While abroad and trying to stay up to date on all of the real and fake news happenings in the US, I have relied upon ComedyCentral.com for the daily uploads of full episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. However, I happen to be in the UK at the moment and I received the following, rather disturbing notices when trying to watch both shows:

I’m not exactly sure which group of lawyers inside parent company Viacom thought this was a bright idea, but I’m just waiting for the backlash from international viewers to begin. When going to the recommended sites, ironically enough Fox’s FX Network for The Colbert Report (especially considering Colbert calls Bill O’Reilly “Papa Bear”) and Channel 4 for The Daily Show, which then asks you to download a program, connect it to your TV and of course, it is not yet available for Macs!!

I get all of my news and forms of digitized entertainment from the Internet. I have done so now for close to eight years. This isn’t to say I don’t watch television programming, I just choose to do so online. I don’t have cable and currently I don’t even have a TV. I have a couple of very nice laptop computers and a 10MB broadband connection which serves my needs more than adequately.

You might be asking yourself how on earth someone who writes about and discusses the state of mainstream media in this country is actually able to do so without cable… Well there is really a very simple answer to this: All of the news that is actually newsworthy on TV is also available on the Internet, without any of the other crap that comes along with the TV news. In addition, news almost always breaks online before you even see it on TV, read it in the newspaper, etc. (despite a couple of networks’ reassurances they have the “Breaking News”), I’ll decide for myself if it is “breaking”. Any of the associated commentary I want to see, I can do so online after the fact.

There are a couple of TV channels who actually work quite well with my method for information gathering and I appreciate them for it. Even with the embedded advertising (I don’t mind, as long as it isn’t intrusive and the volume raised), these networks are able to provide their content online: MSNBC and Comedy Central are the two that come to mind first. Because I spend a lot of time outside of the country, it is also important to me that I not have to spoof my IP address, therefore slowing any streaming video. Both MSNBC and Comedy Central allow me to watch programming from any IP address I damn well please. However, the content I watch on MSNBC.com and ComedyCentral.com is solely for the commentary, as well as the bizarre. Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow (soon to come to MSNBC) round out one set and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert round out the other.

All of my actual news, I receive from approximately 60-70 RSS feeds I have set up in my reader, as well as strolling for domestic and international sources. This may seem like a lot, and at first it may seem overwhelming, but it forces me to look at what is actually news to my life. We each have different thresholds for what we want to consume as news; some may find they want to hear about the car accident, stabbing, house fire, cheating politician or set of twins that was born on New Year’s Day. However, others may want to let the general irrelevant buzz (irrelevant to my life, in this case) go by and concentrate instead on the news concerning their childrens’ education, parents’ health care, property tax rate, that little thing called war, national disasters or the issues discussed in the upcoming election (the real issues, nothing to do with flag pins or the number of houses) and whether or not you are going to vote. I encourage you to find out for yourself what your actual news wants and needs are and then choose where you get this news from, instead of allowing the networks, newspapers and commentators (posing as journalists sometimes) do it for you. If you would like suggestions for some starting points on where to find feeds or how I built up my network of contacts, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Sunday’s New York Times will feature a very large A&E piece asking (and affirming) Jon Stewart as the most trusted man in news. We wouldn’t go so far as to say Stewart reports the news (Bill Moyers comes to mind as a more probable candidate for “truthiness”, along with a half dozen other well-respected, lesser-known journalists), but Stewart’s popularity and ability to bring the truth (along with a bit of comedy) to an audience who is otherwise left with CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and Faux News is still refreshing, candid and better than most. Kudos to him and keep up the good work. If nothing else, he encourages us all to think a bit more.