Humor & Life Quote by David Cross

Cross frames “staying informed” as a kind of masochistic endurance sport, and that’s the joke with teeth. He isn’t presenting Fox and CNN as opposite poles so much as parallel machines that manufacture outrage on different frequencies. The line “as long as I can tolerate it” turns news consumption into exposure therapy: you don’t watch to learn, you watch to measure how quickly the product does what it’s designed to do - spike emotion, narrow attention, keep you glued.

The clever pivot is his insistence that infuriation is the point and also the clue. Getting angry becomes a diagnostic tool. If you can feel yourself being pushed, you can start asking who benefits from the push. Cross’s comedian’s logic is basically media literacy for people who don’t trust lectures: watch until you’re mad, then rewind mentally and notice the framing choices that got you there.

The subtext is less “both sides are bad” than “both sides are businesses.” Fox and CNN aren’t just reporting reality; they’re curating it, selecting which stories deserve oxygen and which vanish. That final clause - “what they’re talking about and what they’re not talking about” - is the real payload. It points to agenda-setting: the most powerful bias isn’t the lie, it’s the omission. In the era of 24-hour cable, silence is editorial.

Contextually, Cross is channeling a post-Iraq, post-Tea Party, post-Trump fatigue with pundit theater: the sense that the news isn’t merely describing polarization, it’s monetizing it. The bit lands because it admits the temptation to look away, while arguing that looking away is exactly what the outrage economy counts on.