Does the Media Exhibit Symptoms of Oppositional Defiant Disorder?

After work today, I was sitting around trying to think, what, if anything was there to put pixel to screen about today.  It’s Day 3 of the Trump Administration.  It’s 2017.  News moves way too fast to get all that upset about.  Kellyanne Conway’s memorable “alternative facts” line has already been viral and will soon be forgotten.  The media’s orgiastic celebration of the various Women’s Marches has now devolved into questions of “what next?” for that “movement”.  This morning I had a bit of a snit about the New York Times’s headline “News Analysis:  Rocky First Weekend for Trump Troubles Even His Top Aides”, but as asinine as that premise is, it is so clearly premature, exaggerated and flat wrong, that it demeans analysis.  What to do, what to do?

The thought then occurred to me, “oppositional defiance”.  In front of the CIA, President Trump acknowledged that he has a “war” against the “dishonest media”.  Each morning in my Apple News feed I am bombarded by headlines like the New York Times one above, or, from whatever “Mic” is, this beauty “Can Donald Trump be impeached? Here’s what experts have to say.”  The majority of the political headlines I see are gloomy, dark, and defiant.  It dawned on me, then, this is the behavior of a teenager! 

I first want to say that I acknowledge that Oppositional Defiant Disorder is a recognized mental condition.  I have sympathy for the children and parents or guardians that struggle with it. 

A few years ago I recall often seeing a late-night infomercial discussing Oppositional Defiant Disorder and offering a free video to help parents reform the behavior of their child.  Having remembered those commercials, and feeling the way I do about the state of many of today’s political headlines, I decided to check out Wikipedia for the definition of Occupational Defiant Disorder.  Could it be that most of the media that I’m seeing exhibits the symptoms from the infomercial that I remembered? 

According to Wikipedia,  “Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is defined by the DSM-5 [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition] as ‘a pattern of angry/irritable mood, argumentative/defiant behavior, or vindictiveness lasting at least six months.’” 

It seems to me there is a pattern of behavior.  Since Trump announced his candidacy for President there has been ill-informed, loud opposition to him from the mainstream media.  Focusing on past deeds and campaign missteps rather than his call for change and ideas for bringing back jobs to an America wrongly deemed post-industrial by a lazy, snobbish Ivy League class of leaders and journalists, the media became more and more angry/irritable as the now President Trump out-classed and winnowed the field of 16 Republican candidates for the Presidency. 

Argumentative/defiant behavior became more apparent as President Trump continued his call for economic change against one of the most formidable establishment-emblematic candidates ever nominated by a major party, Mrs. Hillary Clinton, a former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State who would ensure that the policies of ever-increasing globalization would continue unfettered, regardless of its effect on the lives and jobs of ordinary Americans. 

Mr. Trump having won the Presidency despite their best efforts, it seems the media has now, really as it has all along, exhibited vindictiveness.  Rather than credit candidate Trump for having spoken to the economic needs of everyday Americans, the media embraced first an absurd dialogue that “white nationalists” were behind his victory.  That failing they decided that Russian hacking must be to blame.  Never mind that the wrong the media complained about, the hacking of emails at the Democratic National Committee and the substance of those emails, would not have gained widespread notoriety unless the media itself was complicit in publishing the emails posted on Wikileaks.  Now, the media seeks to delegitimize President Trump by playing to his vanity and teasing him about the size of his Inauguration Day crowd, knowing full-well that he would respond to its taunts and look petty.  All of this seems pretty vindictive to me.

The good news for the media’s case of oppositional defiant disorder is that there is hope with treatment.  As President Trump’s economic agenda advances, the reality of decent paying manufacturing jobs returning to America may have a positive effect.  Otherwise, my advice to the media, get therapy. 

What is “News”? Can there be “alternative” facts?

Day 2 of the Trump administration and there is clearly an open, established and acknowledged war between the administration and the media. 

