TV NEWS
I find television about as entertaining and informative as
freeway traffic; watch all day and something mildly amusing
may happen. As with traffic, someone else (nobody, really)
is in charge of the timing and frequency of whatever occurs
of any interest. And when anything worth seeing does
happen, a traffic-watcher, like a TV watcher, is likely to
be gazing at something else.
Apart from some sophisticated humor now and then, for me
the only somewhat useful category on TV in recent decades
has been the news. Even though Cable News Network brought a
refreshing new look to TV news a generation ago, and Fox
News has been the most refreshing thing on television since
the Smothers Brothers, every network has capitulated to the
same assumptions about what the public wants to hear. I
submit that those assumptions are gravely wrong.
Now we’re once again in a Presidential election cycle. For
one whole year out of four, television news is adulterated
with moment-by-moment reporting of accusatory drivel and
vacuous poll results. It’s interrupted only long enough to
bring us new celebrity shenanigans and useless speculation
about the latest nationally-sensationalized murder of some
pretty girl.
Fox News pays the most insulting lip service to real news –
(talk about mixed emotions, though; I leap at the
chance to catch it once or twice a week) – with
“Around the World in 80 Seconds.” Eighty seconds! I beg of
you now, Fox: Free the real news from the eighty-second
compression, and squeeze John [Kerry] & John [[Edwards]
& Howard [Dean], Michael & Janet, Scott &
Lacie, Britney & JLo, Kobe, Martha, all of their ilk
and all of their “news” into an 80-second burst. I could
just about stand that much of the lot of them together.
I don’t even care what Washington is up to. It will be news
if Congress and the courts scrape the guano off the
Constitution that they've shat on for generations and start
following it. It will be news when “the President said...”
something instead of “the White House said...” It will be
news if 300 federal agencies stop bothering us, turn off
the lights, and go home for good. Otherwise there is no
news from the Capital.
I know how ineffective this letter will be. So I realize my
only real hope is that a network will materialize – (and
not soon afterward be sold to Ted Turner or RJR-Nabisco or
Xu Ming) – that will treat politicians and celebrities to
the obscurity they deserve. (If PBS/NPR were all news, it
might at least set a weak example. But its political
sanctimoniousness already negates its public mandate.)
Things are happening in the USA and elsewhere in the world.
Thank God for The Weekly Standard, which knows of
places like Taiwan, Ukraine, and Rwanda. But all of the
networks have conspired in a lockout of that information,
which helps assure the continued provincialism and ultimate
dumbing-down of America.
Sent to speakout@foxnews.com 10 February 2004
©DamnYankee.com
