When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s, I thought I was being deprived because my immigrant parents had a thing about not getting a TV in the house. This actu

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s, I thought I was being deprived because my immigrant parents had a thing about not getting a TV in the house. This actually forced me to grow up as an avid reader, which I realized only years later proved a great long-term benefit. Back then (and into the 60s and 70s), TV was wholesome enough but highly limited: mainly three networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) that gave us news, variety shows, and old style sitcoms such as the Beverly Hillbillies and a few local UHF stations that mainly featured old movie reruns. Apart from the "all-night" UHF station, most stations signed off by midnight and then went silent for the night, using an "Indian" image or some equivalent to alert viewers to the fact that they were off the air. I would say, throughout that entire period, that TV was for me what I would call a pleasant time-killer. I wouldn't watch that much of it but, after working like a fiend all week doing my studies and working odd jobs to pay my tuition, it was pretty relaxing to settle back into a sofa and just passively watch something - an old movie, a sports event, a stupid comedy, or whatever - without any demands being made upon me. That was the appeal: a mostly mindless diversion with occasional drama when some important news event captured the nation's fancy (e.g., the Apollo 13 drama). Today, with cable and with digital channels, TV has far more variety with its countless channels and its ubiquitous round-the-clock presence but it remains for me a mostly mindless sinkhole for my time whenever I get caught up watching it, which is not too often. Network news has been largely displaced by wall-to-wall coverage by cable networks of whatever story it is they want to pound to death, with an emphasis on "reality" stories (e.g., what is today's tidbit of information that we can add to the story of the missing teenager who vanished in the Caribbean?). Reality-TV formats are everywhere, creating voyeuristic opportunities to watch people interacting with one another in this or that setting and featuring really nothing more than the personalities of the participants as points of interest. All this and more is for me little more than the "vast wasteland" that Newton Minnow called TV back in the 1960s, with the quality of programming having settled in at a level of almost mind-numbing banality. That said, TV is nothing more than a medium and will always feature this or that item that is indeed interesting or stimulating. It just is not a good habit to find oneself continually caught up in it. Used selectively, it can be just fine for occasional entertainment or for particular items of news or commentary. Not normally very profitable but nothing to be too critical about either.