When I was a kid my dad would get home from work, pop open a beer, and watch the evening news, which was than a half hour of local CBS news followed by the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
It was like the Wild Kingdom of humanity, Walter Cronkite on the news set like Marlin Perkins, Dan Rather out in Vietnam or some other dangerous place like Jim Fowler.
That was whenever we had a television that worked. Our family would go months without a working television. I think the longest break was about eight months. When the television was broken my dad would get his news fix on the kitchen radio. (We did have a working television for the Apollo moon landings. If we hadn't, my grandfather probably would have bought us one. He was one of the many engineers who worked on that, and immensely proud of it.)
I think the hyperbole of September 11, 2001 news coverage and George W. Bush turned me off of television news forever. Television news and opinion are worthless to me. Noise.
My wife and I quit traditional television entirely more than a decade ago. Our television plays DVDs and Netflix. We can 'cast other stuff to it but mostly we don't.
It seems that once you quit television it soon becomes intolerable. Or maybe I was never fully habituated to television as a child.
So far as "special bulletin" adrenaline rushes go, I used to write for a university daily newspaper back when the AP News feed was still a mechanical teletypewriter rattling out yellow paper from a big roll. When a big news story hit the feed it was preceded by a series of bells. Everybody would jump up and crowd around, trying to read the story as it printed.
= new reply since forum marked as read
