I found this oldie but goodie on 51 things your father should have taught you. My father taught me well, and one of the things he taught me was how to watch the news. Things have changed somewhat since my father raised me, and I was trying to come to terms with the fact of the “new media” of which, as a blogger, I’ve suddenly become a part. This is the first of three articles on the changing media universe.
My Father’s News
My father grew up in a world without television, and he always distrusted the medium. When I was growing up in the sixties, there were only 6 stations on television: ABC, CBS, NBC, a PBS, a UHF station, and a Spanish television station. The news came to us primarily on one of the three major networks and was divided into separate sections. First came the news, national and local; then came the weather and sports; followed by some entertainment news.
Weather was not like it is today. Your weatherman –and yes, in the sixties there were very few women on television—actually had an interest in telling you what was going to happen in the weather, rather than scaring you with the most extreme forecasts they could think of. Today, Anderson Cooper has learned that bad weather makes for good news, and so every time there is even a hint of bad weather, news people are racing off to cover it. (Take a look at this guy reporting on “hurricane conditions” in the Pacific).
Sports, quite frankly, were never all that interesting to me. I was a small kid, and football seem to me to be a sport of oversized groups kicking the c**p out of one another on a regular basis. I was afraid that if I ever got involved in a football game that I would be torn limb from limb. Baseball seemed more my speed, but even baseball did not interest me enough to follow it on the news.
Business was something I didn’t learn to appreciate until I was much older. This was because they didn’t teach economics when I was in school (they still don’t). The stock market numbers and the fluctuation of the currency was something I really could not understand. So I ignored the business world until I got into my first job at 33 years old (I went to grad school instead of getting a real job).
Entertainment in the sixties was part of the culture. We really wanted to know what the stars like Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and his band of merry men, or Marilyn Monroe were doing, which parties they went to and who they were seeing. We weren’t all that interested in their decadent sides. And we didn’t think that clips like this featuring Carol Channing weren’t all that creepy.
The News
And, of course, (unlike today) the most important thing in the sixties was the news. In the sixties, the news was serious business; and we watched it, digested it, and commented on it at the water cooler the next day. Even people like me—people who didn’t care for the sports, weather, business, or entertainment section of the news—knew that it was important to keep up the news.
The people who reported the news were serious people. One of the most famous of them, Edward R. Murrow, “champion of the oppressed,” ran a documentary called Harvest of Shame the day after Thanksgiving, 1960 in which he highlighted the plight of migrant workers. We were still watching that documentary as an example of journalistic integrity in high school in 1979.
The Passing of My Father’s World
The world my father grew up, the world he educated me in, is gone. Paul Harvey is dead, and former RNC chairman, Ed Gillespie, has recently posted an article “Media Realism: How the GOP should handle increasingly biased journalists” in which he has thrown in the towel on the whole question of media objectivity.
And so when I decided to begin this blog, I had to figure out what I was going to do as a member of the new media. This required an assessment on my part of what has changed in the media and in the larger culture.