Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop Off

I'm watching less and less news on TV these days.

Attentive readers of this blog will know that I stopped watching the PBS NewsHour broadcast because its news reports were getting too dry and staid and because its stories on arts and culture were getting too politically correct with far too many stories on hip-hop - and because Amna Nawaz can't stop acting like an anchorwoman on the local news in Eau Claire, Wisconsin or some place like that.  So I started watching public television broadcast of the BBC's World News America half-hour report.

As with the PBS NewsHour, I started out watching the BBC program every weekday.  Then Hamas attacked Israel.   Now all the program does is report extensively and exclusively on the war in Gaza at the expense of practically everything else.   Now I only watch it once in  a blue moon.  Ironically, I stopped watching it every weekday to make time for programs on MNSBC - Chris Hayes's, Alex Wagner's, et. al. - to find out about the progress of getting Trump held accountable for his various crimes.  (Everything I watch on TV I watch on DVR to skip through the commercials.)  Now I'm starting to skip over even that.  Because the news about Trump is getting too depressing - i.e., he's going to delay his criminal trials, he's going to win back the White House next year, he's going to be a dictator, and when the authorities find my blog, I will be arrested and subsequently executed for calling Trump a moron.  (Labor camps in North Dakota are more likely to be used for lesser crimes, such as murder, assault, or women wearing pantsuits.  I'm not joking about the last one - women in Chile under Pinochet could be punished for wearing clothes that downplayed their femininity, like trousers.) 

I pretty much stopped watching CNN, for various reasons (*cough cough*, Tia Mitchell, *cough cough*, CNN contributor, *cough cough*), and if I watch any news program regularly at all these days, it's Jen Psaki's on MSNBC - and she's only on twice a week.  Or Ian Bremmer's PBS foreign-policy talk show "GZero World," which is on only once a week.  Or CBS's "60 Minutes," on only once a week.  If I catch anything else on TV news, it's because my mother has the TV on and I happen to be in the room at the time.

So what else do I watch on TV?  Not much.  Maybe a movie, if I can find one I want to see.  In fact, I saw an old movie on YouTube this past weekend by renting it.  The only current sitcom I watched on broadcast TV was "American Auto," and NBC had to go and cancel it.

Besides, most of the interesting stuff on TV these days is on channels I don't have access to.   That means I get to spend more time mouthing off here.  And uploading content on Flickr and YouTube.

Ahh, who cares?  If television was a vast wasteland in Newton Minow's day, it's not much better now.  But the most wasteful of this vast wasteland remains the news broadcast, not necessarily for the glibness of the anchors and commentators or the packaging of op-ed programs as entertainment, but for the whole narrative-based approach to reporting, the idea that every ongoing news story is a tale which has a simple progression and a neat outcome that allows the media to go on to something else afterwards.  Good thing I preferred being a print, not a broadcast, reporter, and it's easy to see why a one-time broadcast reporter I am connected to on Facebook gave up that job for a career in something more meaningful - real estate.