Hi there -- I am a former journalist, and I teach communication courses, so I have a certain responsibility to stay abreast of what's going on. I try to focus on news related to politics and governance. I turn off news that gets too maudlin or disturbing, when the news media are covering a story hour after hour, repeating themselves. Right, gotcha the first time there.

I do not like the heavily sexual content of many shows. I don't even like the way the females dress on dancing with the stars. Way too trashy and exposed for my taste.

I tend to watch HGTV, History Channel, and Food Channel. I had to stop watching Criminal Minds and Law and Order: SVU because of the disturbing sexual content.

In a course I was teaching about media analysis, one book compared coverage of serial killers in the media with frequency of occurrence of such crimes. In fact, it was something on the order of .001% of all murders are committed by serial killers.

In addition, in the longest running study on media use, over the course of 30 years, Dr. George Gerbner and his team demonstrated:

1. People who watch a lot of TV believe that the world is a far more dangerous place that it statistically is.

2. Media products continue to grow in violent content. For example, he counted the number of dead bodies in each of the Godfather films. The body count rises exponentially in each film. Audience seem to need more and more gore to shock and excite them. Another reason for violence is that it doesn't require a lot of dialogue to understand, so it is easier to sell the films in other countries. It takes intelligence to write good dialogue.

So, Moonkin, you are not alone, and research supports your ideas.