Earlier this morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, presidential counselor KellyAnne Conway had a remarkable interaction with moderator Chuck Todd about the distracting media troll job about the size of President Trump’s Inauguration audience.  In defending White House spokesperson Sean Spicer against claims of lying at the President’s direction, a fairly remarkable assertion on the second day of an administration, Ms. Conway declared that the White House had merely presented an “alternative set of facts” for consideration by the public. 

It really was quite an interview, one that almost certainly Mr. Todd’s predecessor, Tim Russert, would have had the good sense to avoid, and it brought up a lot of issues for me.  What is the news?  As a consumer of media, is it proper to call it “news” media?  Is it something else?  I’ll try to flesh those out based on my sense of things.

Funk and Wagnall’s defines “news” as “[r]ecent intelligence; something new; always used as a singular.”  Not particularly helpful without knowing what’s meant by intelligence, which it defines as “[m]ental power; understanding”.  Not a lot to unpack there. 

How do estimable Messrs Funk and Wagnall handle the definition of “facts”?  It is a word that has been presented by the entrenched media as an Excalibur, a razor-sharp foil used to eradicate any opposing viewpoint President Trump or his defenders might proffer.  In FW’s definition, a “fact” is “[a]nything that is, is done, or happens, an act; deed; truth; reality”.  

Only one more, I promise.  What, just to round things out, is “opinion”?  Again going to my terse definers at FW, “opinion” is “[a] confident belief without full certainty.” 

Now we’ve got a start, then.  “News” is recent intelligence/understanding.  By definition, however, a proper definition of news does not by necessity include fact.  A fact is something concrete, it “is”, has been “done” or “happens”.  Opinion on the other hand lives where there is less than full certainty.

To me, this helps give an understanding of the fight between the media and administration of President Trump.  For over two years there has been a nearly complete lack of “fact” reporting by the “news” media.  By necessity, except for the reporting about specific things that happened or words printed or uttered in deed, there have been no facts to report about the Trump administration; it hasn’t done anything yet.  Media outlets are free to report and speculate about the meaning of specific facts, but upon wading into those waters they leave the realm of “fact” news and enter the sea of opinion, by definition. 

Given the definition of fact, Ms. Conway erred in declaring that Mr. Spicer and the Trump administration had presented an “alternative set of facts” as related to the size of President Trump’s Inauguration Day crowd.  There was one crowd size, but without a recognized official attendance count, that number cannot be known with certainty.  The tweet used by media outlets, and retweeted by the National Park Service, certainly indicated that there were fewer spectators for this Inauguration than there were in 2009, but without indications of what time a photo was taken, that clear conclusion can be somewhat reasonably disputed.  Given what is acknowledged as fact both the media and President Trump can have alternative opinions.

In my opinion, the slim definition of fact is the cause of the war between the Trump administration and the media.  The definition of “news” does not require fact.  The definition of news does not differentiate between fact and opinion.  In my view the news media has determined that it is an arbiter of fact.  In today’s media environment however, consumers of media have the same ability to see objective images and hear objective words.  There is no barrier between the public at large and the concrete substance that the media reports upon.  Having presented the concrete images to the public, however, the media then determines that it is free to opine upon the meaning of the substance it has presented.  While opinion on the substance can be helpful for understanding to an audience it is not necessary, humans are able to see facts for themselves and form their own opinions about those facts.  To me it is kind of funny, precisely by providing more access to campaign rallies and speeches, the media in essence eviscerates one of what it appears to see as its core functions, to frame facts.  To an empowered audience, facts don’t need framing.

I think this has been interesting.  Funk and Wagnall’s have provided narrow, and in my opinion, natural, definitions to our understanding of language.  Because there is such a narrow definition of fact, concrete occurrences which have existed or currently exist, there naturally is a broad range for opinion.  By providing wide ranging access to facts, which allow consumers to form their own opinions, the news media has obviated its role to frame those facts to consumers.  The news media is fully within its role and true to its function by providing opinion based on the facts as it sees them, but that doesn’t mean its audience must agree with that assessment.

If You Are Not on Wi-Fi, Don’t Visit the Bleacher Report Mobile Website

Over 100MB's to load a stupid webpage?

