CSotD: Tune in tonight
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Blondie is a strip so settled in its groove that most days you read it out of habit and with fairly low expectations. But when it's not recycling the character-driven jokes — Dithers is a bully, Herb borrows tools, Dagwood likes to eat — there are some gems in there and it's actually one of the better zombie strips.
Yes, damning with faint praise, I know.
Most days, though, the strip is like a relative who tells the same jokes every time he comes over, and you laugh because you like him, not because it's funny. It's comfortable.
But when Dagwood comments on the world, he sometimes hits the mark, and the best gags in the strip come at the diner, at the barber shop or, especially, when he's watching TV. Like today.
The dramatic incident downtown usually turns out to be not much of anything, but they hooked you in and that was the point. They want you to tune in, and they'll say whatever it takes to make that happen.
Worse is when they tease the news with a warning, like "Are your children in danger?" or "This storm could be a killer!" If that were true, they'd have an obligation to break in and give you at least the basics, which is how you know they're probably lying and that, in any case, they certainly don't give a damn about you.
Local TV doesn't have a monopoly on this. On-line aggregators are outrageous liars, and, while I still have HuffPost on my morning news diet, it's become much more of a touch-and-go landing in the last year because 75% of the headlines are misleading if not total fabrications. The entire right hand rail is basically an on-line supermarket scandal sheet and the rest is only slightly below "Bat Baby" level.
But sites like HuffPost are in the business of collecting clicks, not reporting the news. As the old joke goes, "we've established what you are; now we're just dickering over the price." And it ain't a lot.
We should expect more from local outlets.
Back in the days when the threat to local TV was just cable, not the Internet, they started talking about "localism" and it's still the way to save the franchise.
But too often, "localism" has come to mean setting up a web site where people can post pictures of their kids and their dogs. It doesn't mean breaking into programming to let you know the roads are becoming deadly, or, as in today's "Blondie," giving more than a tease about news they claim is important.
This failure to create community is a lost opportunity from a business standpoint, but it's also a more critical lost opportunity because we're losing our sense of local identity as more people identify with narrow demographic groups rather than broader geographically defined ones.
In other words, people get less and less of their identity from where they live than they used to, and they know more about people on another continent who share some particular interest than they do about why the city council wants to upgrade the water treatment plant or what is likely to happen to that nice patch of woods at the edge of town.
We've all got hundreds of friends, but only a handful of neighbors, and that's not healthy for society.
Where I live, we're lucky: We do have one TV station that, in addition to the pictures of dogs and kids, regularly provides quick weather updates throughout the evening and will provide news breaks between shows. It's also the go-to place for things like school closings, either on a crawl on the screen or a listing at the web site.
My only complaint about them is they keep saying that they're the station "where the news comes first" and my mind always adds, "… and then the weather and then the sports."
Check it out: We've got another listing among the independent comic collection sellers in that listing to the right. It happens to be a book I have and can recommend, but what really pleases me is that the "buy it here and I'll sign it" thing seems to be trending. It's not a requirement of the artists, but it's the kind of peer pressure I really encourage.
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