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For the past year I have watched television with absolutely no cable, satellite, or digital enhancement. It was really pathetic.

Our family made the decision last summer to stop our Satellite service to save an additional $600.00 to put down on a house. We were planning on purchasing a new home this past summer. When we made the decision to finish our basement instead of moving, one of the first questions the children asked was, “when can we get our satellite service back???”.
Over the past year we had all missed favorite channels. For me the various music stations that played 24/7 with no commercials was one of the best features of the whole set up. I loved listening to classical, opera, the blues, and BYU radio. I also watched BYU religious and arts programming, Food Network, C-Span, and Fox news quite a bit. Ben really enjoyed Noggin and Nick Jr. Our older children loved Disney, and Paul especially loved watching the sports channels.
Our main reason for getting satellite was to be able to watch General Conference twice a year in the comfort of our own home. But the many and varied services and channels made life more fun, and we all loved the DVR feature which allowed us to record a show and quickly scan through commercials as we watched as our leisure.
When we stopped our service last year, we went back to stone age television, with a nasty picture made only somewhat better with antenaes that Paul installed and only local channels to watch. When I did turn on the television, I tended to watch PBS, as they had the best arts programming. I loved watching the various musical performances.
Occasionally I plugged my nose and watched the news hour with Jim Lehrer. I supplemented this news by watching the local Denver news as well as the big three national news shows. It was amazing how those programs had the timing for the stories down so well that I could quickly flip from channel to channel and they were all reporting the same stuff at the same time during the broadcast.
It has been an interesting experiment. I had gotten so used to C-span, Fox News, and the various other cable news shows and online internet radio, that to get my tv news from just those few sources was a serious reminder of how screwy the news business is.
Especially PBS. Last night for example, while I watched coverage of the primary election the gals on news hour made it seem like the only race, heck the only issue from that election was the Lieberman race in Conn. A whole half hour was devoted to this one story. Then the station broke for a ten minute plea from the local PBS hacks who begged, pleaded, guilt tripped, and claimed the phones were “frighteningly quiet” during the pledge drive.
Then back to the humorless interviews…”we all have to be so serious at PBS….we are the REAL news”. Israel stinks, Israel is a bully, Israel does not play by the rules. Etc etc etc…No mention of Hezbolla using innocents as human shields….no just….Israel is really mean.
I was chuckling to myself as I watched. I guess the gals in Denver running that pledge drive have not heard that a news revolution has happened this past year. Why would I get my television news from “The news hour” when dozens of sources are available on cable, digital, and satellite stations (without the guilt tripping and begging for money) and thousands of news sources were available on the internet? It is true that I enjoyed seeing footage of various sound bites and stories on the television to supplement my internet reading and that is why I bothered to turn on the TV in the first place.
(Placing my tongue firmly in my cheek) I was “sorely” tempted by the “two free tickets to see and meet Jim Lehrer in person at a luncheon in Denver”….if ONLY I will contribute $1000.00 to our Rocky Mountain PBS station and become a “cornerstone” member.
Talk about old school. I want to meet Mark Steyn and Michelle Malkin. I want to hang with Laura Bush and the twins. I want to attend a luncheon with Ann Coulter and laugh my head off. I want to spend the day protesting moonbats with my Freeper Pals here in Denver, and I want to meet Condi and Pres. Bush. Phyllis Schalfly and Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Sowell. These are the ones who have been my teachers and my mentors. These are the folks who I would like to spend time with.
Jim Lehrer??? Who goes to those events but tenured public school teachers and IRS employees who still believe Bush stole the 2000 election, there were no weapons of mass destruction, and Joe Wilson’s The Politics of Truth is on a par with the Bible.
Paul ordered our new television service this past week, and in the package we are going from really fast internet connectivity to screaming fast internet connectivity – and tomorow it all kicks in. High Speed internet and 150 channels of high quality television!!! I am really excited to turn off PBS with all the social babble and warmed over collectivist thought, pushing of immorality on preschool programming, and dissing of conservatives, and go back to the fun folks at Fox News.
I would rather watch pathetic MSNBC than PBS at this point. The news hour last night finished up with a fifteen minute overview of all of Israels mistakes in the war with terrorists, and the final wrap up….”And two more soldiers died in Iraq today”. Who needs this junk? Who would choose to watch? Over and over and over again I would turn on the news this past year, start watching the national news at 5:30 at either nbc, cbs, or abc (flipping around channels the whole time, counting up all of the pharmacuetical ads as I watched) and then if I had not turned it off in disgust, click to PBS to see how much of the news hour I could take before I turned it to Everybody Loves Raymond.
My father in law sent us a free subscription to the Readers Digest this past year, and it is like reading the New England Journal of Medicine. Ads, Ads, and more Ads for drugs. Stories about doctors, people saved by doctors, doctors, nurses, doctors….everywhere you turn doctors and hospitals saving the day. A doctor stranded in the wilds of ….has his leg amputated by fire ants…..and saves himself using the highly specialized skill of cutting off his own leg with a pair of nail clippers taught to him by the big pharma companies who enabled him to become a legalized drug pusher…
Same with the news shows. All the lies fit to print to bolster the medical profession. Immunizations, the new pink in fashion…..Medical Procedures that your insurance company is too cheap to pay for….doctor as hero, doctor as “our citizen of the year”, psychiatrist as our dude of the hour.

It just nauseated me to see those ads for Anti-depressants. “Depression hurts….” Depression stinks….depression can be fixed with our little pills….” hurl and barf….
If anyone thinks that all those ads ensured your local, national and “the most trusted news show on television” (as the pbs groupie running that telethon called Jim Lehrers show last night) is NOT influenced by all that drug money…then I have some lovely ocean front property to sell you in Boulder Colorado.
Bottom line…I am finished. We will never be without our high speed internet connectivity again. And we will never go back to just our local channels. I appreciated seeing certain theatre productions on PBS (Like South Pacific with Reba McEntire as Nellie), documentaries, and science shows.
But I can watch similar programming on Discovery without anyone hitting me up for money or trying to “sell” me some lovely socialist or big pharma propaganda.
It has been an interesting year, but I don’t plan to go back, and as far as I could tell last night I only heard the phone ring once during the whole telethon. Perhaps that ring was the final wakeup call for those PBS hacks feeding at the public trough, using taxpayer money to shove socialism on the unsuspecting viewers. I wonder how quickly the whole set up would collapse if living under free market rules of engagement? Isn’t it time to find out???
Those glory days of the Keatons…when Conservative Alex was just so selfish, and his hippie parents were just so hip, Daddy Steven worked for the most righteous, most holy, and the most selfless organization known to man (after the United Nations, of course)….he worked as a manager for a PBS television station.
Well, the 80’s are over…a new sheriff is in town, and last I heard his name was BLOG.

Jenny Hatch