On the cell phone family plan that I share with my brother, sister and brother-in-law, we are constantly running up against a data plan crunch.  It’s been surprising to me.  I look at my phone a fair amount, but I don’t watch videos on cellular data, and I rarely stream music.  I’ve always felt that my data usage has been fairly normal.  Also, being a neophyte, I’ve never bothered to figure out how to check my data usage.  Just the other day, however, after getting a 75 percent data usage message in the middle of the month, we siblings banded together and upped our data plan.  It was a good move, didn’t cost that much, and is better than paying the $15 that Verizon charges for an extra gigabyte.  Upping the plan though didn’t get to the problem of where was all the data going?

After a Google search I found out how to check my data usage so I could see how much responsibility I had for the overages, and I was kind of floored.  I have had my phone since February, and in that time I had used over 60GB of cellular data.  I figured that was kind of a lot.  Thinking more about it, maybe it wasn’t my sister on subway rides or her husband that were using all of the data.  It could be me?!  Seeing the number I reset the counter for my data usage, and though extremely cowed by the high previous number, I proceeded to use my phone in my fairly standard way.  I work at a computer all day examining the driest of documents, and, having a phone, I like to check sports and news headlines probably too frequently.  It’s a boring job, so any salacious headlines I see on profootballtalk.com or CNN’s website are welcome distractions. 

My hunt for interesting headlines is generally confined to six websites:  nytimes.com; cnn.com; startribune.com; espn.go.com; bleacherreport.com; profootballtalk.com.  By visiting these six websites, I generally figure that if anything important, kind of interesting, or just plain old dumb has happened in the news or sports world, I’ll find out about it.  Especially when I am off of Wi-Fi, I thought that sticking to the same old websites would be okay, and this is my group, no big deal. 

After resetting my data clock, I did not venture outside of my group of sites, and I was doing really quick-hitting headline scans – I was in and out of the website fast.  On the first afternoon, by limiting my website viewing, and by turning off the cellular data use of non-essential apps, I was able to limit my data use to about 50MB.  I’m sure it’s naïve, but I still thought that was kind of a lot of data for what I was getting out of it, but I figured it was doable.  This morning at work I maintained the same routine, and I would check the cell data use after opening a webpage in Safari.  My last search for something more interesting than the bank spreadsheets I look at for work involved three websites:  profootballtalk.com, bleacherreport.com, and espnfc.com.  Checking my cell data after another unfruitful attempt at livening the day, I was stunned.  My cell data usage had gone up over 100MB’s in the span of 3 minutes of looking at my phone.  What the hell had happened?  100MB’s for viewing three websites seems unconscionable, and these three were my buddies!  I let my brother and sister know what had happened, and that I was pretty sure that I was the data sponge costing everybody extra.  I felt, still feel, crappy about it.  They were cool about it, of course, they’re great folks, but I felt betrayed.  I hadn’t streamed any video.  The ads didn’t seem overly obnoxious.  What happened on those websites to cost so much data?

As soon as I got to my home Wi-Fi I downloaded the Opera Mini app, which is designed to minimize data usage in mobile website browsing (wish I had known of that earlier!).  Exploring the app, I found that it has a nifty feature in which it tells you how much data its special compression technology has saved versus if the site had been viewed in a non-compressed browser.  I thought that was pretty cool, and it dawned on me that I could retrace my steps.  Which of those three esteemed sites was draining my data plan?

Profootballtalk.com was my first stop.  I love the website.  It has great headlines and content.  The founder of the site, Mike Florio, appears as a weekly guest with Paul Allen on 100.3 KFAN in Minneapolis, and it’s appointment radio, it’s great.  Going to the website with Opera Mini shows me that it uses 1.5MB of data to load the website’s main page.  That seemed reasonable. 

Espnfc.com was the next website I visited.  I have been a Liverpool F.C. fan for a long time, and soccer headlines can be interesting.  A quick visit with the new browser showed that it saved me 1.1MB out of a possible 1.5MB’s.  Again, that does not seem out of the ordinary.

