Life After Television   

My TV died in September 1997, and I turned in my cable box the next day. I may not know about the latest trendy TV shows, and I may not know what most of the C-SPAN hosts look like, but I know their voices from C-SPAN Radio.

For the past 10 years, I've kept up with the news worth knowing by radio, reading and the Web. I listened to radio bulletins about the attacks on September 11, 2001, then I worked for 12-and-a-half hours on the copy desk of the Washington Times. I didn't know about the attacks before my brother did – he works in the Pentagon but was elsewhere in the area that day – but I knew what happened before my daughter did.

In 1973, I had the honor of interviewing Walter Cronkite for radio in his CBS News office. Even then, he was saying the nightly half-hour newscast (Broadcast Views, December/January) was only a "headline" service – only 18 minutes of the newscast were news and sports – and that the audience must collect information from many other sources. There's even less real news in a 30-minute newscast today; I've watched them occasionally. Many TV and radio newscasts still cause me to ask: Where's the news in that story? Why was this news?

The major networks have been losing audience for years, but the other sources of information aren't informing that audience. Callers to C-SPAN's "Washington Journal," for example, frequently show how uninformed they are about the issues they are calling about. Many of them are interested only in viewpoints they agree with.

H.L. Mencken, sadly, was right about the American public.

Stephen H. Goldstein
Silver Spring, Maryland