For clarification I do watch television series, and movies and such. I just watch them commercial free. I either torrent them or get them from services like Netflix, Amazon, etc. I stopped watching televised news, and regular TV a long time ago. More than a decade ago now.
Early on I noticed a growing trend of what you could call fear mongering. Time and what could be on TV changed a lot during my life time. When I was young if you wanted to see anything R rated you had to go to a movie theater. Until I was around 6 or 7 and cable and HBO became a thing. For the first time you could watch movies on your TV a few months after they were in the theaters. This included R rated titles. My mother was pretty strict when I was younger about not letting me see such things.
As I grew older what was permitted on TV continued to expand and grow. Gradually "If it bleeds it leads" began to dominate news. They only wanted to talk about the sensational, or horrific things. They were so fixated on this that they would seek out any negative stories they could find. Gradually the news began to be more about all the bad things that happened. Just as many positive things happen, but they are not what the news wants to report. In fact, many of the negative things they are reporting constantly now are at historical (all time lows) yet the sheer amount of reporting on such topics gave the mental impression things are getting worse.
As to regular TV over time regular shows have scenes that are far more gruesome than anything in R rated movies back in my youth. This doesn't particularly bother me as I've always been a fan of horror, sci-fi, good special effects, etc. In fact, when most of society was increasingly sheltering their children from violent video games and movies, I was doing just the opposite. The difference is I was also teaching my children the difference between reality, and fiction.
9/11 was a huge change in my life. In reality, it changed the entire world. Much of the problems of today had their seeds on that day. I happened to be home sick on that day lying on the couch watching it unfold. I was in shock just like everyone else.
I thought it was crazy what happened and I went a couple of months where I was pretty much like any "normal person". Then one day I stumbled across some people posting photos and asking some pretty compelling questions about the Pentagon on that day. It got my mind thinking... but I still wasn't quite there.
A guy passing through my town happened to give several 9-11 documentaries to me sometime within a year of the event. I remember one of them was "9-11 In Plane Sight" and it starts out defining what Conspiracy Theory actually means before it digs into the video. In fact, the delivery was very reasonable and geared towards just giving information and letting me make my own decision. I remember at the end of it I was likely a little pale and said "holy shit, we did it" and that was my impression then. I know far more now than I did back then and this was before movements such as Architects and Engineers for 9-11 truth had come into being.
9/11 In Plane Site - Directors Cut
This is one of those things they mention in a lot of psychological discussions called a Paradigm Shift. Paradigm shifts do not typically occur unless there is a shock that accompanies it. I have little doubt I had a paradigm shift on that day.
Now in my defense I've always been interested in mysteries, stories about the unknown, etc. So I also was well aware of JFK, and several other long standing Conspiracy Theories. They interested me, but I can't really say they impacted my life much back then.
Having this revelation was like getting a new prescription of eye glasses. Once this realization was made I could be able to see cases where motives were more probable in one direction than what the official narrative was passing off. I could see the bias and the force feeding of information, it became more obvious. I could watch how people in my town would react to a news story. I even saw people reacting to news that I knew was false. I was getting first hand experience in watching propaganda at work. They taught us in school about propaganda in WW2 and it is like they want us to pretend that propaganda suddenly went away after that war. It didn't go away. They simply got far better at it.
I got used to being attacked as a Conspiracy Theorist, and later a Truther. It was sad as the people generally had no clue what the word Conspiracy or the word Theory mean, much less when combined together. Then it was even more ironic that Truther was turned into a derogatory label. Someone who seeks the truth is seen as a bad thing...
I realized this was mostly a conditioned response. The news, the media blitz, and the politicians were carefully dictating who the "popular kids" were, and who the "nerds" were. Making certain words be bad and make people flinch and avoid such labeled people as though they are Lepers is exactly what they want.
I was having a big moment of waking as an individual. I was freeing myself from group think, and trying to fit in. I was finding out who I WAS rather than trying to act like a carefully crafted ideal of what people should be.
I could see that the television was the tool that was trying to keep us stuck in the group think worldview. So we actually unplugged from TV for two reasons. At the time were in financial straights so not having a cable bill saved us a little money, and two because the commercials and bias were making us angry.
The longer we went without TV the easier it became to see the bias. When you are not being bombarded with propaganda day in and day out it becomes very obvious when you see it. When you are being bombarded with it then it becomes more difficult to see just like a droning sound you might learn to ignore, or an odor in an area you might learn to ignore. I think this happens with propaganda as well. We become desensitized to the fact it is there. You can be very intelligent and still fall prey to this. In fact convincing an intelligent person to defend propaganda is one of the best victories for a propagandist.
After months then years of no typical television if I happened to visit an establishment like a bar, restaurant, doctor's office, etc where the news was playing I'd fairly quickly start to get angry as the telling of one side of a story, intentional leaving out of facts that would change a story, and the overt bias is so obvious that it is hard not to get angry when you see it.
Another thing happened while I was away from television. It went from an occasional pharmaceutical commercial, to that being primarily what is on television in terms of commercials. It is all about big pharma slamming their products on us. It is about the corruption in that system and how pervasive it has become in our media as well as our government.
There are many things I don't like about television and I could probably write about it for a very long time.
I will clarify again that I never stopped watching movies or TV series. I simply bought DVDs, streamed them from streaming sites, or torrented them. Thus, I've avoided commercials. I also see clips of the news as I am researching topics by finding them on youtube, vimeo, and occasionally their own website. So I didn't stop occasionally seeing the news. I just stopped being bombarded by it, and I stopped letting them control the only narrative I was hearing.
Extra Media That Influenced me over the years
Nevermore - Poison God Machine
"I know what it wants now...the void
has swallowed the light and the machine
wants my soul"
The media machine knows what to do
It knows how to feed the poison to you
Useless information for your useless little lives
The tv lies and pacifies
Do you believe everything you see?
Children of the void come follow me
Denounce your faith and penance the savior is unseen
I am the new drug, your poison godmachine....poison
Poison godmachine
Poison is a word, God is a word used for fear
In subtlety we obey through ink and broadcast wave
The doubts and fears that shadow media decay
Deprogram this affliction and the cathode ray unclean
I am the last nail, the empty soulless screen.....soulless
Poison godmachine
And we eat the poison, we created the poison godmachine