Finally, I visited bleacherreport.com.  For an awful long time Bleacher Report has been a favorite stop of mine.  Its headlines can be splashy and funny.  The “Team Stream” feature in which it aggregates news articles and twitter feeds about individual teams is great.  My feelings about the site, however, have changed since visiting it with Opera Mini telling me how much data has been saved.  A quick visit to the front page of bleacherreport.com required 32.2MB of data.  Again, 32.2MB of data!  That is shocking to me.  It looked like I had found my culprit.

Diving deeper into the Bleacher Report data black hole, I thought I should check out how much data individual articles take to pull up.  Here I found a more reasonable, and seemingly standard, number of 1.7MB’s.  What about the Team Stream?  I check that pretty regularly at work to see what is new with the Vikings, Liverpool, and my beloved Timberwolves.  It nearly made me cry when finding the number.  Simply to load Bleacher Report’s mobile site, navigate the menus to access the Timberwolves’s Team Stream, and then load the Team Stream took 106.9MB’s of data.  106.9MB’s!!!  That’s the size of a two-hour podcast. 

Checking out the Team Stream’s of my favorite teams had been something I enjoyed.  I was naïve about my data usage when browsing the web on cellular data, but it is absurd that a mobile website should be so data demanding.  I am sure there were days when I checked the Bleacher Report website numerous times.  Knowing what I know now, those visits without Wi-Fi could have used as much as half a gigabyte of data.  That is absolutely ridiculous.  I will not be visiting Bleacher Report’s mobile site again.

How cold was the coldest winter in Minnesota?

I stopped into the local Irish pub tonight to grab a beer and watch the Timberwolves game.  The Wolves were in form.  They kept the game within 20 points against the juggernaut Utah Jazz until the final minutes.  If it wasn’t within the final 10 games of the season, if I wasn’t an absolute glutton for punishment in following my favorite NBA team, and if a decent question hadn’t arisen, it would have been a total dud of a Monday.  As it happened, as almost always at the local pub, you start shooting the bull, and it turned out that the fellow next to me had moved to Minneapolis from Alabama.  The guy had moved to Minnesota in December.  Shockingly, he thought the past winter had been pretty cold.  That got me to wonder what was the coldest winter in Minnesota?  How does this year stack up?  I’m clearly running out of steam on this project, but here it goes.

First, it appears that weather data in Minnesota has been collected since 1820.  That initially strikes me as pretty wild.  In 1820 there were 22 states, Minnesota did not come into the Union until 1858 as the 32nd state.  Apparently the weather in Minnesota was a concern back then too, it must have taken 38 years before a livable winter came along and Washington gave the go-ahead to add a state in “The North”.  So, anyhow, there is a slew of weather data.  How cold can it get?

In January 1888, the temperature in Minneapolis dipped to -41 Fahrenheit.  That’s a pretty cold day.  “According to the National Weather Service, frostbite can occur within 5 minutes in temperatures between 0 degrees and -19 degrees Fahrenheit.”  So, getting out of the sod house that day would have been a bad idea, but it must have been a fluky day, right?  Sadly, as I am finding out now, it wasn’t.  Apparently “a series of phenomena, including the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa in August, 1883, created an atmospheric shield against solar radiation that plunged the globe into the deep freeze from 1882 to 1888. In the long gaze of history, the powerful blizzard of Jan. 12, 1888 was a final exclamation point.”  That final explanation point was “The Children’s Blizzard”.  I think my Mom read that book and told me about it.  I’d forgotten and feel like kind of a punk now trivializing the temperature in my stupid weather post.  That was a real tragedy.  I’ve got to regroup, though, and I lived through the arctic vortex of 2014, so 1888 had the coldest day, but was it the coldest winter on record in Minneapolis?

Those of us who lived in Minneapolis in the winter of 2014 were not alone in thinking that we had just endured unrivaled misery temperature-wise, but, amazingly we were wrong.  So says “Minneapolis/St. Paul Expert” Clara James, “[t]he coldest winter season in Minneapolis/St. Paul . . . was 1874-75 with an average temperature of just 4 Fahrenheit.”  What’s more, “[a]nd how does 2013-2014 measure up? As of February 28, the average temperature was 9.7 Fahrenheit, putting it in contention for one of the top ten coldest winters on record for the Twin Cities.”  So, it was pretty cold, just not singularly cold. 

