If you're like me, you've witnessed a disappointing phenomenon that has affected just about every specialized channel on television. MTV used to actually show music videos (back in the eighties)...now it's just a crummy reality TV channel. The History Channel rarely shows anything of historical interest...unless you're interested in that twisted Ancient Aliens program. It used to be that no matter what day of the week or time of day, you could tune in to The Weather Channel and get updated...now they have long swaths of time, especially on weekends...when they keep repeating the same old features about killer storms or the Earth's origins. Well, at least that's interesting, but not necessarily what I'm looking for when I want to know about the weather right now and in the near future. And look at Sunday night on some of these cable news channels...unless there's a terrorist attack or a devastating hurricane preempting regular programming, you get special series that usually have little to do with the current "news". And remember Headline News Network with its repeating headline news every half hour? Now its called "HLN"...you can just forget about the news here anymore. These are just a few of the disappointments on TV where a channel's intended focus gets fuzzy over the years, sometimes to the point where its original format is unrecognizable...
When I start up my computer, I get a tableau of news headlines on the screen, jumping right out at me. I can click on any of them and quickly read more details. Yet on TV I haven't been able to access ongoing news in this way...at least until I discovered a new channel: Newsy. Newsy, channel 276 on the Cox Cable lineup here in Gainesville, tries to continuously fill the clock with ongoing news stories. I haven't yet experienced the asinine debates here that channels like CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC hold where the "contestants" are set off in little boxes like the Brady Bunch or Hollywood Squares and spend most of the time interrupting each other, making stupid faces, and repeating the same, stale old talking points. That is NOT news...it isn't even a reasonable discussion of the issues in the news. Now I predict that eventually Newsy will degenerate like all the other channels and lose its original purpose. But at least for now, they seem to be in the business of just reporting the news...how refreshing!
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