When I was in college in the mid-1970s (OK, I'm that old), one of my professors introduced our class to a terrific book. It's called News from Nowhere, by Edward Jay Epstein. The premise was simple. TV news is a manufactured product, and its aim is not to inform, but to induce viewers to "stay tuned." At the time, I didn't believe it.

Now just to let you know up front, I graduated from Emerson College with a degree in Mass Communications. Yep, I actually thought, back in my naïve 20s, that I would like to have a career in TV news. So I studied really hard, assistant produced the news on the college TV station, read lots of Marshall McLuhan and idolized Eric Severid, Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters.

Then I graduated and joined the unemployment line with the rest of my class. After hundreds of resumes sent and about sixty rejections received (with which I actually considering wallpapering my room), I decided that television production wasn't for me. So I took a job in publishing, a move that became a 20-year career.

Over the years that followed my college graduation, I was jealous of the newscasters on TV. Jealous of my classmates at Emerson who had "made it." I thought of the big salary I could be making if I was only an anchorwoman, or a producer, or an assistant producer, or the girl who gets the coffee. Looking back on it now, it seems kind of pathetic.

As I got more wrapped up in the publishing world, I eventually lost my desire to work in TV news. And movies like Network and Broadcast News confirmed my decision not to pursue TV news as a career. But I always watched the news programs, and was particularly happy when the new cable news outlets started up. News 24 hours a day! For a news junkie like me, that was an exciting promise.

At first, CNN, Headline News and then MSNBC offered some promise. CNN brought us the first Iraq war, live from Baghdad. Though I didn't agree with the war, I had to admit that the coverage was impressive. I started to tire a little with the Monica Lewinsky affair and subsequent impeachment (All Monica All the Time). But by the time the 2000 election rolled around, I was getting really miffed. Why did the news seem less like news and more like entertainment to me?

When Ted Turner quit AOL/Time Warner (owners of CNN) citing differences in opinion with the direction the station was taking, the handwriting was on the wall in big capital letters. NEWS IS ENTERTAINMENT!! It doesn't matter what's happening in the economy, or the environment, or in life as real people live it -- it only matters what's happening with celebrities!

As far as CNN and MSNBC go (or right wing Fox for that matter), forget anything that happens outside U.S. borders. Canada? They're just a bunch of loonies to our north. Mexico? Central and South America? Are we really part of the same continent? Europe? Do those Europeans ever do anything important? Not according to the U.S. news, they don't.

Sure, we hear about the occasional bombing in Bali and earthquake in Iran. Terrorist attacks and natural disasters are always good journalism, especially if there's some really exciting film footage to go with it. But if there's a one second "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl or a celebrity dangles a baby over a crocodile's jaws or out an open window, that's got to take precedence. Now that's NEWS.

Then, of course, there's the news media's inability to let go of a story, even after it's played out. A good case in point is the "Dean Scream." Two weeks after the Iowa caucuses, some TV "journalists" were still trying to use that one moment in time to define the entire man. In fact, the "I have a scream" speech played more than 600 times on CNN alone! I may be cynical, but to my mind that shows a deliberate attempt to quell the rise of a "outsider" candidate. In fact, it probably cost him the nomination. And whom do we get instead? That media darling, our wooden, "war hero" junior senator (but don't get me started on JK).

So where do I get my news from these days? The only television news worth watching in on C-SPAN 1, the House of Representatives channel. Their morning Washington Journal program discusses issues in a calm considered manner. No shouting, so dueling pundits, just responsible reporting and phone calls from viewers (who are also very considerate). In my humble opinion, everything else on TV that's labelled "news," whether it's on network or cable, is pure hogwash.

Most of the time, however, I get my news from the alternative press through e-mail newsletters and websites, including TruthOut.org, AlterNet.org, TomPaine.com, TrueMajority.com and Jim Hightower's "Lowdown." If you haven't done so before, check the links in the Alternative Media Watch column below to find out what's really going on in this country.

From this moment on, I'm declaring my independence from TV news. As the fictional news anchor from the movie Network once said, "I want you to go to your windows, throw out your television, and scream 'I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Couldn't have said it better myself.

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