This year then?  I remember a couple of days that may have dipped below zero this year, but what’s the average temperature been like?  Apparently Minneapolis averaged around 18 Fahrenheit this winter and was on the warmer end of the spectrum.  I noticed it, but to someone from Alabama, I could see how it would seem cold, their average winter temp this year was around 43 degrees.  So, I guess in the end, this year was not really cold in Minnesota.  Hope if I move to Arizona in July and remark that it seems hot in the summer that someone doesn’t take me for ill-informed.

Is it only in this era that government funds have been used to construct athletic stadiums?

Living in Minneapolis, one of the facts of life that a person who consumes local sports news will have to deal with is a never-ending hue and cry regarding stadiums.  Talk of athletic facilities is everywhere, and strangely, for a conversation that really centers only upon big buildings and money, there can be a lot of (for lack of a better term) sex-appeal in the discussions.  The fabulously wealthy are always a good headline source, and when you can throw in highly visible athletes and sports teams, local and state politicians, matters of civic pride mixed in with general income inequality and tax policy issues, the mixture can become pretty volatile. 

Stadium talk is currently in the news because of the recent award of a Major League Soccer franchise to Minnesota, subject to the caveat that the team needs to build an 18,000 seat downtown Minneapolis soccer-specific stadium before it can join the league in 2017.  The expected cost for the proposed stadium is $150 to $200 million dollars.  Clearly that is a lot of money.  So in this current stadium debate there has been a lot of pro and con discussion in the media, some grandstanding by politicians who vow that ‘this time we are taking a stand’, cameos by billionaire owners/partners, and an appearance by all of the platitudes that surround soccer in general (the passionate, urbane audience, the worldwide game with a domestic league gaining in popularity, the fact that it’s not American football, and all the rest).  The forthcoming chatter around this stadium ought to be pretty good.  That is until reality sets in.  The stadium will get taxpayer funding, it will be built and eventually seen as an asset to the community.  That’s just the way the stadium debates always end up.

I am not passionate about Minneapolis’s current or past stadium debates.  In my mind they all involve a lot of air and ink being spent on pro and con arguments that are ultimately pretty meaningless.  I am curious, however, about how long stadium debates have been going on?  It seems to me like there is a pretty myopic idea that new stadiums and arenas are some sort of personal property for the team that primarily occupies them, has that always been the case?  This should be riveting.  I’m only going to focus on baseball stadiums.  It’s the American pastime after all.

First I checked out Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, they were built in 1912 and 1914, respectively, but I was not able to find much on how construction of those ballparks was financed.  I was hoping to find archived newspaper articles from those cities decrying the owners for their greed, but no such luck.  Amazingly the next oldest ballpark in use today is Dodger Stadium, a full 50 years newer than Fenway. 

Dodger Stadium was finished in 1962, and while Wikipedia reports that it was financed using private funding, looking at the stadium’s history shows that local government was not sitting by idly as the noble private financiers built their ballpark.  Per the site “The land for Dodger Stadium was purchased from local owners and inhabitants in the early 1950s by the city of Los Angeles using eminent domain with funds from the Federal Housing Act of 1949.”  When a planned apartment development was not built on the land[1], the city was able to buy the land from the Federal Housing Authority for a reduced price.  Eventually the land in the Chavez Ravine area was essentially given to the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers in an effort to lure his team to LA.  When the local government gives land to a professional sports team that seems to me like government funding of a stadium. 

