[Icemaster]

There's multiple reasons IMHO.

1. News Fatigure - Too much being shoved down our throats and into the frontal lobe at once. Too many pointless crawls across the screen having nothing at all to do with what's being commentated on during the broadcast. Who wants to bet me that sometime soon someone's going to come out with a study that implicates news crawls with contributing to ADD?

2. Dumbing down - Everything being boiled down to a 15 or 20 second sound bite leaves very little time for any in depth analysis or balanced presentation of the facts. The fact that ad time on regular broadcasts television continues to eclipse the amount of content doesn't help either.

3. Multiple sources - causes a dissonance in that there's no clear trust that can be developed for the facts as being presented. Who do you trust? CNN? MSNBC? FOX (God no....ahem.)? PBS? NPR? ABC? Internet?

4. Apathy. Think voter apathy is bad? Try engaging someone on an indepth discussion of the economic impact of rising oil prices. Think the average Joe Sixpack wants to even THINK about how this will impact not only his gas tank but his heating bill next winter? Or his groceries that get delivered by truck to his local market? Nah. It's kind of like a bumper sticker I saw back in the Quayle days:

"Vote Republican - It's easier than Thinking"

5. Time - I have less and less of it these days with the job, 1 kid and a pregnant wife... Am I typical? You betcha....

The great thing about it though is that at least if your willing to take the time to wade through this mess, and actually THINK about this we have more options from which to choose to get our info.

This whole things really becomes a cyclical self fulfillign prophecy - kind of the chicken and egg discussion a la "I have less time so I need to get my news quicker so i like the crawls but that leads to me not comprehending all thats in front of me so that I get bored and frustrated and turn the TV off then go to the Internet where I sometimes get bogus info so I go back to the TV where I have to wade through adds for Cialis to get to the real news but then they only tell me 30 seconds of details cause that's all they have time for but I want more so I can be informed...."

and so on and so on and so on.....