After my own casual experiment of not watching the presidential election on TV this year, and after a year of crazed TV news reporting, culminating in RatherGate, I decided to do this month’s “Ideas For Every Room” newsletter for Electronic House on yet another reason why a PC belongs in your media room or home theater.
It looks like advertisers are agreeing with me: Internet ad revenues are soaring, as more and more people (especially men, interestingly enough) tune out TV networks in search of content on the Web.
TV as a device isn’t going anywhere, but in a trend that George Gilder first spotted over a decade ago, more and more it’s going to be an interactive device for playing back entertainment (sports, movies, and music-oriented content, whether it’s via DVD or TiVo’ed off the networks), rather than for simply a device for passively pumping the media’s biases into our brains. But when Dan Rather is disgraced (how badly? Well, I reflexively started typing the HTML superscript command when I got to the “th” in his name just now), Tom Brokaw booed at college football games, and ordinary folks come up to Peter Jennings and say this…
Well, the handwriting is on the wall for the big three’s national TV news coverage.
(On the other hand, if Fox wants to put together a nightly news show for their TV network, they’ve got a pretty darn good chance of cleaning up in flyover country. And the infrastructure is already there: make Brit Hume the anchorman, let James Brown (no, not the Godfather of Soul–this James Brown) do the sports, and presto!–instant ratings and advertising revenue machine.)
Update: Great line by James Lileks:
Oh: one more thing. The Administration is clearing the decks for the second term. Out with the old & tired, in with new ideas, etc. How
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