Yesterday, after being up all night, I was paying some bills online when the telephone rang. I answered the phone and the lady told me that she was not soliciting anything but was from an organization called DOVE. She then began to ask me if my wife was at home and I said no. She then asked me if I thought 
there was enough children and family oriented programming on TV. Now remember, I had been up all night and I was really focusing on the balancing act that occurs when you have more bills than you have money. I then snapped out of my daze. It dawned on me that there are tons of family programs on TV now. There’s Nickelodeon, Nick at Night, Nick Jr., the Boomerang Channel, the Cartoon Network (remember that some of those cartoons are not children oriented), Animal Planet, ABC family, HBO family, Nick Toons, Noggin’, Toon Disney, Disney and Discovery Kids. There are probably a dozen sports channels which may not be very interesting to some very young children but to others they would be fine. So, are we at 20 channels now? Oh, and I forgot PBS kids. But before I could ask about any of the aforementioned and television shows she began her spiel about the Hollywood elite and their agenda against families. Then I asked her a simple question, “Isn’t Cars, a family oriented cartoon, the number one movie in the country?” (Adam Sandler’s new movie, Click, is the new box office king this week. Cars was king for the previous two weeks. Cars and Garfield are both in the top 10.) She then replied something like I don’t support families and then hung up.
I don’t understand. I grew up in the 70s. In Dallas we had five possibly six channels to choose from. Children’s programming was on from three in the afternoon until five in the afternoon on 2 of the channels. Children’s programming also came on on Saturday morning from about eight in the morning until about 11 in the morning. That was it. There was nothing else. But yet, this lady was trying to tell me that there’s less selection now. Well, that was simply a lie. Television is different today than it was in the 70s. The big three television networks dominated the airwaves back then. Now that is not true. With cable and satellite, that clearly is not true. I won’t even mention the other forms of entertainment that are available today like VHS, DVD’s, iPods and the Internet. All of these entertainment devices or mediums have plenty of children programming.
So what exactly did this person really want? How many more channels needed to be “family-oriented” before she would be happy? Maybe she wanted the same thing that Brain wants in the Animanic’s cartoon, Pinky and the Brain. Maybe she wanted to “control the world.”
Tags: General, Media by ecthompson
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