It seems I watch more television during winter than at other times of year. I’m not sure why, since programming seems to have deteriorated to commercials and sports interrupted briefly by news and game shows. In summer I pay more attention to the outdoors, watching birds, squirrels and an occasional deer or turkey wander across my yard. In winter I spend more time reading, writing letters, poetry, this column and putting together word puzzles and trivia quizzes. My television is turned on a lot more than in summer, and I suppose the writers’ and actors’ strikes are responsible for a lot of the reruns and other dreary things we had to put up with all those weeks. Thinking the disintegrating quality of the programs could be partly my imagination, I recently repeated an experiment I conducted several years ago, to get an idea of just how much time was devoted to actual programs and how much to commercials and other promotion. It turned out to be even worse than before.
This was not scientific. I didn’t have a stop-watch, just my kitchen clock, and was forced to merely guess at the length of some of the briefer interruptions that amounted to only seconds each but could, nevertheless, add up to a couple minutes of the half-hour program. I counted as promotion, all the little ‘teasers’ that promise to be right back after the commercial. I also noticed that newscasters are reluctant to admit that they are taking a commercial break and that we are going to be subjected to a high-intensity sales pitch. They can’t seem to work up the courage to say something as honest as, “And now a message from our sponsor.” Instead, they pass it off with a cowardly, “And now this.” Then, they paste on that frozen smile and try not to look embarrassed while they wait for the camera to cut out.
Those little teasers that promise us that something fascinating is coming right after the commercial can’t be about real news. Real news is the stuff that can’t wait. The stuff that they interrupt your favorite game show or the ballgame for. Anything that can wait until 10 pm. can’t be news or they’d be scrambling to be the first to tell us about it. In the end, a half-hour newscast offered slightly under twenty minutes of actual news and a smidge over ten minutes of commercials and promotion.
The longest continuous commercial-free segment lasted for eight and a half minutes and the longest continuous commercial interruption (on the hour, between a game show and a newscast) was almost twelve minutes in length. You can pretty much forget seeing anything worthwhile during the final few minutes of nearly any program. It will be a hodge-podge of commercials, self-promotion and what they call public service announcements that all do little to justify your taking the time to watch. About the only thing that might be worthwhile would be at the end of the newscast. They just might do a re-cap of the weather and remind us that they have indeed told us what they told us they were going to tell us, Don’t fear missing something important, you can always tune in to the late news where they will pretend it’s breaking news – and, if there’s anything really newsworthy, they’ll interrupt your favorite detective show at a critical moment in order to bring you up to date – count on it.
In a nation as large as ours, in a world with instant communication capabilities, there must be thousands of newsworthy events to choose from. I wonder why all the networks have basically the same few stories to tell us. And even more mysterious is the fact that some events are repeated and treated as breaking news on different newscasts on different days. We hear nearly identical accounts of happenings on different channels over several days – making me wonder if they’re simply getting the news stories from each other – or off the internet? And I think it is really tacky for professional broadcasters to tell us, every time they come on the air, that they are the best, the favorite, the most trusted, the most accurate. So why do I bother to watch television? Because it’s there and I keep hoping that, just maybe, today it will be better.
Perplexing commercial: This medication is “…not for people with type 1 diabetes or children.”?