One of the biggest ways you can start to make changes in the world (all by yourself, one little "me" at a time) ... is to stop watching television! As you may or may not know, mainstream media is NOT the news. There is no such thing as "journalism" any more, and all news programming is just that.... programming.... talking heads reading a teleprompter spewing fear porn at you with absolute enthusiasm and NO moral core.
Not only will "killing the telly" improve your mood, I.Q and overall sense of well being, it will employ the oldest radical action in the book.... "Boycotting", and be noticed immediately by the DRD (digital ratings detection) inside that little black box under your 45" flat screen TV.
Here is an article written in 2005 when cable tv and tivo were just hitting the markets.... terrifying really.
Who’s Really Watching? How Cable’s Digital Box Will Rock the Ratings World
By Ken Kerschbaumer -- Broadcasting & Cable, 5/16/2005
"Some of the largest U.S. cable operators are quietly testing a service in nearly 2 million homes that may offer the first real competitor—or complement—to Nielsen ratings. The technology can record every click of the remote control by every digital subscriber. And it offers an instant census of millions of homes that dwarfs Nielsen’s current universe of thousands.
Cable operators have already begun tracking digital-cable viewership on a massive scale—without Nielsen. Comcast is collecting viewer data from 1.2 million homes in Philadelphia, for example, while Time Warner’s Oceanic Cable is crunching viewing patterns in 200,000 households in Hawaii.
At the moment, Nielsen Media Research has teamed up with selected cable partners to experiment with new technology. The ratings giant is negotiating with cable giants Comcast and Time Warner Cable on ways to access and use the data to monitor viewing in non-Nielsen households. And it has gone further with Time Warner, developing software to track channel changes in Nielsen homes within Time Warner’s subscriber universe.
Nielsen concedes that data from digital-cable set-top boxes could greatly enhance its offerings and expand the accuracy of current ratings, particularly for small networks. “Set-top data can have value if it’s linked to existing Nielsen metered points,” says Scott Brown, Nielsen Media Research senior VP, strategic relationships, marketing and technology.
The need for such a system, say critics, is obvious. In a media-obsessed nation of more than 109 million TV homes, Nielsen household ratings track the viewing habits of a sliver of that: a mere 8,000 demographically correct TV homes. Yet this archaic system is the creaky underpinning of an annual bazaar in which networks and ad buyers exchange more than 60 billion advertising dollars."