"All we had then was Black & White, but without, I'd never have seen the Zapruder film of the assassination of John F. Kennedy"

The Zapruder film was first shown on TV in 1975, on the show Good Night America, hosted by Geraldo Rivera.  

1975 was a great year for TV. You had classic comedies like Sanford and Son, Good TImes, and The Bob Newhart Show. You had classic PI shows like The Rockford Files and Mannix. You had gritty police dramas like The Streets of San Francisco and Starsky and Hutch. You had The Six Million Dollar Man, which featured the ingenious device of showing him in slow motion when he was running faster. Seriously, who ever came up with that and managed to persuade everyone else to to do it was brilliant.

I haven't had TV for about nine years now, and I can't begin to tell you how freeing that is.  Sure, I truly miss things (mostly sports, docs, and movies), but how much of our time did/do we really watch absolute shit?  I mean, pure unadulterated shit?

TV here to stay?  Certainly.  But that doesn't mean we have to sit in front of it every fucking night, from the time we get home from work until we go to sleep.  Unfortunately, that sums up the viewing habits of far, far too many people.  You know, the dumb fucks.  

TV certainly has been a powerful force acting on the public since the 1950s or so - the effects have been clear for all to see.  Our mass culture is largely determined by Television entertainment, our shared frame of reference is largely shaped by whatever we learn through the television, television watching is a behavioral norm in our society and anyone who trumpets the fact that they don't watch or own a television may as well be waving their arms and hollering 'Hey everybody - I'm some kind of freak!'.

My opinion is that the TV in general discourages literacy and intellectual development because it competes with things like reading and self driven inquiry/exploration of the world which inherently require the development of literacy and some reasoning skills in order to access them.   If you spend all your time passively absorbing illiterate and irrational  brain dead pap you will not practice or develop the intellectual skills needed to solve problems and acquire new skills suitable to performing useful work in todays complex world.  I appreciate that entertainment can be a much needed 'time out' for those who are stressed from having to grapple with the exigencies of complex modernity but at least earlier forms of lowest common denominator entertainments (pulps/comics/pot boilers) had the side effect of exercising a consumers ability to read, visualize, comprehend, and maintain attentional focus in order to enjoy the 'payoff' of the activity while TV will flood you with a nearly incoherent deluge of stimulating imagery and sound that exercises and requires nothing in the viewer.

The advent of cable TV has seen diversification of broadcasting entities into specialized content distribution channels resulting in niche markets/audiences being given a wider selection of programming to choose from - provided they are prosperous enough to pay for cable.   In some cases this has resulted in greater availability of programming that informs and enlightens its audience but it seems that it has also opened the flood gates to content that seems determined to destroy the minds and corrupt the values of its audience in a poisonous downward spiral of depravity, ignorance, and trivia.  The rise of the DVR, internet media sites where TV content can be accessed,  TV content being sold in DVD sets and subsequently available through services like Netflix, and Cable + Broadcasters partnering to provide TV 'on demand' services has led to unprecedented choices/control for consumers as to what they watch, when, and if they will tolerate commercial interruptions - again this level of choice comes at a fairly substantial fee.

There have been a few wise voices who saw the potential for beneficial use of TV as a tool to educate and uplift the general audience/ to serve the common good and they have been ghettoized mostly to PBS stations.  Recent history has seen PBS and the idea of there being a 'common good' to be served by it under assault from economic fundamentalist right wingers who extrapolate their absolute dislike of taxation to support 'public' institutions and belief in free markets to mean they are obligated to defund and destroy the public broadcasting system since it represents gov't interference in a market and that is a priori BAD! The economic fundamentalists have a powerful ally against public broadcasting in the religious fundamentalist right which frequently objects to the progressive cultural content and political/intellectual/social points of view expressed in PBS programming.  To me Bill Moyers/FRONTLINE/The News Hour/Sesame Street/NOVA/Nature are shining examples of how Television can sometimes fulfill its potential to enlighten, uplift, and serve the public good (Modern Marvels on the History Channel also deserves an honorable mention IMO).

The great majority of TV may be a toxic wasteland of lowest common denominator pleasures, malevolent propaganda, and brain-rotting swill but there are some pearls to be found here and there.  New distribution technologies have made it possible to cherry pick the best of what is out there and enjoy it on your own terms.

"...when theft and high crime becomes obscenely obvious to even the blindest beer sucking idiot, it is always the Republicans who are in office." -- Joe Bageant

In case you didn't know (and few people do), and still have an analog VCR or DVD/R, it's not going to work either once we go digital.  If you want to keep yours running, go to https:/www.dtv2009.gov and get your DTV coupon.  $40 off on a $60 converter from RadioShack (among other places).  Net?  $20.  The digital recorders I've looked at range from $250-$600.  It's up to you, I'm just giving you a head's up.  I rarely use the VCR any more, but if I can salvage it for twenty bucks, fine by me.

there's only one way to find out...

Everyone here likes to hate on all the lowest-common-denominator programming that blights the airwaves, but I have to tell you guys:  When it comes to the break room TV at work, there's nothing better to tune to than car-accident television.  Why?  Because there's absolutely no context.  You can wander into the room in the middle of one clip, get your cup of coffee, wander out in the middle of another, and not have any sense that you missed something important.  Some of our workers and customers aren't from the US and don't speak English as a first language, but you don't need to understand anything when shown a helicopter shot of some dude trying to outrun the law in a garbage truck.  And the conversations that get started when that truck inevitably crashes are a lot more interesting than the banal, repetitive crap evoked by banal, repetitive cable news "analysts".

If I want news, I'll use the web.  If I want a compelling story, I'll stream it from the site.  But when I want background noise to mildly distract me while I eat my taco truck burrito, give me Faces of Death (PG-13 version).

(is 3fingerspointback)