The Written Word
for January 28, 2001

You have to be forced to watch afternoon television in order to know how bad it is. I go on the treadmill for 30 minutes a day and unless my schedule permits me to hit the 3:00PM BBC World News I might just as well listen to music.

CBC Newsworld is appalling. When I consider what we pay the "Mother" Corporation it makes me want to throw up. It is so Central Canada dominated, with an exception I’ll mention in a moment, that it sounds like Gesteleradio out of Moscow before the Soviet Union broke up. I am not a Canadian Alliance member and while I editorialized in their favour in the last election that was because of Mair’s Axiom II which says, of course, "you don’t have to be a 10 in politics, you can be a 3 if everyone else is a 2. Stockwell Day was a 3 in a sea of twos and besides, how could anyone in their right mind vote either NDP or Liberal? But Day never had a chance. Much of the reportage on him and the Alliance was sneering, some of it was outrageous … all of it was clearly biased against them. Which is the long way of saying that I cannot trust CBC and thus don’t watch it.

The exception to the eastern bias is Ian Hanomansing and the four o’clock version of the news which is simply terrible even though it is supposed to emanate from Vancouver.

So what else is there besides Oprah and old movies and golf infomercials?

Well there is CNN. And it can be OK – especially for the news at the top of the hour. But if you miss the top of the hour you can and often are exposed to little other than warmed over CNN features, usually with some airheaded young woman who, over and over again, tells us about getting drunk in Iceland and Sydney Australia. CNN was good to watch during the election and the post election fooforaw but now that’s all behind us, it’s pretty tame fare. Sports are an option but in the early afternoon all you’ll get is an old soccer game or idiots riding motorcycles up and down hills.

My preference will tell you how bad it is. I watch the CNN all news channel, in my area channel 19. There’s no depth to it but at least you know that in a half an hour your mind will be kept off the sweat pouring off your brow and the endless whirring of that damned treadmill.

You’re perhaps wondering why I don’t listen to the radio and the answer is simple – I need a distraction for the eyes as well as the brain. If I don’t have my eyes occupied they stray to the timer on the treadmill and every minute seems like five.

Now, if someone would just invent a decent gizmo that would hold a good sized book, be placed so that your eyes don’t wander to the timer and would enable you to turn the pages and hold them where they are turned to, salvation would be at hand.