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defrogIncidentally, regarding the previous post, one might get the idea that I see television as an evil force upon society.
I don’t, really. I watch very little TV these days because there’s very little worth watching, but I do watch. And while I grew up watching tons of bad TV shows, I still managed to survive that childhood reasonably well-educated in the long run – even without the benefit of the more complex, multilayered TV shows we have today. So I never really bought the axiom that watching TV makes you an idiot who doesn’t read. Odds are, you were already an idiot who didn’t read – TV just gave you something to do and talk about with yr friends afterwards.
It’s also interesting that since Network was released, the landscape of American TV has changed drastically thanks to the rise of cable and satellite TV. And that diversity actually provided a venue to prove that you didn’t need a major network behind you to make clever and well-written TV shows like Deadwood, BSG, etc. The rise of the YouTube/Hulu generation will alter it even further.
However, it’s fair to say that while American TV dramas have gotten better, that’s been offset by the atavistic mind-deadening inanity of so-called “reality TV”, which will go down in history as the second-greatest cons the mass media ever pulled.
The first-greatest con is, of course, the credibility of American television news.
Funny, that. As TV entertainment shows have shown patchy but measurable improvement, TV news has gotten worse. There might be a few bright spots here and there, depending on how well funded yr local affiliate is (and whether or not they accept “video news packages” from the govt, or have a policy IDing them as such), but for the most part, Howard Beale was right about that.
And that was over 30 years ago. Imagine what Paddy Chayefsky could have done with the blatantly partisan circuses of Fox News and MSNBC, or CNN providing 24-hour coverage of Michael Jackson’s death, Jon & Kate’s divorce (whoever the hell Jon & Kate are) and Carrie Prejean OpinionGate. (And you wonder why no one knows what's really in Obama's healthcare reform proposal. Okay, odds are neither does yr Congressman, regardless of whether he's for or against it. But unlike you, he/she has a copy of it.)
Actually, we don’t have to imagine how Network might treat cable TV. Jon Stewart shows us every weeknight. Which is why he’s the closest thing we have to Walter Kronkite now.
Or not. It’s possible we no longer need a Walter Kronkite in an age where cable TV and the Interwub make it possible to tailor yr news input to match yr sociopolitical biases – trustworthy “objective” journalism made to order.
Which makes me think of Edward R Murrow’s warning of allowing television to become a medium to “delude, amuse and insulate” us. He was talking about TV networks favoring entertainment over news, but I wonder if even he knew then that TV news would become the problem rather than the antidote.
Or is that too heavy for the Labor Day Weekend?
Never mind. I’ll make it up to you later with metal sharks and boob monkeys.
Let me entertain you,
This is dF
I don’t, really. I watch very little TV these days because there’s very little worth watching, but I do watch. And while I grew up watching tons of bad TV shows, I still managed to survive that childhood reasonably well-educated in the long run – even without the benefit of the more complex, multilayered TV shows we have today. So I never really bought the axiom that watching TV makes you an idiot who doesn’t read. Odds are, you were already an idiot who didn’t read – TV just gave you something to do and talk about with yr friends afterwards.
It’s also interesting that since Network was released, the landscape of American TV has changed drastically thanks to the rise of cable and satellite TV. And that diversity actually provided a venue to prove that you didn’t need a major network behind you to make clever and well-written TV shows like Deadwood, BSG, etc. The rise of the YouTube/Hulu generation will alter it even further.
However, it’s fair to say that while American TV dramas have gotten better, that’s been offset by the atavistic mind-deadening inanity of so-called “reality TV”, which will go down in history as the second-greatest cons the mass media ever pulled.
The first-greatest con is, of course, the credibility of American television news.
Funny, that. As TV entertainment shows have shown patchy but measurable improvement, TV news has gotten worse. There might be a few bright spots here and there, depending on how well funded yr local affiliate is (and whether or not they accept “video news packages” from the govt, or have a policy IDing them as such), but for the most part, Howard Beale was right about that.
And that was over 30 years ago. Imagine what Paddy Chayefsky could have done with the blatantly partisan circuses of Fox News and MSNBC, or CNN providing 24-hour coverage of Michael Jackson’s death, Jon & Kate’s divorce (whoever the hell Jon & Kate are) and Carrie Prejean OpinionGate. (And you wonder why no one knows what's really in Obama's healthcare reform proposal. Okay, odds are neither does yr Congressman, regardless of whether he's for or against it. But unlike you, he/she has a copy of it.)
Actually, we don’t have to imagine how Network might treat cable TV. Jon Stewart shows us every weeknight. Which is why he’s the closest thing we have to Walter Kronkite now.
Or not. It’s possible we no longer need a Walter Kronkite in an age where cable TV and the Interwub make it possible to tailor yr news input to match yr sociopolitical biases – trustworthy “objective” journalism made to order.
Which makes me think of Edward R Murrow’s warning of allowing television to become a medium to “delude, amuse and insulate” us. He was talking about TV networks favoring entertainment over news, but I wonder if even he knew then that TV news would become the problem rather than the antidote.
Or is that too heavy for the Labor Day Weekend?
Never mind. I’ll make it up to you later with metal sharks and boob monkeys.
Let me entertain you,
This is dF
