The Winter Olympic Games — now a week old — will be missed, though not by me.

CNBC’s news blurbs sandwiched between curling coverage was a constant reminder of the world I left behind when I switched from 24-hour cable news to National Public Radio.

Why the switch? Simple: NPR offers a respite from the irrelevant story-telling, frantic pace, constant commercials and heavy editorializing of 24-hour cable news networks.

To articulate the differences between the two, I watched the morning news exclusively for a week, then listened to NPR exclusively the following week making observations along the way. In order to eliminate perceived political bias, I chose CNN for my television news (instead of say MSNBC or Fox).

To begin, I pose this question: What does traditional news, a collection of stories involving murders, plane crashes and car accidents have to do with you? If you were in the car accident being featured, the answer may be, “I was in a car accident.”

However, if you lie within the remaining portion of the population not involved in the said car accident, the answer is likely not much or even nothing.

Here, a discrepancy can be observed. The week of Jan. 31, the morning CNN broadcasted stories about the Toyota recall, marijuana in California and a viral video of a car driving through a window. In that same week, NPR featured stories about a plane crash in New Jersey, President Barack Obama’s budget, the Toyota recall and national trends in the housing market. Not all stories on NPR were of national interest, but my observations saw a larger percentage contained a national relevance than CNN’s programming.

So why report exciting news over relevant news? A casual observer may conclude that the sensational nature of CNN’s stories suggests that what is important to them is maintaining viewer interest, and of course, maintain it they do.

Turning on CNN, MSNBC or Fox News, you are not only met by many fantastic stories, but copious amounts of information and flashing graphics. In my study, I found that CNN covered four stories in six minutes. The stories themselves contained the main video, the story headline, the CNN logo and a crawl along the bottom — all of which changed regularly. The CNN logo flashed and changed to another CNN logo while the crawl ran a circuit of headlines once every three minutes. Backgrounds between stories were often bright, quickly changing and dramatic. I may have selected these elements to prove a point, however, I only noticed them because my eyes were naturally drawn to them. I doubt this is a coincidence.

A flickering television, according to “Television and the Quality of Life,” by Robert William Kubey and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, activates the evolutionary adaptation that dictated our ancestors to observe a rustling bush for predators. This same adaptation is exploited by television news to ensure that we acknowledge their media. However, we are not necessarily processing the information, we are simply looking in that direction.

NPR, by virtue of possessing no visual element, allows you to listen to and process the information being provided. The effectiveness of NPR’s journalism is compounded by the fact that they address stories at a much slower rate. Each story was generally about three minutes long with less commentary and more detail.

Although this initially lay outside my attention span (as it likely would yours), after two weeks of listening I felt calmer and more attentive listening to radio news, absorbing more information in the process.

Though one might argue that longer stories and the lack of a visual element prevent rapid processing of information in a busy schedule, I would say that you probably are not actually processing that information in the first place. Example or anecdote?

Also, while you may not hear about Cali’s marijuana epidemic listening to NPR, you might find it advantageous instead to know how the job market is evolving. The final reason for switching to NPR is that I found television news to be rife with editorial. In my observation, stories meant to incite fear or doubt (ambiguous medical studies and terrorist plots primarily) contained leading titles with question marks, coupled with analysis from an “expert” of an unannounced background. NPR on the other hand presented statistics from established, authoritative agencies, such as the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, and less emotional voice inflection when reporting stories.

Why does this matter? Because journalism is meant to present facts for public consumption and interpretation.

The inclusion of dramatic representations and editorials stunts this process and shapes public emotions, affecting interpretation of facts. That’s something that belongs on the Opinion page or Commentary section of a Web site, which is not equal to — news.

As a source of information, NPR provides a rare, less-varnished perspective into world happenings. Both sources have their weaknesses, but the irrelevant stories, confounding pace, frequent commercials and unnecessary commentary present in television provide more than enough reason to make the switch.

NPR can be heard by tuning to 90.1 FM — an Iowa Public Radio station. News airs in the morning and around dinner time with classical programming in between.

Ian Barker is a senior in chemical engineering from Des Moines.