If you Google “How Many Ways to Skin a Cat?” you will get nearly five million entries. At first I was somewhat surprised by such an abundance of information since my reason for Googling the idiom in the first place was to illustrate the point that the Internet is a vast cloud, hawking information in various guises in infinite incarnations, most of it of dubious value.

As a bona fide news junkie, which probably has something to do with having grown up during a period in New York City when there were eleven newspapers which covered what seemed at the time a world choked with events and never ending activity. It was not uncommon to become dependent on two, three or more of these newspapers for our daily fix of information.

Early habits are a powerful influence and it seems perfectly normal to have carried these habits into the age of the Internet, a never ending perpetual flow of endless rivers of information which, as the song says, just keeps rolling along. It is not uncommon of me to tap into more than a dozen so-called information sites even after an extensive bout with my home delivered copy of the New York Times.

I have been a paid subscriber to the electronic Wall Street Journal since it was first introduced and manage to flip through it daily as the first of my computer generated forays into the news of the day. I figure I spend about 45 minutes with the Times, a half hour with the Journal and another half hour running through all the sites I have bookmarked on my computer.

As a full time writer, I spend a great deal of time in front of my computer screen and since I am master of my own schedule, I can choose to spend this much time getting my news fix. If I were a working stiff with a job in an office or a factory, I would be spending time commuting, my mind cluttered with the impending problems of my workaday world. This would also be true if I was a student or, for that matter, a practitioner of any form of labor on any level.

Considering the press of time and the buffet of uses for that time from watching television, to playing computer games, to myriad forms of entertainment, plus the distractions associated with family and other responsibilities, I have been wondering how many people are actually paying more than passing attention to the news at all. Actually I have been more than just wondering, I have been developing a theory based on pure speculation and my own habits, inclinations and observations that there is probably less than ten percent of all adults that pay any attention to the news at all, the large bulk of them falling demographically into what might be described as the mature years.

As for national news, I would opine that most of the sites on the Internet are a traveling road show for the same people, divided into subsets of folks of various political views covering the continuum from left to right. During a national election, this group expands by about five times, persuaded to join in by a drumbeat of advertising and hype that gains traction in the last weeks prior to the national election. Note that I am talking primarily of national news which, by far, occupies most of the Internet sites devoted to news.

All of these sites are mere aggregators of the news, most of it gleaned and sometimes enhanced from the active news operations led by the Times, the Wall Street Journal and the AP with some assist from Fox and CNN and freelance news gatherers who work for various outlets. For the most part the Internet sites, aside from being aggregators, provide an avalanche of opinion pieces offering an endless array of what passes for analysis based on preconceived biases, most of which can be delegated to very few categories, but all subject to the various spins perpetrated by their authors. Hence my references to the many ways to skin a cat.

These cat skinners are ubiquitous. Often they quote each other to prove their analysis creds. They have become a vast punditry, vying for attention, ladling out their convictions like gobs of sticky molasses. They beg for comments which come in various forms, encouraging conversations, more opinions, offering more and more ways to skin the cat.

I keep wondering where all these comments come from. Who has the time or even the inclination to ponder all this alleged wisdom and insistent critiques of this and that policy, this and that instruction of what will work and what not? It is the traveling roadshow of the faux elite who truly believe that the eyeballs they attract are making on impact, although on what is subject to endless speculation.

My hunch is that the level of attention on these sites is bloated, overhyped and suspect. For some like The Huffington Post it strikes me as something of an ego trip for Madame Huffington who seems never to have encountered a policy with which she didn’t agree or reject at one time or another. She is merely one example of hundreds too numerous to name. Indeed, even advertisers have caught the skin the cat syndrome and, I suspect that they too will find that the attention span and word overload will eventually prove debilitating to their pitch for eyeballs.

The cacophony is mind numbing and the Tower of Babel seems to be growing exponentially into an infinite wasteland. Of course, I am part of the roadshow, this crowd of cherrypicking news addicts and policy wonks who flit from site to site like bees among the flowers.

I’m beginning to think that all this bloviation is hazardous to our political health which seems to be declining precipitously despite all the digitized sturm and drang racing across our computer screens.

The problem it seems to me, is that while all these potential cat skinners arguing about the most efficient way to part the feline from his furry exterior, the pussy of the Cheshire variety sits comfortably on his branch exhibiting his cryptic smile and watching the human animal chase around in circles sniffing for their lost tails and knowing in his ever beating heart that no one will ever come up with the best way to skin his species.