"...Bad News Travels Fast...In Fact, Faster Than Ever..."

Nobody can reasonably accuse me of being a fogey.

I may have been alive since Eisenhower was President, but I know what RAM and MP3’s are, I know what a USB is for and where it goes, I know who John Mayer, Amy Winehouse, Dr. Oz and the Kardashians are (keep in mind I know who Kim and her peeps are, but I don’t really care) and not only does my VCR NOT blink 12:00, I don’t even have a VCR anymore because it has long ago been replaced with my combo DVD/VHS player.

Having said that, there are moments when I really do miss the good old days.

Lately I find I long for the days when broadcast television consisted of three network channels and one “educational” channel.

And “signed off” every night.

That’s right. Every night, sometime shortly after midnight, the national anthem would play as soundtrack as fireworks exploded in the background, the American flag waved in the foreground…and then…snow.

For those born after say 1980, snow refers to the gray, fuzzy screen that was purposely caused by the nightly discontinuance of transmission of the local television signal, not to be confused with the blank screen that occurs these days when the cable service that costs four figures annually craps out when the least little thunderstorm rolls through town.

Yes, children, the culture actually managed to survive without twenty-four hour a day television.

And it’s not that I cant appreciate the merits of a technology that allows us to have “Jaws IV-The Revenge” available every couple of hours around the clock, it’s just that there is, as always, a price to be paid for that luxury.

Above and beyond that four figures annually we pay for the service that craps out when the least little thunderstorm rolls through town.

The trade off, in this case, is that the monster has to be fed.

My ex, Melissa, was the first to explain to me about the monster.

She works in local television news and enlightened me one day to that which seemed obvious once I heard it, but had never really crossed my mind.

If television is broadcasting twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, then there has to be something put on that air twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

Duhh.

Ergo, “Jaws IV- The Revenge” available every couple of hours around the clock.

Hey, count your lucky stars.

There was a period of time when it was “Jaws 3D” instead.

Compared to that one, IV is Citizen Kane.

Meanwhile, back to the monster.

It has to be “fed”, as it were, with whatever can fill the hours.

And the hours.

And the hours.

And, in hindsight, it almost seems inevitable that the result of having to fill all that broadcast air time would be not only the dilution of the overall quality of television (wow, that phrase read oxymoronically before I even finished typing it), but also in a more frantic competition for your attentions.

Hundreds of channels trying to get your finger to remote them makes the “contest” between ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS, back in the day, seem like a Tball game.

Which brings me to the reason I got to thinking about all of this in the first place.

If it bleeds, it leads.

You’re heard the phrase. It means what it says.

The prurient, the salacious, the sensational, pick your adjective. That’s how they come at us to get our eyes looking in their direction.

“Mother of three chops kids heads off…details coming up…but first, coming up tonight on Letterman….”

And the problem isn’t that that approach is a bad habit.

The problem is that it’s not even a habit anymore.

It’s the usual.

And media, in general, conducts business as usual.

Television, print, even the ole’ www.

This link, exactly as it is appears here, was found on the home page this morning of CNN.com.

Susan Boyle shaky in contest's 2nd round

If you read the accompanying story, you find NOTHING that even alludes to “shaky”.

If you watch the video, you see that, in her understandable nervousness, Boyle wobbled one of the first notes of the song she sang and then went on to receive a standing ovation from audience and all three judges.

Yes, even Simon.

And that’s the sad point of it all.

The link line doesn’t read “Susan Boyle gets second standing ovation” or “Susan Boyle wows audience a second time”.

“Susan Boyle shaky in contest’s 2nd round”.

47 years ago, a guy by the name of Newton Minnow, then head of the FCC, coined a phrase not heard much anymore.

He called television “a vast wasteland”.

And that was in 1962. The days of three network channels and an educational channel.

Before twenty four hour, seven day a week programming.

Before the Internet was even a gleam in Al Gore’s eye.

THIS JUST IN….”Thomas Edison curses the darkness…”

Nobody can reasonably accuse me of being an old fogey.

But there are times that I really do miss the good old days.

Signing off now.