Maybe I’ll just stick in California, like Minnesota it’s another hotbed of stadium construction talk these days, and four Major League Baseball stadiums were built there between 1962 and 1967.  Looking at the construction history of Candlestick Park in San Francisco shows that “[a]s part of the agreement regarding the Giants' relocation to the west coast, the city of San Francisco promised to build a new stadium for the team.”  Across the bay in Oakland, it’s reported that in order to keep up with the Jones’s in San Fran and for the east bay to have a positive self-image, the Oakland Coliseum was built using public funding, which eventually helped Oakland land the Kansas City Athletics.    Down in Anaheim, to convince the Angels to move out of Dodger Stadium, “the city of Anaheim and its mayor, Rex Coons, lured the team with an offer too sweet to refuse: a publicly financed ballpark, a 35-year lease, and the chance to build a new fan base among Orange County's growing population.” The decision by Major League Baseball to award San Diego the Padres in 1969 was also no doubt buffeted by the city’s decision to construct Jack Murphy Stadium with a $27 million dollar municipal bonding measure.  It’s funny, with discussion of NFL teams possibly returning to the LA market, something you always hear is that there will be no appetite for any public assistance for the construction of any stadium in California, given the history of stadium construction there, I don't know how much faith I put in that proposition.  

Is it the cost of stadiums today then that seems to have amplified the idea that spending public dollars on stadiums is abhorrent?  As noted above the proposed soccer stadium in Minneapolis will cost $150 to $200 million dollars.  The under-construction Minnesota Vikings stadium is supported by nearly $500 million dollars in public funding.  That’s a lot of money.  I don’t know that it’s a huge enough increase though to suddenly turn off the spigot and ban the use of government dollars on sporting venues.  A nifty inflation calculator found at dollartimes.com shows that San Diego’s $27 million dollar bond in 1965 would cost it over $200 million in 2015.  That’s a lot of money too. 

Even 50 years ago in stingy California there was public assistance to build stadiums for professional sports teams.  I was hoping to find some salacious newspaper articles from the time that are having their arguments in essence plagiarized by those who are either on the pro or con side of current stadium debates.  Unfortunately that didn’t happen.  I did learn that public funding has been a part of baseball stadium construction for a long time.  For the record, I have no issue with government dollars being used to build sports stadiums.  I think the question is whether a professional sports team is seen by a community as an asset.  If a community values a team, I think it is perfectly fair for the community to put a dollar figure on the cost it is willing to pay to acquire or keep the asset.  Insert your Vikings and Twins jokes here, I guess.

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[1] Wikipedia’s entry on Dodger Stadium includes this line regarding the City of Los Angeles deciding to scrap plans for the proposed housing development, “[p]roposed public housing projects such as Elysian Park Heights lost most of their support as they became associated with socialist ideals.”  There was not a cite for the line, however.  I would have liked to have learned more about the ideologically dangerous design of the housing development.

When was the first NCAA game to be played in a football stadium?  What did the crowd think?  How much were the tickets?

Watching the Duke vs. Utah basketball game on March 27, 2015, in NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas, makes me wonder.  When did the idea of putting an 82 foot court in the middle of a stadium designed around a 120 yard field become a great idea?  Clearly it came about because of ticket sales, but I don’t think I’m alone when positing that it’s not a great look for college basketball to be played in football stadiums.  So what’s the verdict?

A quick glance at Wikipedia shows that “From 1997 to 2013, the NCAA required that all Final Four sessions take place in domed stadiums with a minimum capacity of 40,000[.]”    That’s not a great help.  Anyone who watched the classic Duke vs. UNLV final in 1992 at the Metrodome in Minneapolis, Minnesota knows that the football venue was used before that.  We’ve got to go deeper into the Wiki-sphere. 

Looking at the venues that have hosted NCAA regional finals, conveniently collected by our friends at Wikipedia, it looks to me like the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, the “Eighth Wonder of the World”, is the daddy of NCAA tourney games played in football stadiums.[1]    Per the site, the Houston Astrodome hosted the NCAA Finals in 1971.  This game clearly followed the success of “[t]he Game of the Century between the University of Houston Cougars and the UCLA Bruins took place at the Astrodome in 1968 before a crowd of 52,963 — the record for the largest attendance ever at a basketball game until 2003. The first National Collegiate Athletic Association regular season game broadcast nationwide in prime time[.]”  Apparently the NCAA Finals in 1971 drew an average of 31,000 people per game and was the trend-setter for NCAA finals to come.  That seems fair, I guess, it’s a huge sporting event and why wouldn’t someone with the means and the desire to see the game want to go?  I wonder what folks at the time thought of going to a basketball game in a football stadium?

