Reality Show
Inside the Last Great Television News War
Introduction
I grew up with a black-and-white television set on a rusty metal stand in my bedroom, and when you wanted to change programs you had to get up and turn this round metal protrusion-it was, I believe, called a dial -- from Channel 2 to Channel 4 or Channel 7 or the handful of local stations.
This did not seem like a terribly heavy burden at the time. I had, and this may be hard to grasp, no computer. No VCR. No fax machine. No e-mail. No voice mail. No FM radio, no tape cassettes, no DVDs, no music player capable of holding thousands of songs. There were no blogs to read, no Web sites to surf, no video-on-demand to download.
If you wanted news, you bought a newspaper in the morning, and if you wanted more up-to-date news, you bought an afternoon paper, one of which I delivered for a time, stuffing the copies into a canvas bag that hung from my bike's handlebars. And if, during or after supper, which was generally eaten together by families, you wanted the latest available information from the rest of the world, you turned on the ne ... read full excerpt from: Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War ebook
