 |
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
photography from Guatemala, Maryland, Italy and elsewhere by Doug Terry |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
VISIT DC? AN ESSAY ON WHY EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN SHOULD VISIT |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
News, analysis, commentary, social trends, culture, politics, government, books, movies, travel, cycling and other stuff |
|
|
T H E T E R R Y R E P O R T 2012 |
|
|
Facts first, logic always, truth before everything |
|
|
|
I am beginning to think that the ABC News evening newscast is a joke. Well, after tonight, maybe even more than a joke. The third story on the rundown was Tiger Woods wins a tournament. Wow, now there is really an earthshaking, important story. How would I get through my day tomorrow if I didn’t have this fact at the tip of my tongue? Add to this insulting little bit of unimportance placed high in the newscast that he did this great feat yesterday. So, this is news this evening, more than 24 hours later? In the first segment, before the commercial break? ABC News has gone soft and then softer. I guess it must be working for them, because they are full bore headed in that direction. I couldn’t imagine that Occupy protest clash with the police in DC on Sunday, resulting in tearing down the structure the protesters were building, would be a story that they would do in detail 24 hours after it happened, but Tiger Woods? No problem. He’s trying to make millions for himself, the protesters are trying to work for a more just society. I realize that a lot of people care what happens to ol’Tiger and that he had a really spectacular crash as a husband, a golfer and a human being a couple of years back. A lot of people are interested in him as a kind of morality play of their own lives: will I get away with my affair? What if I had done half of what he did? Is he ever going to make a lot of money again? Why hasn’t he been winning? Who cares. Well, some people do, I don’t. But that’s not the point. Since when did a single half hour of national evening news concern itself with such fluff? If you tune in to ABC on a nightly basis, that is about all you are going to get in the second half of the program, night after night. On occasion, like tonight, the features move up into the first part of the show. They have the big opening segment, usually with two or three major stories, then go to commercial. They come back from that with an oh-so-short interlude of minor news, go to commercial, come back with a short feature, back to commercials, and then wrap up with another feature story. If you really want the news, you are really out of luck. What about this “made in America” waste of time? One or two or even three stories would have been fine, but doing this over and over again stretched out over weeks seems little short of abusive to me. Why don’t they just say all of the country is dumb and doesn’t give a turkey’s gobble where the stuff they buy is made, as long as it is cheap? We, the buying public, made the import boom happen by looking at price over true value, cheap over quality and more, more, more over anything else. Of course we should buy American made products when we can and support American workers and our own economy, but corporations should stop shipping a massive number of jobs overseas, too. I suppose, one of these months, David Muir, a pleasant enough on air person, will get around to telling us how to resolve this mess. By then, I’m going to be taking a nap. Anyone who thinks this isn’t important should think again. NBC News went tabloid when Tom Brokaw was anchor. Communism was over, we didn’t appear to be at war anywhere in the world. Opps. At the end of that period we had the terrorist attacks of 2001, the market collapse of 2000 and the mortgage collapse of 2008. This stuff matters. The major news programs are still watched by more people than read any newspaper and if the public is fed soft features, they come to believe that there is nothing important going on in the world. It is sad that ABC News has decided to push this same falsehood back at us. Doug Terry, 12.5.11 ps: Diane Sawyer really gets on my nerves. It is a better night any night when she is not in the anchor chair. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
SCROLL DOWN FOR TOP NEWS HEADLINES (home page only) |
||