The NCAA itself acknowledges that “[t]he first Final Four to be held at a dome was in 1971 at Houston’s Astrodome, but the temporary-seating configuration was not available, which resulted in spectators not having clear sightlines to the raised floor.”  Any spectators at the ’71 Finals want to weigh in?[2]  Googling “1971 Finals Astrodome” led me to a great article in the Houston Chronicle.   Apparently if I thought that watching an NCAA game on TV in a football stadium in 2015 was not the best, that had nothing on the first attempt.  “As Joe Jares, who was covering for Sports Illustrated, wrote: ‘The Astrodome was far more suitable for feeding Christians to lions than for basketball.’”  Further it was reported, “[t]he elevated court, intended by the NCAA to deliver the dramatic effect of a boxing ring, instead left fans in many of the most prized expensive seats craning their necks to see anything except the players' upper torsos at the opposite hoop and kept the scrappier, ball-hawking players in a constant state of jeopardy.”  I love those descriptions.  They may be a bit dramatic, but they express, which I like.

Just for fun, how much were the tickets for the 1971 NCAA basketball finals?  Found one on Ebay showing a Mezzanine box for $8.00.  I wasn’t able to find the exact seat map for the Astrodome, but found from the Georgia Dome website that the Mezzanine level is in between the first and second decks, maybe an idea of etymology would have saved that trip, but those are the breaks.  Eight bucks seems like a fair price for that level of seats.  What do they get today?  Ticketmaster shows that seats close to the middle level of the stadium are going to run you $2,300 or so.  I tried to look on Stubhub but, not caring to go watch a basketball game in a building the size of a blimp hangar I lost interest. 

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[1] I’m aware that the Chicago Bears played an indoor game at Chicago Stadium back in the day, but the venue in my mind was never intended to be a football stadium so I’m throwing the 1953 regional finals played there out.

[2] I am writing this sort of stream of conscious, and am feeling a fair amount of glee when I post the next couple of sentences.

Why do television news broadcasts not have to use the TV Parental Guidelines rating system or at least provide a disclaimer when disturbing images are shown? 

          

I awoke this morning, turned on the television to CBS’s morning news and was luckily able to avoid the rundown of the horrible world events that had occurred in the last 24 hours.  When I caught the program it was in the midst of an interview with Aetna Insurance’s new-age CEO, who was discussing how its customers’ ever-rising insurance premiums were being used by the company to provide gourmet cafeterias, massage parlors, and exercise and yoga facilities for Aetna’s over-taxed and stressed employees.  Nearly any story regarding the insurance industry in the United States can be found disturbing on some level - particularly the blithe admission of those in the know that the system is not working, but it’s our system – but this was not the objectionable news item for me.

Following the insurance/new-age work place lionization, the broadcast switched to a story regarding an effort to increase wi-fi bandwidth and “Vehicle to Vehicle” (V2V) technology and the tension between the two.  The premise behind the story is actual journalism and the main reason that I tune into CBS in the morning rather than the schmaltzy morning news shows offered by other networks.  The concept that news regarding proposed Congressional action and how it may impact a current government program is fit for morning consumption is one that I applaud.  I was grateful for the discussion, it made me think.  It was during the discussion of V2V technology, and the imagery used to present the concept, however, that I was left appalled.

Per the CBS story, V2V technology is currently in development and would allow new cars to use a government provided bandwidth to “talk” to each other and help the driver be more aware of nearby traffic and traffic conditions.  The story described that if the technology was in place today studies showed it could reduce traffic accidents by up to 80 percent and prevent more than 1,000 accident-related deaths per year.  I appreciate information in news programming presented to me in a manner that allows me to use facts to determine whether government funded research, development and dedicated bandwidth should be devoted to V2V, or whether the country would be better served by opening that bandwidth up to enhanced wi-fi availability.  The information in the story was great, the part of the story that I could not comprehend was the images of auto accidents used as the debate was being framed. 

