I was reading Roger Ebert’s excellent piece about the sad template that Bill O’Reilly is currently etching, and it occurred to me that the problem on the 24-hour news network isn’t the creeping partisan politics masquerading as news, it’s the networks themselves.

Consider: prior to the 1980s, the national news was a half-hour long and took place once a day. Paltry? Probably. But also well researched, fact-checked, and thought-out.

Before the advent of continued news coverage, the people charged with reporting the evening news took the time to consider what was important, how to frame it so that the relevant parts were underlined, and, finally, how to present it so that everyone in America could understand it. This wasn’t because they were geniuses, it was a function of having 23 and 1/2 hours a day to work on the problem: there was time to try to get the news right.

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Comedy Central

(Week of November 10, 2008)

Hey, kids! It’s time for a quick round-up of highlights from this week’s episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The boys are still doing fine, despite the fact that with each day comes another reason to be a little less bitter about the state of the government. That is not to say there aren’t plenty of hot topics, because there totally are. Prop 8 and gay marriage seemed pretty popular this week, and, boy, did people have things to say.

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Fox

This week, my brain clacked about The Observer, Madonna the hypocrite, and so much more. See if you agree with my thoughts:

The Observer is a stroke of genius. Not only are viewers tuning into Fringe every week to catch a glimpse of him, they’re recording the show and playing it back to find him (note: he was in the German airport in this week’s episode). My son actually text’d me from school on Wednesday, because he and his buddies were talking about Fringe. Remember the line in this week’s episode, “Where does the gentleman live?” My son thinks The Observer is the gentleman, and he lives in Little Hill. If only we knew what or where Little Hill is. Some place deep in the earth’s core, perhaps?

The girls on Fox News are all cute, blonde and skinny. Why is this? I have some theories: 1) It’s in Bill O’Reilly’s contract; 2) Because the network is named Fox, all the women have to BE foxes; and 3) The girls actually come in plump, brunette models, but are given magic makeovers that turn them into skinny blondes (Criss Angel on staff, perhaps?).

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ESPN

My father is of the belief that certain old-school views of manhood ought to be brought back into our sometimes too-PC society. In fact, when he talks about my generation of men, wrapped as we were in the warm glow of mandatory self-esteem training, he uses words that rhyme with “Mussy” and “Bomo”.

There’s a laundry list of formerly male activities that have been protested out of polite society, but the thing my father feels we’re missing most is fighting. In the old days, apparently, if two boys on the block didn’t like each other they didn’t peer mediate; rather, they punched each other repeatedly until one boy learned his lesson. This taught you how to a) take a punch and b) not to be a sniveling little shit who made people want to punch you.

Watching Around the Horn today, it occurred to me that my father was right. Growing up without the threat of a ham-sized fist knocking the snot right out of them has created a generation of TV personalities that are almost unbearable. To paraphrase Michael Scott: I don’t blame them, I blame society. These five TV personalities might just become worthwhile human beings if someone could just get around to punching them square in the face …

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