How much honest reporting is too much?

I’m happy to report my Al Jazeera screen time has been whittled down to a half hour per day. I couldn’t take it anymore. Six months into the Gaza war, Israel’s invasion has claimed the lives of 14,000 children, and Al Jazeera has shown me every dead child at least twice. Talk about overkill! Al Jazeera is one of the very few networks that has had reporters on the ground in Gaza, working independently of IDF oversight, and that makes it a valuable source of information on what’s really going on. They must have some quid-pro-quo worked out with the Americans. You can be pro-Hamas and anti-Israel, so long as you are a reliable ally of the US Empire when covering Russia, China, and Iran. Al Jazeera adheres to the deal slavishly. Putin’s genocide in Ukraine. Israel’s genocide in Gaza. There must be some cognitive dissonance around the fact that the evil Putin, the Butcher of Bucha, has only managed to kill 600 Ukrainian children in two years of full-scale, unprovoked, illegal, brutal, genocidal war. For at least the first full year of the Ukraine war it was just about the only thing you saw at Al Jazeera. Gaza is all you see since October 7. The first has maybe 500,000 -600,000 casualties. The second, perhaps 125,000. There are ongoing wars in Africa that have casualties in the millions. We rarely hear much about them, not on Al Jazeera or anywhere else. In any event, I can’t do anything about any of those wars, other than voice my opposition on whatever platform is available to me. That’s why I’m scaling back my screen time. I feel much better after a walk in the woods and a few hours on the stoop watching the birds and listening to the frog choir singing all day long in the marsh across the way.