Category Television

The Formula

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Let me introduce you to the family of Marine Lance Cpl. Shane Martin of Spring, Texas, and ask you to join me in apologizing to them.  It wasn’t enough that they lost a loved one—the 23-year-old Martin was killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan last week—but now they join the ranks of the grieving who’ve been victimized by Houston’s Leading Information Source.

Actually, I commend the paper for running a story about local servicemen and women who are killed in war—it should remind us that our children are fighting a war, something many find all too easy to overlook these days.  But why, why, why does the Houston Chronicle have to keep running The Shot—

Martin family

Yeah, go up there and talk to the family, grab a few heartwarming anecdotes, then ask them to pose for The Shot: get them all lined up on the couch or a line of chairs, looking real sad like, and holding or touching the picture.

 

We’ve talked about this before—I can presume the family is unhappy about Martin’s death (if not, you’ve got a different story); it doesn’t help me to see them portrayed like victims.  I feel like I’m intruding on their grief.  But the editors run The Shot over and over again, sticking to the formula because then they don’t have to think.

Oh yes, there’s a formula…it’s different for print than it is for TV, or for radio or the Web, but they all have them.  On BBC4, they don’t mind explaining it.

C’mon, Chronicle, don’t let yourself become more of the butt of the joke.

Pompous is funny—Fox News proves it

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Talk about looking for excuse to pile on!  Fox News Channel found one and did, and Jon Stewart was there to skewer them.

On last night’s The Daily Show Stewart used the coverage of a recent contretemps involving NASA (full disclosure: I work for a NASA contractor) to ridicule Fox’s anti-anything-Obama  attitude and its religious intolerance.

Yeah, yeah, I know, “We report, you decide,” and the news shows versus the opinion shows, but still…(and don’t bail out before he cracks America’s News Mommy, too.)

image

I once thought Fox just hoped the rest of us weren’t paying attention, but now I realize they don’t care about that.  They have faith, my friends—faith that eventually, each of us loyal, God-fearing, right-thinking Americans will come around and agree with them, and the lack of fairness and balance won’t matter.  In the meantime, cha-ching!

(All in all, sort of the same attitude that ESPN has, as demonstrated by having finally put their last shard of editorial integrity into a blind trust.)

USA 234, HIPRB! 1

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Happy 4th of July, all you American patriots…the rest of ya, too.  I’ve got a gift for you, even though you’re not the one turning 234 years old: I invite you to remove your shoes and stroll barefoot among the new tabs at the top of the page, up there under the site title (I gotta get a better title).

For almost a year I’ve been using this page to show off my ideas, but mostly to practice putting one word in front of the other on a regular basis again.  When I discovered that there can be more than one page here, I knew how I wanted to use them.

For years I’ve been saving quotations that appealed to me.  Some I saved just because they were so well written but most of them are ideas I agree with, expressed more ably and eloquently than I am capable (of).  (See.)

Choose from ideas about American law and government and politics, thoughts about my first post-college profession, a section of funnies, and a collection of philosophical takes on life.  I hope you enjoy them, and offer your comments pro and con.  I’ll be adding to the sections as new material is discovered.

So, what did you get me?

IPTV threatens democracy—more after Oprah

Pat Ryan 3 Comments

Does the delivery system really make a difference, or do we just like to let ourselves get all caught up in something new?  I think the answer is, yes.

Last week Lord Google announced Google TV, its proprietary flavor of The Next Big Thing: Internet television, IPTV.  I’m not surprised to see Google out front on this: a system to deliver television programs over a fast Internet connection to a set top box for presentation on the ginormous high definition display at the heart of the family entertainment center.  If I can sit in my big comfy chair and enjoy cool Internet stuff on the same big clear monitor where I watch my teevee shows, and can get my shows on demand instead of on someone else’s schedule, why wouldn’t I?

This nirvana is not without its perils, though (but you knew that, right?): along with further diminishment of shared communal experience, local broadcast TV stations and their news operations are at economic risk.  The respected former newsman and Silicon Valley CEO Alan Mutter makes the case for the threat to local stations: once I can watch anything on my giant TV on demand, I will; so, the value item that local TV stations offer advertisers—a mass audience at a time certain—will start to diminish; and with it, the high profits local stations earn.

Then Mutter takes the next step: reduced profits mean less revenue available for the local broadcaster to spend on programming, specifically local news, which is the majority of any local station’s local programming.

Now I have my issues with local TV news, but I agree with Mutter:

A contraction in local TV news coverage, combined with the recent curtailment of newspaper coverage in most communities, will deprive our society of even more of the authoritatively reported information that is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy.

So, it’s our convenience and amusement vs. an informed and active citizenry?  Uh oh…

TV rots your brain…and that’s not all

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Television has been my friend since I was just a boy; it still is.  It’s taken me to the Enterprise for Tribbles and to the moon for Tranquility, to Yankee Stadium for Larsen’s perfect game, to Berlin to see the wall fall.  Color television made it clear that the Ponderosa was fake, and thrilled me when the peacock fanned its tail.  I’m still drooling at what I see on my HDTV.

Tee Vee has made me laugh, made me cry, and for years has made me my money…although I laugh about that part to keep from crying.

But who knew it was taking dead aim at my heart!

The conclusion of the Australian researchers, reported today in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, is that more time spent watching television comes with a significant increase in risk of death than does watching less television.  They also find that exercise alone is not the answer, that “we also need to promote avoiding long periods of sitting, such as spending long hours in front of the computer screen.”

Just a minute…gotta stretch.

No long periods of sitting?  What if I sit for four or more hours reading?  Have there been reports of high death rates among the world’s book editors?  And woe to those who sleep sitting up, like your cube farm neighbor.

Personally, I wonder if there’s any special dispensation: does it count against me when I watch TV professionally?  And, is there transitive benefit I can gain by watching other people exercise?