On Air Personalities In a Tizzy
I got a good laugh this morning: a "PSA" with on-air news personalities, seemingly about to lose it over people who haven't applied for the converter box coupon or otherwise made transition arrangements.
News personalities (anchors, reporters, whatever) do a pretty good job at feigning emotion to get what they want from us: our very precious attention. This time though, I almost found their emotion believable.
Here's a little news. We don't actually need TV anymore. Yeah, I said it. Least of all, network TV. Oh Phel, you're just being dramatic as they are. No, not really. Most of what's on TV is useless to most people, and the news is 80% spin. If you really want to know what's going on, you can turn on your computer or much, much worse: listen to talk radio.
At best, TV is background noise and some days, it can't even serve THAT purpose very well.
News personalities (anchors, reporters, whatever) do a pretty good job at feigning emotion to get what they want from us: our very precious attention. This time though, I almost found their emotion believable.
Here's a little news. We don't actually need TV anymore. Yeah, I said it. Least of all, network TV. Oh Phel, you're just being dramatic as they are. No, not really. Most of what's on TV is useless to most people, and the news is 80% spin. If you really want to know what's going on, you can turn on your computer or much, much worse: listen to talk radio.
At best, TV is background noise and some days, it can't even serve THAT purpose very well.
posted by Phelony Jones at 7:13 AM
3 Comments:
I couldn't agree more. My television doesn't receive cable or satellite, and doesn't receive any broadcast stations well enough to watch them. Aside from snippets in a bar, I haven't truly watched television in years.
Not only do I feel ten times more informed and half as manipulated, I probably reduced my blood pressure in the bargain.
The only way I come back to television is when I can order programming a la carte. This episode of this show, that season of the other... and I want to rent movies through it, too--a selection as big as Netflix's DVD rentals.
Signs point to at least some of these things happening eventually, but we're not there yet.
Network TV is a joke. There are other aspects to TV that have some value, but, no question . . . network TV isn't one of them.
It's OK, Uncle Barack will save us from having to go without TV.
I've noticed that no one obsessing about the coming transition ever wondered how many people without pay TV have intentionally chosen not to purchase it--and they assume we're all too poor or too stupid or lazy to buy a converter box if we really want to keep watching (all I watch is sports, and all the video highlights are online). Keep wondering why we don't pay any attention to you...
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