I’ve wrapped up my Low-Information Diet for this week.  If you haven’t been keeping track, the Low Information Diet means cutting back on media influence, notably TV and internet news.

This means I haven’t watched any Fox News, CNN, MSNBC - even no Colbert Report.  And I typed “CNN.com” into my browser several times before catching myself.  My intake of news has been limited to incidental contact - seeing a blurb about Britney Spears after I log out of Yahoo Mail or catching a newspaper headline as it sits there in the dispenser.

Did I survive the week without news?  Yes, or I wouldn’t be typing this right now.  Here are observations:

• To me, the line between news and entertainment has blurred, and I see little difference in reading about the latest comment by Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama that will be forgotten in two days than reading a blog post about this week’s episode of House.  There are better ways to pass the time.
• I did miss news commentary on Fox News and shows like the Colbert Report.  Our news is always passing through filters, whether we like it or not, it’s just a matter of choosing the filters that suit you.
• I missed sports coverage, too, although the Bears are playing so poorly that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to boycott news.
• If a blogger linked to a news article, I didn’t read it.  There’s nothing wrong with checking out one or two informative news articles that catch your interest.  The habit of looking up CNN.com and seeking out entertainment, however, is one to be avoided.
• You know that feeling when you go on vacation and basically don’t get much news or internet surfing done, and then come back home after a week, anxious to see all of the stuff that’s piled up, only to see that there was nothing really that engaging going on?  That’s what this week was like.

My paradigm didn’t shift, and I probably came to some conclusions that I was going to make anyway, but at least now I have some evidence that I don’t need news all that much.

Note:  Now that the challenge is done, you’ll see more posts with news in them.

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