"When Junk Interrupts Junk," Norm Solomon

Published on Thursday, March 3, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
When Junk Interrupts Junk
by Norman Solomon

Seen out of corners of our eyes, TV commercials maintain much of their power because we don't think about them very much, even while we absorb them. However, if we set out to consciously scrutinize a random sample of commercials for a while, we're liable to be jolted by just how awful they are. A wide range of netherworld adjectives apply. For instance: nauseating, insulting, degrading, idiotic, insipid, asinine, numbing, mind-warping, stultifying...

And how about the programs that the commercials interrupt? The other night, I clicked from the celebrity-and-crime fare now dominating CNN's prime-time lineup to an episode of the much-hyped ABC show "The Bachelorette." With breathtaking acculturated stupidity, the show was so painfully dehumanizing that any interruption from a barrage of mindless commercials was actually a relief.

The fact that tens of millions of viewers, including young people, watch such insidious programming is cause for despair. Overall, the United States is heavily socialized by the likes of what dominates TV screens.

Mailer is quite correct. In recent decades, gradually and profoundly, corporate programmers have cut up the televised tales an inch at a time as commercials splice and dice continuity into fragmentation. And everything moves faster. On the evening news, sound bites are now often sound nibbles or mere crumbs. Entertainment shows flash images for split seconds. Thoughts and emotions are not communicated or portrayed so much as suggested, truncated and dispatched with inarticulate pseudo-sophistication.

more......

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0303-32.htm

NetFlicks, On Demand, etc. will do better and better as PrimeTime slides lower and lower.

Hell, I used to watch The History Channel, Discovery and TLC, but now I'm limited to an hour or two a week...and that hour or two is just barely watchable. BTW: When I visited Canada last summer, their History TV was MUCH better.

I'm often amazed at how much television is completely mindless, vanilla junk nowadays. The only two channels I remotely enjoy watching anymore, outside of an occasional sporting event, are PBS and HGTV.