Perils of pundit TV

The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf zeroes in on why cable news broadcasts (particularly the political variety) are bad for you:

"Yes, I know, television is a very popular medium (mostly because it demands so little from its audience). But it is the worst way to engage politics in America. Compared to reading it is a wildly inefficient time suck. The format itself often strips the issue at hand of all nuance. It rewards demagoguery, and the host's words disappear into the ether so fast that inaccuracies slip easily past and are seldom corrected for the people misled by them. Often as not, its producers and writers just take insights from the written medium and dumb them down."

"I suspect that if politics on television were to magically disappear tomorrow, we'd all be better off. ... With very few exceptions, the retirement of a popular political talking head is great news: it's likely to result in fewer people watching political television."