A video about the Civil Rights Movement, presented a memory trip for me.
As I was entering college in the ‘50s, times were tough for African Americans in the South — but I was terribly unaware in my teens. My home town was segregated, but the beginning of the movement for justice and equality had not pierced the psyche of citizens of Pleasanton, Texas.When television began showing the attempted peaceful demonstrations and the resulting violent confrontations in the South, I became more aware of the inequities and the injustice.
Then, the Vietnam War exploded on my screen on the nightly news and the anti-war movement gained coverage as the war became more unpopular. The images I showed in class are my gift to your understanding of the troubling and incendiary climate of the time.
The whole world was watching. As the saying goes, “You’d have to be there.”
The class history video pulled together the beginning and the growth and broke down some of the most popular programming: comedy, oaters, variety shows, family sit-coms, drama, quiz shows. And all these programs were on only three or four channels.
Not much has changed. We have plenty of lame attempts at comedy, have replaced oaters with police shows, moved the families out of sit-coms and replaced them with attractive, sex-starved men and women and promise millions in winnings for lucky contestants.
The difference? If you have cable, you can bypass all the drivel and choose whatever tickles your fancy.
Next, we will look at how a very basic news package is put together, and we’ll talk about how networks still place programs into their lineup.
Probably the highest stakes "game" in the world is television programming.
According to how well the players do in this game, hundreds of millions of dollars are won and lost each year. The players are primarily the New York network executives who decide what programs should and should not be on U.S. networks, on what day they should be scheduled, and in what time slots.
Stay tuned.