Everywhere we go, we are bombarded by what our society calls news. Brightly colored, exuberantly loud, and blithely edited, the result is a constant stream of pseudo-information that deafens us to reason, giving us a giant plastic smile and a warm glow that comes from watching news and thereby feeling oh-so smart. This is, of course, dumb.

Twenty-four-hour news is the worst things to happen to news outlets since Goebbels. Inaccurate, sensationalized and inadequate, they manage to be the unhappy bastard child of newspapers and construction paper without the informative value of one or the arts-and-crafts utility of the other.

The worst trait of our TV news services is not their short attention span, limited scope or witless reporting. Rather, it is their easy fascination with single meaningless stories that they can stretch over days, creating a drama that they hope people will be captivated by.

The result of this fascination is that we stare at reporters trying very hard to look upset, while floods, fires, war, chaos and gruesomeness continues unabated.

The most recent example of this was the Sago Mine incident in West Virginia, which occurred during winter break. Thirteen miners were trapped in the mine after an explosion, and after a series of bungles and miscommunications, the families were told that 12 of them were alive. People cheered, CNN got very excited, and it seemed that maybe America had received a big chunk of miracle.

The media ignored the fact that the Sago Mine had been cited 273 times in the last two years – once every three days! – for exactly the same problems that led to the collapse. Thank you, Washington Post. It went unreported that in 2005, 22 people died in mining accidents in the United States and were largely ignored. But hey, you know what they say: “If it bleeds, it leads. Not bleeding, not leading.”

In reality, almost all the miners were dead. Some say it was a miscommunication from the company, others that it was an unauthorized cell phone call. There were many explanations given, but the irresponsible news coverage threw it everywhere: “Miners found alive!”

The minidrama had come to a conclusion, and the news services’ jobs were done. Except that 12 of the 13 trapped men came out the mine in body bags.

And then the cameras descended again. Like glass-and-plastic vultures they savaged the families of the slain miners, turning their voices from the crowing joy of a few seconds before into despair that we were all expected to share. Weeping wives and crying children were thrown in our faces, all over our TVs, as the tragic miscommunication was brutally milked for screen time.

If you weren’t disgusted, you should have been.

In the three days of this little epic, Iran announced that it was resuming nuclear research, California flooded, and the Midwest burned. In Iraq, as usual, a smart bomb killed an innocent family. 1,075,566 babies were born and 465,036 people died – and only 12 of them were in a mine in West Virginia.

This isn’t news. It’s not even journalism. It’s just voyeurism, the sick sad hunger to see other people feeling something – if not joy, then pain.

Reject that hunger. Read your news. Ignore the siren song of brightly colored charts and fact-a-minute reporting. “News McNuggets,” Gary Trudeau called them, and he was right.

Learning about our world is not just a hobby. It’s our duty as informed citizens of the last superpower on the only decent planet for a few light years in any direction. We owe it to the world and to ourselves. Get into the news – just ignore the TV.