Robert Ringer: On the TV Wagon Again

I decided to come clean and admit that late last October I made the decision to get back on the TV wagon again right after the November 6 election. It was the second time over the past three-plus decades that I made such a decision. During the Jimmy Carter era, I had also given my brain cells a chance to get sober by striking TV news from my life, cold turkey.

I credit Dr. Andrew Weil with both of my decisions. Weil said that if you refrain from turning on the television set for a week or two at a time, it will dramatically reduce your stress. Since I’ve had considerable firsthand experience trying it, I can assure you he was right.

My current abstinence includes the once last refuge of serious television journalism, Fox News. It’s very sad what has happened to Fox over the years. The network that started out as a genuine alternative to America’s socialist media is but a shadow of its former self.

Much of the airtime at Fox is now filled with boring or irrelevant shows, anchors who are careful not to rock the boat (You do remember Glenn Beck and Judge Napolitano, don’t you?), guests who religiously cling to establishment talking points, and automaton contributors whose chief function is to act as sleeping aids for bleary-eyed viewers.

In a spirit of full disclosure, I feel obliged to admit that I’m not 100 percent on the wagon. I do still catch a few minutes of Fox here and there, but more often than not I go several days at a time without subjecting myself to any TV-brewed “news” at all.

(No, I did not watch a single minute of the Duplicitous Despot’s state-of-the-propaganda address. But I did watch Marco Rubio’s rebuttal, and when he began by congratulating Barack Obama “on the start of his second term,” I knew it was going to be a really bad presentation — but not nearly as bad as it turned out to be.)

In case you’ve been contemplating mimicking “Chief” Bromden, the giant Indian in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (who threw a sink through a window and escaped from the insane asylum, leaving fellow inmate Jack Nicholson behind), but are concerned about whether you could handle the withdrawal symptoms, I have good news for you: Cutting back on Fox by 95 percent has been the most cathartic experience of my life. I now have more time to pick and choose from genuine news sources on the Internet, without being subjected to all the silly stuff that is the heart and soul of television programming.

That’s right, I no longer waste valuable time being inundated with “culture-warrior” nonsense, Sean Hannity’s welcoming RINOs to his show night in and night out, or Megyn Kelly’s shrieking at the camera about a horse stuck in a mud hole in Amarillo or a cocker spaniel that found his way back to his home in Tulsa after suffering a three-year bout with amnesia.

If I’m in a mood to get a quick and heavy dose of truth, I listen to Mark Levin on the radio. I don’t give a damn what the purist libertarian crowd says about Levin, at least he has the guts to call the far left a gang of liars, Marxists, and frauds — i.e., the guts to tell the truth. Sure, it’s unfortunate that he doesn’t understand Ron Paul — or libertarians in general — but he does understand the difference between liberty and tyranny, and the number of media commentators who share that understanding is shrinking daily.

This past Sunday, I took a break from my writing, picked up the remote and unthinkingly clicked channel 32 — Fox News. Yikes! Fair-and-balanced Chris Wallace’s guest on Fox News Sunday was none other than the ever hot, aging queen of political theater, Nancy Pelosi. It was fortunate that I caught the last couple of minutes of Wallace’s interview with Pelosi, because it reminded me just how good it feels not to be hitting myself over the head with the “fair and balanced” hammer day in and day out.

As I listened to the former House speaker close out the interview with the usual left-wing babble about the need for the rich to pay their fair share, I once again pondered the question about nefarious Nancy: Is she truly a bad human being or is she simply an idiot? And, as always, I came down on the side of “a great deal of both.”

The coup de grace came when, seconds after the Pelosi interview ended, Chris Wallace, barely able to contain his excitement, announced that “coming up next” was the one and only John McCain. No, I’m not kidding — Nancy Pelosi, followed by Mush McCain, on one of Fox News’ premier shows! With a lineup like that, who needs NBC’s Meet the Press? It reminded me once again why I had gotten on the wagon and elected to get my news online.

As our outlaw government continues to ignore the Constitution, kill American citizens at will, move ever more rapidly toward banning all guns, and borrow and print the country into financial oblivion, most Americans remain stubbornly focused on college and professional sports, let’s-pretend TV shows, and the latest electronic gadgets. With their soma-saturated brains, they are not able to comprehend that their remaining liberty is rapidly evaporating from their lives.

Time is running short for Americans to break through their denial bubble and realize that the vast majority of nail-biting issues that dominate the airwaves are nothing more than purposeful distractions — distractions intended to take their minds off their loss of liberty, their children’s and grandchildren’s inherited indebtedness, and their rapidly sinking financial prospects.

The most important news issue of the day is that we are moving headlong toward a showdown between liberty and tyranny, and you won’t hear anything about that on TV — not even from Fox News.

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Copyright © 2013 Robert Ringer
ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author and host of the highly acclaimed Liberty Education Interview Series, which features interviews with top political, economic, and social leaders. He has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, The Lars Larson Show, ABC Nightline, and The Charlie Rose Show, and has been the subject of feature articles in such major publications as Time, People, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Barron's, and The New York Times.

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Comment:

The Tortoise expresses my sentiments cogently.  Here, here.