Ben Krimmel is a senior majoring in international affairs. 

GW students, do yourselves a favor. Please, just until the government shutdown ends, turn off cable news.

Don’t worry: You won’t miss anything, as until there is a deal, there will be no significant news.

Your refusal to watch CNN’s shutdown stopwatch that counts how many days, hours, minutes and seconds the government is in shutdown mode won’t end the University’s reign as the “most politically active” campus.

A democracy and a campus addicted to political SportsCenter, interested only in presenting daily “winners and losers,” do not advance a nation’s pressing social and economic problems. So if anything, we have the 24-hour cable news media to blame for feeding the political drama and prolonging the shutdown.

Watching the slime coming out of our television sets only encourages further political logjam: More and more politicians will be encouraged to see their most aggressive and egregious sound bites on screen as they jostle to earn the title of biggest child in Congress.

There’s a pervasive sentiment in the District that the political parties want to see the other side lose, even if it means that Americans are harmed along the way. And the already polarized cable news environment has been the perfect venue to publicize and exacerbate the problem.

But drama drives ratings. And if we as politically involved students tune in to lowbrow coverage, we’re only fanning the flame of today’s abysmal media environment.

There are real problems caused by the shutdown. Federal clinical trials have been cut. Thousands of workers were furloughed. And it has hurt some of society’s most vulnerable, like low-income seniors and single mothers.

But watching the pundits, politicians, and “news” anchors blow hot air is not an #onlyatGW moment for you to brag about on Twitter.

Wait for the shutdown to end. Then you can gorge on the next round of political pettiness, like the debt ceiling battle in two weeks.