Seasons

Yeah i can't believe Doctors whos stopping soon.
I barely watch tv either- I watch some soaps and stuff but basicly yeah theres not many good things On

I do love Nova, Secrets of the Dead and Meet the Ancestors etc. But the computer has definitely taken the place of the tv for me.

I tend to watch the documentary and DIY-type channels. The only fiction show I'm watching at the moment is the original CSI (since the last Stargate ep. aired last night). And I've never understood the appeal of "reality tv." The first I heard of Survivor was when it made the cover of Time magazine as a phenomenon sweeping the country. I stared at the cover thinking, "Huh?"

Oh, I forgot CSI, I like that too..OH no! I am still watching too much tv.

I dislike reality TV too, as a rule. I'll admit there are times I've watched Wife Swap and Trading Spouses as a guilty pleasure, but that's only because I like seeing people with different life styles and values on TV, and I'll admit the edit and twist things too much for the shows. I have also seen a few eps of Beauty and the Geek. Fine, I am a "sheeple" after all.

It's probably a matter of changing values that bother people as much as the "dumbing down" issue. I really hate the dating shows and the bachelor shows, but that is because I'm a hopeless romantic and I like love in the movies in the 1940s (where men chased women as god intended )and seeing women compete over men become the norm just annoys me (it is a matter of personal taste not feminism, so don't jump on me). I guess the fact that I pay enough attention to know these are issues kind of makes Psimagus' point.

As for news, there was a time when journalism was important in the US, or so I have heard. Most of my evidence for this idea comes from Lois Lane in old Superman comics. Now there is no separation of media and state in the US, and unless we have widespread political reform ending economic ties between the private sector and individual politicians, I see no help for it.

Ah well, we still have the Internet to keep up informed and intellectually challenged. Anyone have a good link to LOLcats? (JK, I like LOLcats)

Re Psimagus 5078:

Bread and circuses!
Minus the bread!

Bread and circuses!
Minus the bread!

There's plenty of bread. It all belongs to Rupert Murdock though.

Who also owns a huge chunk of the "free press" and is currently angling for more...

I almost never watch news on tv. It's more about getting viewers than about actually reporting anything, government-sanctioned or not. Also, I find that by getting news on the internet I tend to be about a month (or more) ahead of the MSM (that's main-stream-media). Plus I can easily look up more info if a story interests me.

Interesting posts...and points of view. God knows we need more people out there that take an interest. News used to be news MOST of the time. We've always had some political slant but never to the extent it is today - in either direction. It's really all about the bread now - bravo! You said it. The pathetic thing is that the hard work of the artists and journalists is lost whenever the money talks instead of the news. Professor Klato suggests that BOTS RULE and should take over the news function - sort of like the Vitaphone Company did for the movies during the Spanish American War - except the bots could manufacture the news so it's all GOOD news. I was just a kid then in 1898. I've listened to a whole bunch of your bots - very professional. Don't you think they can manufacture the news better, spontaneously, and so we don't have to wait until 6 PM? And we don't have to listen to the same stale news over and over because they could revise it on demand. I think they would do an excellent job.

A correction to the above. Professor Klato says that it was Stuart Blackmon et al that created a movie for an event during the S-A War. They were not there, of course. Blackmon became president of Vitaphone. Every film that is made with special effects still carries (I believe) the Vitaphone Seal. I love manufactured news. It's so entertaining. [Note: if any more errors are found, please refer them to Professor Klato, who has now mastered 3 words and spoken to his first botmaster (besides me). I believe the word was "hello". I will relish the day when he can say meaningfully the words "obscene" and "vulgar".]

I try to avoid overdoing TV these days, sticking only to those shows that I like that have a sense of ongoing storyline, leaving behind the reset switch episodic types (CSI comes to mind even if it is a very watchable show). I do think there is serious dumbing down going on in some of them. For instance I do like Numb3rs. I think it has some really good characters for a story driven show. But I often find that they dumb down the mathematical concepts used to the point of irrelevance, and often what is revealed through the data processing (usually a mathematically likely suspect) is the sort of thing that common sense and a little detective work could just have easily provided you.

As for news, what I hate the most is the way the adjective more and more readily finds its way into a news report, which is supposed to be objective facts (don't get me started on the live-cross speculation-as-news thing). Once it was just a shooting. Then it became a brutal or senseless shooting. No one really objected, because perhaps in some instances very few people would have disagreed that the crime wasn't "brutal" or "senseless". Then it started to creep into everything. You count how many emotionally-loaded words you'll find in your average article or TV news bit, and you tell me that we're not being positioned to a particular point of view or response?

/end rant