I hate the 24-hour news cycle. I think it's bad for us as a society—it controls the way we learn about and process the news and affects how we understand our world. Even worse, it is formatted in a way that makes the news a source of entertainment.

More troubling is the amount of time and attention major networks regularly pay to stories that involve only a few individuals. The top stories are edited down to 60-second segments, truly important news is cropped and details are left out in order to fit the allotted length of the program. Watching Fox or CNN is never as informative as actually doing the research on the issue you want to know more about.

Take the Casey Anthony trial, for example, which dominated news cycles for almost half the summer.

Anthony was tried on first-degree murder charges after the remains of her two-year-old daughter Caylee were found outside her home in 2008. The trial was televised and attracted throngs of media attention this past July.

Crowds lined up outside the courthouse hours before the trial's daily proceedings began to jeer at Anthony or vie for one of the coveted seats inside the courtroom open to the public. For some reason, this trial captivated audiences, and networks were happy to oblige.

I followed the Anthony trial feeling slightly sickened by the amount of attention it was getting.

While it's true that, by our nature, we are naturally fascinated by outrageous stories of horrible crimes involving young, beautiful or powerful people, I don't think it is the media's job to give the people what they want. The Casey Anthony trial was highly publicized because, for most people, it was a source of entertainment. The trial affected very few people aside from those directly involved in the story. At the same time, major networks ignore other lower-profile crimes that occur every day.

There are countless examples of stories like these, blown out of proportion by the media. The Amanda Knox case similarly gripped the nation.

Even though it was hardly important to my own life, I followed the proceedings of the trial. Some media analysts explain that networks will almost always give the most coverage to stories about gruesome murder or disappearances involving white women or children.

There's no reason why the public had to be involved in the intimate details of the Knox or Anthony trials. Murders happen every day in this country, but only a select few make it into the nightly news.

Even the recent coverage of Hurricane Irene bordered on ridiculous at times. For the entire weekend that the storm passed over the East Coast, it was all that was on TV. If you had any interest in knowing what was going on in Libya, Egypt or Afghanistan that week, there was no way the major news networks were going to give you what you were looking for. Instead, unnecessary information about the hurricane dominated.

All that we really needed to know during the storm was when it was projected to hit our area, how severe the damage was estimated to be, what we could do to protect ourselves, and a follow-up assessment of how the East Coast fared after the storm.

I didn't need to see a dozen miserable reporters dressed in windbreakers talking to lunatics at the Jersey Shore who were bent on "chasing" the storm as it passed over their beach houses. Just give me the facts, and I'll change the channel when I want to be entertained.

The amount of time news networks dedicate to certain stories has always made me uncomfortable. CNN, MSNBC and Fox all undoubtedly spent more time covering the Casey Anthony trial over the summer than the earthquake that struck Turkey this past weekend, killing 138 people.

The earthquake may be a more "important" story because more people died; the amount of media coverage during the Anthony trial, though, suggests that networks thought people would care more about the outcome of the murder case.

It reminds me of the oft-repeated quote by Joseph Stalin that claims, "The death of one is a tragedy, while the death of a million is a statistic." The sad truth may be that it is just easier to care about one murdered child than it is to care about the accidental deaths of hundreds of people.

The nature of our television media today gives us too much information about stories that don't have much relevance to our lives. Far too often we forget that there are other possibilities in the way our news is presented to us.

It's fine to watch MSNBC, Fox or CNN to get a general sense of the headlines of the day. But if we complacently accept the way we are given our news, then we are allowing ourselves to be manipulated by these networks, and we shield ourselves from the full truth of what is going on in the world around us.