Do We Need Media To Give Us the News?

You know, in the olden days when all we had was a radio with some AM stations which basically gave the local weather report about every 15 minutes or so, and three TV networks which broadcast over a local station if you happened to live in an area with a large enough viewing population to support local TV, you got the local news from 6:00 P.M. to 6:30 P.M., which is when the old man came home from work and plopped himself in his living room chair waiting for the wife to tell him that dinner was served.

You then wolfed down the meal in a half hour or less and camped yourself back in front of your TV set at 6:30 to watch the national news with Walter Cronkite on CBS, or Peter Jennings on ABC or Chet Hunley and David Brinkley on NBC.

And that was it. Most of the really big cities like New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Los Angeles also had local newspapers but you read those things either for the classified ads or the store sales. And if Macy’s bought a couple of pages to advertise a markdown on mattresses, guess what happened to the amount of space given over to the news?

That was then, this is now, and now between all those goddamn cable news stations, FM radio, podcasts and everything else on the fucking internet, there’s no end to the news, particularly during an election cycle which won’t be over in the next two weeks.