I made a pleasant discovery this morning.

While eating my customary breakfast of oatmeal/quinoa/almond-flavored non-dairy beverage and watching the episode of The Fourth Estate I automatically recorded last night, I found that I can go ahead and stream the final episode of the season.

Naturally, I’m squeezing out the time to finish the series before going to work today.

The series is riveting, and I find myself wishing that television news coverage looked like this.

Instead of the flash and speed and repetition and lack of reflection and pushing of polarized points of view that I find the norm on cable news, I wish it could be an observational space for taking a careful look behind the scenes.

Imagine that…

Context. Process. Getting to know a bit about the people behind the bylines.

The only television news I am recording and watching regularly now is the CNN show Reliable Sources, which is a weekly look at the media hosted by Brian Stelter.

I have watched it for years, even when Howard Kurtz hosted it before jumping ship to go to Fox News.

Sometimes I also look at the Sunday morning shows, but I’m not doctrinaire about watching them like I used to be.

Mainly, I read the daily papers (The New York Times, The Washington Post, and sometimes the Wall Street Journal) because I can control the pace and the news flow from these sources.

For someone who has been a news junkie for a long time–my first job out of graduate school was as a television news reporter and anchor–it has been surprising to me that I have reached a point of overload and fatigue with the news.

I now avoid television and radio news most days.

If I do feel the need to “catch up” beyond the papers, I watch 22-minutes of curated television news known as a network evening newscast.

That makes me feel a little bit like a relic (the viewership of those newscasts skews very old), but it’s an efficient use of my time. Besides, a lot of thought has gone into which stories make the cut and how they are reported.

Thinking about that behind-the-scenes process takes me back to The Fourth Estate.

As someone who does follow major stories, I was particularly interested in watching how The New York Times handled sexual harassment charges against reporter Glenn Thrush, who was suspended after charges were leveled against him in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein reporting.

The candor of the conversations and the thoughtfulness of the decision-making process shown in the series is refreshing.

Good news and good for news…the series in ongoing…