Matthew Yglesias writes a lot, nearly every day. It comes as no surprise then that he's a fairly quotable guy at least once a week.
...The three [daytime cable news] networks combined have an aggregate daytime audience of roughly zero. But even though the audience, looked at nationally, amounts to [a] rounding error the networks are hugely popular among the tiny number of people who work in professional politics. Just like traders have CNBC and Bloomberg on in their offices, political operatives are constantly tuned in to what's happening on cable news.
The result is a really bizarre hothouse scenario in which people are basically watching . . . well . . . nothing, but they're riveted to it. How things "play" on cable news is considered fairly important even though no persuadable voters are watching it.
And cable news' hyper-agitated style starts to infect everyone's frame of mind, making it extremely difficult for everyone to forget that the networks have huge incentives to massively and systematically overstate the significance of everything that happens.
We've unsubscribed from cable TV and have no service to replace it; we don't hate TV, we just recognize that we weren't watching any for the last several months (what with 2 jobs + a 1-year-old), so why pay a monthly fee for it?
Now and then I miss a couple of shows, or live baseball. I do not miss the cable news networks one bit.
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