We live in an age of informational excess. Twenty years ago, when I worked as a producer for the public radio program "On the Media," my colleagues and I would bemoan the sad state of TV news with its short sound bites, its obsession with scandal, its tropism to heat over light and its "if it bleeds it leads" aesthetic.
In the decades since, none of those aspects of TV news have gotten better, but compared with the nastiness and disinformation that is everywhere on Twitter and Facebook, the cable channels increasingly feel like average sources of information.