The Tele and then that

I read that CBS’s Evening News is falling behind in rates (originally via Alan). Some media reports blame this on America’s first (female) anchor, Kate Couric.

And a recent Gallup poll reinforced the notion that Ms. Couric had become a polarizing figure: 29 percent of respondents said that they did not like her, as opposed to 51 percent who said that they liked her.

I’m not sure about the polarizing part, but just this last weekend I saw an episode of Larry King with Katie and was utterly surprised that this time Couric was actually interviewing Larry King on his own show instead of the other way around. How low can you go? And what is that with those softball questions?

I have been ignoring TV recently and that’s not because of Couric: what’s on TV is nowadays not all too interesting because it appears that most commercial broadcasters seem to play on ‘safe edu and entertainment’. You know, ‘safe programming’. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems that only public stations are willing to broadcast the controversial stuff, or rather, in-depth (and generally, independent) reports. Take for example PBS’ ‘America at a crossroad’, the BBC’s Scientology report (Panorama) and their landmark Planet Earth series. And we can all laugh about the silly Eurovision Song festival, but, if you think of it, American Idol: that’s a classic example of brainless entertainment. Brainless entertainment is fun, but if everything else on the TV is of the same quality, what do you do?

That said, I think I mentioned before that I frequently check out ‘Smashing Telly’s list of online videos (great set of interesting documentaries). Earlier this weekend, I decided to give up on YouTube and move on to ‘DailyMotion’. I assume that since this site is set up by a French company, it has less reasons to fear for the wrath of the media corporations..