Children's Television

Chris Matthews, a TV reporter working the children's beat, recently proclaimed: "My job is to make the Obama presidency work...to make this work successfully because this country needs a successful presidency."

Your Bloviator swore off TV news decades ago, weaning himself from it with surprising ease after reading a day-in-the-life account of the producer of the CBS Evening News. That hard working fellow's day began with a copy of the New York Times placed on his desk by his secretary and his scanning the front page (and only the front page), pencil in hand, circling the stories his crack writing team would later distill down to fifty words or so. Thence to the Teleprompter, from which the avuncular Walter Cronkite would display every night his amazing ability to read words, all spelled out and everything. Reading that copy, it seems, was the sole involvement of America's most trusted newsreader in the production of the CBS Evening News. I learned later the process was similar at the other networks.

(Some years later the legendary Cronkite announced his retirement. The delightfully brash R. Emmett Tyrell, in his American Spectator, ran a small item that contrasted sharply with the Cronkite encomiums spewing from most of the media. Tyrell closed his piece with the stunningly accurate prediction the beloved Cronkite would soon become "a minor pest.")

So it's no TV news for this blogger and I would strongly recommend same for all my readers if it weren't for the fact statistically, most of you probably don't watch it anyway (and do any of you actually know someone who does watch network news--anyone, that is, not in the target group for all those ads promoting adult diapers, laxatives and erectile dysfunction cures?).

Mr. Matthews, however, has performed a valuable public service with his asinine pronouncement. Though the audience for network news programs is tanking in direct proportion to the degree they go into the tank for the left, the jackass blatherer's sanctimonious pronouncement he alone will decide what TV audiences should know and not know could well persuade those few remaining viewers of his, and his vacuous ilk, to click the off-button on TV news for ever. It couldn't have come at a more propitious time.