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The media has enacted some genius decisions. Long ago when news was a small portion of what was on television, it was important to get the importance of the news across as efficiently as possible. When news became its own channel with 24 hours to fill, they needed to find more news so for a short time in-depth reporting and investigations were the norm. You could find hour long works on single topics that were in the news at the time.

But once there were competing news networks survival became more about ratings and so ad revenue than journalism. So news agencies studied what viewers most responded to -- sound bytes, quick snippets of information. Thus was born 24-hour Headline News. Journalism took a hit.

And as time goes on, this trend just solidified. They looked more into what people wanted to watch -- and that quickly became theatrical and exciting in nature -- pundits and fearmongering. It wasn't really until talking heads because popular on television that the mass polarization really took off. Everything gets boring if we all agree to disagree. So Journalism took another hit.

The politicians have all realized that in the modern world you can't just provide good plans or reasons not to vote for the other guy. You've got to play into that polarization. If your voters don't believe the world will end if your opponent is elected, then that's a small margin of votes you might lose but you can't live without.

The solution? Stop watching. If their ratings tank and they push for more and more of this nonsense and more people stop watching, they'll either wither and die or fix themselves. It's going to take Fox News or MSNBC or CNN tanking for someone to realize this is not the way to run the news on television. But at the same time, someone has to put up a real news station again. For a time, CNN did a great job of this -- around the early 1990s -- but they're really not much better than anyone else at this point.

If you watch any of these channels for the screaming heads and irate fury, understand it is not genuine. Understand that there are other places to find irate fury that are genuine and stand for something. They air it on C-SPAN -- it's called the US Congress and the British House of Commons. Watch them instead. Stand for something with them. The hollow fury of pundits and facades are comparatively weak.

If you watch any of these channels for the attractiveness of their mannequin speakers, understand that their beauty is as fleeting as their names and personas. But everyone knows William Cronkhite. Understand these people are hired and praised and fired and berated by their appearance. Whether or not they have any integrity is at best an afterthought.

If you watch any of these channels to find any idea of what the external reality is, understand that reality is not so arbitrarily defined such that it may be captured in a sound byte, a single fleeting picture, video clip, or lofted opinion. Reality are those things we find ourselves -- not those things we are shown, told of, or given.

If you watch any of these channels, I wish, I hope, I implore you to stop. The course they drive holds a destination I cannot stand to enter.