a good book.

Worst for last: OMG!, it can't all be BREAKING NEWS all the time. The networks are playing with fire as they continually try to convince us that the next five minutes are genuinely more important than the last five were. What are they planning to do when something really important happens? Trumpets? A chorus line? Trot out Walter Cronkite's clone and have him read the teaser? Someone needs to reread "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." They give the game away when a new story comes along (shiny object) and the one that was ABSOLUTELY-THE-MOST-IMPORTANT-THING-IN-THE-WORLD! suddenly disappears without a trace. Like it never happened. Case-in-point: Am I the only person who wondered what happened to the wall-to-wall coverage of Russia's unconscionable attack on Ukraine? Where did it go? Hamas attacked Israel, of course. That conflict is equally important, perhaps even more so, but doesn't the "the existential battle for the future of freedom" which we constantly (and correctly) heard up until the day of the Hamas attack, warrant even the occasional segment? We're not even getting one out of ten as of this writing, nearly two months into the conflict. It makes you wonder: Did they mean it or was it all about just getting eyeballs?

All of this has its roots in the maxim "if it bleeds it leads," coined way back at the end of the nineteenth century by publisher William Randolph Hearst during the Spanish-American War. And maybe it's our own fault for no longer seeming to be able to juggle multiple concepts at once, but it's crass and cynical to purport to be stewards of information vital to the understanding of our world while in reality offering simple, often incorrect, answers to necessarily nuanced issues. This is what Trump and the Trump-alikes understand. And the cable TV news falls for it over and over again.

Of course the solution to all this is both simple and, considering our collective addiction to more, faster, shorter, flashier, agonizingly difficult to correct. Let's start with the obvious: watch less cable news. And make the shows you do watch of a higher quality with less churning over one big story. Scripps News does a pretty good job with that. Bloomberg Originals, if you receive it, airs lots of excellent, varied stories and mini-documentaries. If you just like having the TV on during the day, consider CSPAN, which eschews most of the posturing and framing. And read more of your news, a medium in which stories are generally more in-depth and more intelligently written.

Perhaps most importantly, it's not just cable news viewers who are being affected. Even persons who don't watch a lot of it are indirectly influenced by the breathless OCD-like behavior the networks along with social media are establishing as a baseline for social discourse, and it makes all of us that much dumber in the process. We would all be better off stepping back and allowing our nation's decision-making process more room to breathe.

And that's just smart.