Old TV static ambience for sleep, relaxation, and deep focus. 9 hours of channel surfing white noise with soft signal drift, static hiss, and subtle audio fluctuations. No talking, just continuous ambient sound. TV static and ambient drift is this week’s episode—the sound of no television signal, i.e., no channel transmitting. I’m old (we’ve discussed this). I realize that TVs today just have a logo bouncing around the screen (yes, I'm thinking of the Office). In the old days, we would see static or “TV snow”—random electromagnetic noise displayed on screen (in the absence of A Current Affair). And that electromagnetic noise gets passed to the TV speaker—“you deal with it” and that sounded like “KSSSSSSSSSSSSSH.” In the old days, when humans got mad at the TV, they had to stand, walk across a room, and turn a knob to change the channel. And many channels were unassigned, so we had to traverse multiple screens of “KSSSSSSSSSSSSSH” before seeing another human talking at us. Speaking of changing the channel—modern cable news... Cable news is essentially sports radio (they even offer betting now). Drive through any major media market (NY, LA, Philly—I love you, Philly! **** the haters) and listen to any sports radio station: bickering, crazy talk that all purports to lay the groundwork for fixing the home team’s problems. One subject that covers the entire day, ad infinitum. There was a point in the ’90s–2000s when television leadership realized their anchor—a stiff doofus reading current events—wasn’t great for keeping eyeballs. And TV heads wanted audiences sticking around for twangy erectile dysfunction ads. Execs realized that arguing and debate among ***holes with insincere smiles and unearned gravitas equaled prolonged viewership. The problem is that on-air talent often doesn’t know what the **** they’re talking about, especially when they drift from the teleprompter. I’ve worked in television (we’ve discussed this too) and have witnessed anchors interject into on-air time with riffing—saying profoundly incorrect ****. One anchor claimed a local basketball phenom with size 18 feet wore bigger shoes “than even Shaq” (Shaq wears, like, size 22). Another anchor, during a breaking live takeover of the US Airways Flight 1549 (Hudson River landing), claimed that whatever caused the plane’s engine to fail must have occurred in Connecticut airspace, because “once you take off from Laguardia you are almost immediately over Connecticut." All you have to do is look at a map to refute that dumb ****... A third anchor notoriously killed whole segments of the 11 o’clock news to make room for ad-libs. How long the show floated unscripted depended on how many beers the anchor had with dinner. Ok, maybe not profoundly incorrect examples... Like these idiot anchors and TV producers, I’m also a communications major, so my criticism is limited to the banal. Yet one needn’t give these TV screws the benefit of the doubt on more complex subjects if they can’t get Shaq’s shoe size right. If you must watch the news, I would suggest you find an independent source you can trust. If I were to suggest guardrails, it would be: follow sources that tell you what’s happening rather than pitting opposing sides to argue about it. If the channel you’re watching brings up a two-box with a couple of ***holes about to square off on anything but Tom Brady—change the channel. PS: Shaq had one of the last awesome Reebok basketball sneakers—the Shaqnosis… For me, it’d be third place to Dee Brown, second to Shaq, first to Allen Iverson’s The Question (honorable mention for John Wall’s weird-looking pair).
