Romney v. Obama…..
The Royal Mail in Britain used to be one of the most dependable institutions in the world.
They would deliver the mail to your house twice a day, like clockwork, six days a week.
As the Empire wound down and as the British economy go worse, so did the quality of the Royal Mail.
A bit like the canary in the coal mine – you could almost gague the health of the British economy by the quality of the Royal Mail service.
Now the Royal Mail delivers only once a day and they are talking about cutting it back to four times a week.
The US TV networks used to deliver the news once a night – once at 7PM when people were actually home to watch it.
There was even a time when they were talking about expanding their news coverage to one hour a night, instead of their usual half hour (which when you take out the commercial breaks comes to 22 minutes – and when you take out the anchor throws and the pap and the animal story at the end, comes to about 12 minutes of actualy content).
But at least they used to do it every night.
Like clockwork.
Like the Royal Mail.
In fact, they were once required to do it (the news) by the FCC in exchange for their boadcast licenses and frequency access (which in theory belong to the public, and for which the networks pay … nothing.. to the public).
So I as astonished last night to find that no network is any longer bothering to broadcast The Nightly News on Saturday nights.
How come?
I called a friend who is an executive at one of the networks –
The answer?
Football – and soon basketball, rate better. Pro or college, doesn’t matter.  Rates better than news.
So sports it is.
Is there value in sports?
You bet.
Is there value in an ‘educated nation’?
Ummm…. apparently not.
Well, what the hell. If you really are so interested in ‘the news’ (BORING!), there are now lots of other places to find it.
Which is true.
And probably this trend toward dropping the news in favor of better ratings on Saturday night will soon migrate to the other nights as well.
News is expensive to produce (particularly the way the networks do it), you can’t rerun it and no one really wants to watch it anyway (particularly the way the networks produce it).
So why not just drop the whole thing?
Who cares?
If that’s the case – and maybe it is the case – then perhaps we should reconsider the Grand Bargain that was made in the 1930s when the incredibly valuable and limited spectrum space was given for free to NBC and ABC and CBS in exchange for news and public affairs programming.
Maybe those networks should now pay for the spectrum (since we, the public, own it – at least in theory).
In a time of budget deficits, there’s a source of revenue.
Now, that would be news.
But you won’t see it on NBC Nightly News – at least on Saturday.
