Columnist Watches 60 Hours of Cable News As an Experiment

Politics Daily columnist Walter Shapiro offers a fascinating take on forcing himself to watch 60 hours of cable news in five days.

It has left him with some troubling results:

1. He has lost interest in leaving his apartment.
2. He’s snapping at his wife.
3. He’s sleep deprived.

An excerpt:

What will haunt me for weeks was [Anderson] Cooper’s tightly produced depiction of the amazing rescue of a 13-year-old girl in a purple shift who had been trapped under concrete, with only one leg protruding, for 18 hours. Afterwards, the girl bravely said in French, “I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t scared of anything.”

In frightening contrast, Larry King built his Wednesday night show around a hitherto underreported and underappreciated aspect of the tragedy — the emotional reactions of celebrities with ties to Haiti. “With us in the studio here in Los Angeles is the lovely Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon,” King proudly announced at the top of the broadcast.

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