Any American that has traveled in a car is aware of auto accidents.  You see them on the way to work, you hear about them on television and the radio, occasionally there will be footage of an accident that reinforces how truly dangerous highway travel can be.  I don’t object to footage of highway accidents being shown in principle.  Being aware of dangers can help people to be more cautious in the hopes of avoiding those dangers.  What I do disagree with is sensational images used out of context and because they are there rather than being necessary to driving a story.

I believe that CBS used graphic footage of a gruesome traffic incident simply out of a desire to shock rather than drive a story, and in its context I strongly disagree with the images’ use without a disclaimer.  To drive home that V2V might be able to prevent traffic accidents, CBS used the image of a t-bone auto accident, at high speed, at an intersection that a pedestrian happened to be crossing.  The presenter noted that the pedestrian was “only” injured, presumably they would have had better discretion than to show the video had the unlucky pedestrian not survived.  The horrific video however, showed two large trucks rolling out-of-control through an intersection and literally obliterating a human being.  Erasing him from the video.  I am uneasy describing the story as I think back to it.  That sort of imagery is simply unnecessary to further the discussion of whether a dedicated bandwidth should be reserved by the government for V2V technology.  Not being a television producer, I really do not know what the motivation was for including disturbing video in a story that really did not concern the objectionable image.  As a television consumer, I strongly object to being exposed to such pre-planned, disturbing footage without a disclaimer before the story is presented.

Very slight research before writing this shows that the TV guidelines are a voluntary institution and have not been applied to news broadcasts, I am not sure whether this should be the case, but responsible news agencies ought to inform their viewers of the images that accompany their stories.  It’s probably not a new phenomenon, but the news these days is a parade of horribles that from an outsider’s point of view seems designed to shock and disturb.  For the most part I think viewers have come to terms with this and can conform their viewing habits if they wish to avoid stories they don’t care to consume.  I know that I do this.  I don’t care to hear about the latest shocking atrocities, crimes, and diseases.  They don’t make me feel good.  Because of that, I generally do not watch the first part of a news broadcast, or simply switch the channel when one of those topics is being broached.  The news caters to all types of viewers, some of whom presumably are interested in stories that I am not, so changing the channel is not a big deal. 

My hackles have raised this morning because of what I feel was an ambush of shocking imagery in a story that did not call for it, and in a story in which viewers should not rightly expect graphic images.  I expect to be shocked by certain news stories, and so I choose not to follow them.  In a story regarding congressional funding for V2V research and opening up wi-fi bandwidth, I do not expect to see images of a pedestrian getting horribly injured in a traffic accident.  It is pure excess on the part of the broadcaster and is unfair to the viewer. 

In stories such as that presented by CBS News this morning, something must be done to inform the viewer of the images that they can expect to accompany the news item.  Had I been forewarned going into the story that graphic imagery would have been used, I likely would have turned the channel.  It’s my right to determine what I want to see and hear in the morning as I attempt to get caught up on the news of the day.  Starting a day with seeing a pedestrian get maimed is not my idea of fun, nor is it necessary or informative for me.  Had CBS’s presenter disclaimed before the broadcast that the story included graphic images of a traffic accident, I would have changed the channel I think, or at least have been braced for what was to come.  Not being told that, I was shocked by the imagery’s inclusion, and my right to determine how I start my day was taken in a way by an unnecessarily sensational news story.

One could certainly say, ‘Get over it, it may not be the best, but it’s how we do things’, and there would not be a lot that anyone could do, but really who is served by including sensational footage in a relatively bland news story?  There is enough awfulness in the news.  It does not need to be implanted without warning in a story that does not call for it.  

Here's a link to the video from the March 26, 2015, CBS morning news broadcast that I found bothersome.  http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/wi-fi-expansion-could-threaten-v2v-safety-tech/.  Is it going overboard to think that CBS should have warned viewers of the traffic accident footage?