TV, Education and Protest
Now, I am not one to get involved in my community, or go to the movies, or watch the news. I rarely ever listen to the radio. What news I do keep up with I do online and even then it's always a bunch of stuff I don't care about. People say things to me like, "Its really important to be aware of what is going on in the world around you,it makes you a better person." It's so cliche and just makes my appendix hurt hearing stuff like that. I have seen the news and for that very reason I don't CARE what is going on in the world around me. People are killing each other, lying, cheating, stealing, using and abusing. I don't have to watch CNN to know that.
The motivation for this post was a discussion question that had to answer for one of my college classes. We were supposed to watch several network news shows and compare and contrast them, assess them for credibility and bias. Easy enough assignment but I don't watch TV. This is the actual text I wrote for my class below in responses to that discussion question.
would first like to point out my protest to this assignment due to the requirement of watching television. I do not watch television. I own a TV but it's up in storage gathering dust where it will remain for the remainder of my life and probably it's own. Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in which books were outlawed and they burned them and had severe penalties for persons possessing books. This would be a very reasonable and rational thing to do with television. Ban them, burn them, and incarcerate anyone who is non-compliant.
I watch so little television that I was not even aware of the extent of the so-called news that was on. Every network had these feature shows that covered one topic or the other but basically it was that one topic for the whole show, it took 20 minutes of navigating the controls to find some plain old world news. I watched CNN for awhile, they covered preparation for a pandemic in America, Bush's new puppet press secretary (briefly), plans to bring tens of thousands of troops home from Iraq (I'll believe it when I see it), and a lengthy piece on the funding or lack of funding for a memorial for Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania in 2001. There was some financial bill or the other that congress passed and they took money out of bush's requested budget for war operations and he promises to veto it (no surprise). We also had an analyst that said nothing Bush could do would lower gas prices, which of course doesn't affect me because not only do I not watch television I do not own or operate motor vehicles. Now I watched what I assume would be a comparative show on FOX, they covered the same stories, though they went on about immigration for awhile CNN barely mentioned it. They had the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, making a statement about immigration in this country. Why a city mayor has anything to do with federal immigration laws is beyond me. I would venture a guess that none of these experts on immigration have been in South Texas in recent memory. Now this Snow guy, the new press puppet for Bush apparently was previously employed at FOX so that had a lengthy one on one interview with him. Fox seems to take a very conservative pro-Bush stand on things and this was reflected in the questions they asked and the questions they didn't ask of our esteemed white house press secretary. CNN seemed much more critical of everything, the current administration, the war in Iraq, immigration. I hope all this suffices for the completion of my assignment because I am not watching anymore television. I still think we should burn them all and put some books in the hands of these future leaders of America who are raised on 10 hours of television a day. And where were all these people that want to get tough on immigration when Pat Buchanan ran for president? On a positive note, I did run across Sesame Street on a Spanish channel and I was relieved to find out that Maria was still just Maria on the Spanish version.
The motivation for this post was a discussion question that had to answer for one of my college classes. We were supposed to watch several network news shows and compare and contrast them, assess them for credibility and bias. Easy enough assignment but I don't watch TV. This is the actual text I wrote for my class below in responses to that discussion question.
would first like to point out my protest to this assignment due to the requirement of watching television. I do not watch television. I own a TV but it's up in storage gathering dust where it will remain for the remainder of my life and probably it's own. Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in which books were outlawed and they burned them and had severe penalties for persons possessing books. This would be a very reasonable and rational thing to do with television. Ban them, burn them, and incarcerate anyone who is non-compliant.
I watch so little television that I was not even aware of the extent of the so-called news that was on. Every network had these feature shows that covered one topic or the other but basically it was that one topic for the whole show, it took 20 minutes of navigating the controls to find some plain old world news. I watched CNN for awhile, they covered preparation for a pandemic in America, Bush's new puppet press secretary (briefly), plans to bring tens of thousands of troops home from Iraq (I'll believe it when I see it), and a lengthy piece on the funding or lack of funding for a memorial for Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania in 2001. There was some financial bill or the other that congress passed and they took money out of bush's requested budget for war operations and he promises to veto it (no surprise). We also had an analyst that said nothing Bush could do would lower gas prices, which of course doesn't affect me because not only do I not watch television I do not own or operate motor vehicles. Now I watched what I assume would be a comparative show on FOX, they covered the same stories, though they went on about immigration for awhile CNN barely mentioned it. They had the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, making a statement about immigration in this country. Why a city mayor has anything to do with federal immigration laws is beyond me. I would venture a guess that none of these experts on immigration have been in South Texas in recent memory. Now this Snow guy, the new press puppet for Bush apparently was previously employed at FOX so that had a lengthy one on one interview with him. Fox seems to take a very conservative pro-Bush stand on things and this was reflected in the questions they asked and the questions they didn't ask of our esteemed white house press secretary. CNN seemed much more critical of everything, the current administration, the war in Iraq, immigration. I hope all this suffices for the completion of my assignment because I am not watching anymore television. I still think we should burn them all and put some books in the hands of these future leaders of America who are raised on 10 hours of television a day. And where were all these people that want to get tough on immigration when Pat Buchanan ran for president? On a positive note, I did run across Sesame Street on a Spanish channel and I was relieved to find out that Maria was still just Maria on the Spanish version.
posted by Schizoid at 9:46 AM
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