I remember Mike Douglas, although I wasn't a regular viewer, I was more entranced by the guests that Cavett had on (never really Cavett). I never missed the Cavett show and would sit up every night in the dark after everyone had gone to bed to watch it on school nights. The Mike Douglas show always seemed more low key to me, more like the Joey Bishop show. Frankly, I never knew he had Lennon on his show.

All this stuff just makes me cry now. It all just seems so sad, especially Lennon. All that was lost and all that's been lost. All that promise and potential of a new world during that time. It just makes me cry now. I don't watch television anymore.

"....while sexual content, particularly anything pertaining to gay and lesbian sex, gets the board's big white panties in a twist."

Right...I had a close male friend, now dead, who had sex with Jack Valenti in New York several years ago. It freaked him out when he realized who it was.

Journalism is not a profession, you are not required to pass a test to practice it like medicine, law, teaching or accounting. Even truck driving has better defined professional standards and accountability than journalism does. Anyone can be a "journalist" as the papers, tv and radio prove everyday in America. Despite that, journalism used to be something of a craft, a noble calling if nothing else, at least it once strove to find and report facts that in the estimation of its writers and editors were facts that people ought to know, particularly facts about the actions of society's rulers and managers, and the impact of those actions on individuals and society. Yes the news was "slanted". The news has always been "slanted", the particular slant dependent on which news organization was reporting the facts. Despite that, there was some accumulation of agreed on facts that everyone agreed mattered, that were relevant to the lives of most people and they were widely reported in all the news organs. The CBS Evening News has now officially become like all so-called "news" in America, just another form of entertainment, full of "facts" that are utterly irrelevant to the lives of anyone outside of the subject of the "story." Neil Postman in "Amusing Ourselves to Death" warned about the emptiness and pointlessness of our public discourse in the age of show business. CBS News, a once great news organization turned into circus hawkers. What a travesty. What a big fat bore.

I stopped watching television four years ago. I don't watch television at all. I haven't missed TV. Several years ago I hiked the Appalachian Trail and what I discovered while being in the woods for six months is that it is completely unnecessary to watch TV news, listen to radio news or read newspapers to keep up with what's happening. If something significant happens that you need to know, someone will tell you. After I left the Trail, I read Bill McKibben's "Age of Missing Information" and was even more convinced that I wasn't wrong. I took to calling TV The Stupid Box. What passes for "news" these days is mostly gossip, conjecture, speculation and spin. Even Salon.com is not fundamentally, certainly not solely, a "news" outlet. I come here to read a few editorialists that I admire and the letters. I avoid nearly all of the ubiquitous media and movie reviews. I just simply don't care about what's on television, who's in the movies, who's acting in them or which celebrity, whom I don't know and who doesn't know me, has done or said this or that thing. The only "news" source that I ocassionally waste time on these days is the BBC online.

Whenever I visit friends who still watch TV, the simple nature of television and its incessant blather and selling and noise make me run screaming from the room.

Here's a suggestion. Turn the Stupid Box off. Go outside, walk around. Have your own thoughts, have your own life rather than sit around watching someone else have one.

So piss off.

-- Sac

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Hey Sac...don't forget to take your meds tonight.

Weird as hell. Totally pixallated. Strange American religio-freako bizzairity. Nutball. The perfect American goulash of cultish nonsense this time around flowing from the the empty faltulence of consummerism that has turned everything in the universe into a product, especially God. This is the result of human brains being formed in a total market culture. Kool-Aid line forming to the right.

Darn it Ann, you left too soon. Darn it. We need you. A 53 year old man and the tears are rolling down my face. God luv ya you wonderful lady, ya did good...REAL good!

How in the name of God do we rid our government of these cretinous thugs?