yelvington.com

Jay Rosen points to a thought-provoking speech in which Clay Shirky likens American television to a gin bender that unfortunately has lasted half a century.

All those hours wasted on mind-numbing trash. How many hours? He calculates "two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year," and projects that's enough to create the equivalent of 2,000 Wikipedia projects, assuming Wikipedia encapsulates "100 million hours of human thought."

I certainly agree about the waste of human potential represented by the time we devote to television, which I also think is a major factor in corroding the social fabric of America by keeping us from talking to each other.

I wish I could be so optimistic about our liberation and our future, but my straight-A girls have fallen under the spell of "America's Next Top Model," which my cable system seems intent on running nonstop until either Armageddon or we run out of electricity, whichever comes first.

(I defend my BSG addiction on the grounds that it's artistic commentary on current events and human nature.)

In the print-only "Darts and Laurels" feature of Columbia Journalism Review for March/April, there's a "laurel to Charlie Gibson and ABC for hosting the best debates of the nominating season -- so far." Well, last night, only hours after I posted the complaint "Journalism? Public service? The networks aren't even trying," it seems Gibson and company threw it all away.

I'm judging, however, from the blogospheric uproar today. I honestly did intend to watch the Clinton-Obama debate, but apparently my eyelids closed seconds after I sat down. I think the reason was largely residual jetlag, but perhaps some part of my brain has decided that I've heard enough bickering already.

George Bernard Shaw died too early to enjoy the fruits of 24-hour TV news channels, but his famous condemnation of newspaper journalism would apply: "Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation." Tonight's election coverage is sure to provide plenty of fresh examples. While you're wincing at the usual cacophony, click over to Slate's interactive delegate counter and see for yourself whether it's possible in the remaining primaries for Hillary Clinton to catch up with Barack Obama. Nicely done.

Cory Bergman over at LostRemote points to Action 25 News, a cable TV site for Macon, Ga., that NBC stations all over the country are reporting is a fake set up by Internet scammers selling DVD "training" programs. Apparently the website the website was created to lend credibility by having a fake TV consumer reporter claim you can make $84,000 a year by working at home.

If you think it looks real and believable, it's not just the garish primary colors, smiling faces of the hometown news team, and irritating scrolling marquee ticker. The design was stolen from a real TV website. Looking at the HTML code I noticed metrics and ad tags that quickly led me to WAXN64 in Charlotte, a UHF station affiliated with Cox Television and Internet Broadcasting (IBSys).

After Charlie Gibson's excellent handling of the New Hampshire primary debates Saturday night my hopes for television journalism were temporarily raised, but watching the coverage over the last two days has restored my cynicism. The cable networks may have temporarily pushed aside the likes of O'Reilly and Dobbs, but I still feel like I'm watching coverage of Britney Spears or Anna Nicole.

Somewhere in yesterday's "Hillary tears" and "angry Bill" soap operas it might have been nice to hear someone, anyone, talk about how the New Hampshire and Iowa results are proportionate and not winner-take-all. The delegate assignment system is complicated and perhaps not as visual and visceral as a tear and a quivering voice, but it's important. Where's the coverage? I had to go online to find an AP graph showing me how things stand.

After Clinton finished in the (minority) lead last night I hoped to hear three little words, but I did not. Here they are:

"We were wrong."

I did hear the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC discuss how "the pundits" had gotten it wrong, as if "the pundits" were some mysterious third party.

Overall, it was a poor performance from institutions with the talent and resources to do much better.

As newspapers fade from their historical role in covering world events, we're left with an unhealthy dependency on the newsgathering and news judgment of television networks. Writing for MIT's Technology Review, former NBC reporter John Hockenberry shreds any notion we might have that the networks are up to the task.

A particularly telling vignette:

At the moment Zucker blew in and interrupted, I had been in Corvo's office to propose a series of stories about al-Qaeda, which was just emerging as a suspect in the attacks. While well known in security circles and among journalists who tried to cover international Islamist movements, al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization and a story line was still obscure in the early days after September 11. It had occurred to me and a number of other journalists that a core mission of NBC News would now be to explain, even belatedly, the origins and significance of these organizations. But Zucker insisted that Dateline stay focused on the firefighters. The story of firefighters trapped in the crumbling towers, Zucker said, was the emotional center of this whole event. Corvo enthusiastically agreed. "Maybe," said Zucker, "we ought to do a series of specials on firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras. Like the show Cops, only with firefighters." He told Corvo he could make room in the prime-time lineup for firefighters, but then smiled at me and said, in effect, that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine.

Of course, this is the thinking that led Dateline to the sick voyeurism of "To Catch a Predator."

There's a movement among some of my blogbuddies to line up in the outrage column in the wake of this week's FCC decision on broadcast licensing, which drops a longtime general ban on assignment of new licenses to owners of daily newspapers in the same market.

I just can't get excited about it. It may feel good to carry a lance against big corporate media ownerships, but it seems to me a case of fighting the last war.

Local television franchises are rapidly losing their luster, and today are little more than a "must carry" opening to cable distribution. Audiences are fractured. The sun is setting on both broadcast networks and local affiliates.

Newspaper companies that might have gone on a rapacious acquisition binge a decade ago are now just trying to keep the wolf from getting through their own doors.

And, of course, the Internet makes anyone and everyone a publisher.

If you want to worry about something, worry about Comcast, which the FCC has only begun to deal with (a vote Tuesday caps any cable company at 30% of nationwide subscribers) and, more importantly, net neutrality. If the owners of the pipes that carry the Internet are allowed to start strangling content creators and demanding tribute, we're all in trouble.