Dylan Ratigan was the guest on the 9th episode of Krystal and Kyle’s podcast.

Halfway through, he was asked a question about the people who do the jobs he used to do, nominal journalists on the air at CNBC and MSNBC.

His response is worth quoting at length.

I consume none of it.

… The most important thing in your life is where you put your attention and your time, and when you allow yourself to put your attention and your time where those who are producing cable news want you to put it, or on them, you are destroying your own life.

… Not only destroying your own life, but you are failing to capture your creative potential to help yourself and other people.

So in other words, I don’t look at any of those platforms as places where information is revealed or discovered or discussed. Those are agencies that produce content to monetize attention, on behalf of advertisers … they don’t have any utility to anybody other than those who are inside of that system and working there and making money from it.

I accept them like I would accept … farting crocodiles. I mean, who am I to say that the world shouldn’t have farting crocodiles? I just wouldn’t want to be in the same room with that.

So obviously that’s funny, and got a huge laugh from the hosts, after which they just pressed on to other questions.

But I think the man was making a deadly serious point.

The vapors rising from the croc’s ass, like the perfect hair of Rachel Maddow or the fashionable suits of Chris Wallace, serve well to distract from the sharp teeth at the other end of the beast, which with every loaded tendentious word they say is ripping and shredding your most precious possessions, your time and attention, into badly ground meat.

The interviews aren’t good for anything else. The punditry isn’t about discovery. The panels aren’t designed for any other purpose. You’re not being informed.

Possibly you’re being entertained, but even the entertainment value is aimed directly at mesmerizing your attention and dropping you into a deceitful consensus trance that paralyzes you and prevents you from acting for the common good, or even thinking in your own best interests.

I’ve never owned a real television.

I’ve watched it obsessively at hotels, and at home when various lady friends insisted on having one around. Before the WWW days, I prided myself on getting all my news and entertainment from print and the NPR.

Nowadays I still listen to the latter during the rare times I’m in the car, but most of NPR (especially the parts coming straight out of DC) have turned into Ratigan’s croc gas exactly.

I still spend too much time online, but I try to put my attention into platforms and voices that deserve it, and I try to be thoughtful about what I hear, and to bring you the best of those stimuli and the produce of that thoughtfulness.

Some days I even think of that as being my job now.

It doesn’t pay very well yet, but I’m working on it.

Cable news is nothing but a distraction, but it’s not the only distraction.

Distractions are literally fatal.

Call it Dylan’s Law.