This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 21st, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

As you sit down with your family this holiday, turning off the 24-7 flow of low-grade

Pablum on cable news, may be the first step toward an enjoyable day,

but even if you can't get that small concession, take this cold comfort from Anthony Comegna,

he argues that the value of quality news gathering and reporting,

whatever comfort it might give us, is a lot less important to the cause of self-government

than we might hope.

As we record this, Jim Acosta, a newsman from CNN, who I guess is their chief White House

correspondent was recently prohibited from White House press briefings, a place that is well known to produce

very little of value for the news consuming public.

And so now this fight is over that.

Before, the fight with respect to White House press was about Sarah Sanders publishing a video from a guy who works very closely with conspiracy monger

Alex Jones and why that's outrageous and terrible.

And it got me to thinking well there are a lot of different ways that people are

going to interpret this I think largely meaningless event if you care about like quality news coverage.

One guy no longer being in the room is not that important.

And news gathering that is consequential probably doesn't come out of White House

press briefings, but the way people

actually consume their news is so separate now. You can choose your team and

then get your news coverage and at least with respect to television and I guess it's true of newspapers to some

extent as well and websites. So my question to you is what parallels do we have going back you know 150 years to say

well this separation the fact that people are not are able to broadly not consume the same sets of facts.

...