{"id":1136,"date":"2006-02-27T21:38:55","date_gmt":"2006-02-27T21:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1136"},"modified":"2006-02-27T21:38:55","modified_gmt":"2006-02-27T21:38:55","slug":"a_vast_wastelan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1136","title":{"rendered":"A Vast Wasteland"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw Good Night, and Good Luck<\/A> over the weekend and ever since then, I’ve been craving Scotch and cigarettes.  At the end of the film, Murrow blasts television as an escapist, superficial medium that has failed to live up to its promise as a tool for creating an educated and enlightened citizenry.  He proposes setting aside a few hours a week for current-affairs programming.  I wonder what he would make of today’s television landscape.  Today’s viewers have a wealth of informative<\/A> and educational<\/A> programming<\/A> available to them, if they choose to seek it out.  Most television news reporting, however, is abysmal.  The cable news outlets rarely do a story that runs longer than five minutes.  What passes for “analysis” is a series of disembodied heads reciting the prepared talking points of one side of the debate or the other.  It’s predictable.  It’s boring.  Worse, it breeds the kind of political apathy and disengagement that is rampant in this country. <\/DIV>
 <\/DIV>
Maybe we need to allow smoking in the nation’s newsrooms again.  Maybe the type of reporter who smokes three packs a day is the kind of reporter who might fearlessly pursue the stories that need to be told.  <\/DIV><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw Good Night, and Good Luck over the weekend and ever since then, I’ve been craving Scotch and cigarettes.  At the end of the film, Murrow blasts television as an escapist, superficial medium that has failed to live up to its promise as a tool for creating an educated and enlightened citizenry.  He proposes […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-ik","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}