Abc @ MindSay

Last week, ABC announced that John Stossel is leaving 20-20 for a position at Rupert Murdock's Weasel News. Perhaps that's where he and all weasels belong.

 Some week's ago, I sent the following message to his e-mail address. It was deleted unread. Apparently John reads messages from only people he knows. The message's text follows:

John Stossel, ABC's preeminent 20-20 video journalist, is as shallow as the water in a rill that has not been rained on in a fortnight. Last week he filled an hour with pure right-wing propaganda based on a selection of governmental actions that have not, to say the least, been beneficent in order to justify an unstated but implied conclusion that governmental attempts to ameliorate malevolent conditions should be curtailed if not entirely prohibited so that people could be left alone to solve their own problems. Ah, if only they could!

Although his examples of governmental ineptitude ring true enough to gain the assent of many people, the conclusion John draws is a gigantic non sequitur.

Indeed, bad governments do bad things. So do bad surgeons. But the fact that bad surgeons injure, maim, and often kill patients, doesn't mean that surgeons should be limited to performing only minor procedures or that surgery should be eliminated. Eliminating bad surgeons is the best way of curtailing the injuries and deaths bad surgeons inflict. The same conclusion holds for bad government. No government is not a solution to bad government; good government is. Would John deny that bad journalism doesn't have bad consequences? Wasn't bad, yellow journalism the cause of the Spanish-American War, perhaps even the current wars in the Middle East? Should journalists then be limited to merely reporting events objectively? If so, John's out of a job.

But John and most mainstream economists have an unreal view of economies. What would one say of meteorologists who claimed that the laws of meteorology apply to all weather conditions except tornadoes and hurricanes? What kind of meteorology would that be? Yet John and most mainstream economists totally ignore a vast amount of economic activity about which they have no qualms about governmental attempts to regulate, curtail, and even eliminate. Burglary, robbery, purse-snatching, fraud, the manufacture and sale of so called illegal substances, loan sharking (except when done by banks), prostitution, bribery—all are economic activities. But somehow or other, the invisible hand which is supposed to keep the economy honest without governmental regulation doesn't apply to this hidden, underground economy. How come? Isn't that just like saying that the laws of meteorology don't apply to tornadoes?

Although the evil, greedy, lying, and corrupt may populate government, such people exist in all human endeavors. There is no reason to believe that the proportion is greater in government than in business or (do tell) journalism or the Cosa Nostra. If someone truly believes in liberal and neoliberal free-market economics, shouldn't all of these be unregulated? Shouldn't all be left to the invisible hand?

But the truth is that the invisible hand is the hand of a pickpocket, and it should be treated exactly like we treat ordinary pickpockets. Of course, bad government is unlikely to do that, but no government won't do it either.

And finally, John, a propagandist is not an honest man. Although everyone (perhaps) is entitled to his own opinion, no one has a right to present it as fact. Not even you.

©2009 John Kozy

Diane Sawyer will take over nightly news anchor duties for ABC when Charlie Gibson retires from "World News" at the end of this year, a network spokesman confirmed Wednesday.

Anybody

But

Clinton

 

She already had her two terms in office. Plus, if she is really standing for independent women, then why is her husband doing so much of the campaigning?

Surprise! What happens to be on this evening at 8:30pm and 9:30pm (EDT) on ABC but...

Yes! The Knights of Prosperity!  One of the best underrated comedy series of the year! It was a mid-season replacement which was dwarfed by the Deal or No Deal power machine.  It's a pity that it was; seeing two episodes again tonight made me realize how wonderful the show was.

Premise: one of the working titles of the show was Let's Rob Mick Jagger.  Premise: A janitor (Donal Logue) and his working class buddies realize that there's more to life than their jobs -- so they decide to develop an intricate scheme to rob Mick Jagger's apartment. (Mick makes a cameo in the first episode as an even more flamboyant version of himself.) The group grows closer and closer together as a group of friends who see this not only as a means to easy money, but also as a means to a new outlook on life.

The thing is -- they're all kind of dorks. And anything that can go wrong -- does.

** SPOILERS AHEAD! highlight the text if you want to read it.

And during episode eight -- well, they realize that they can no longer rob Mick Jagger due to some new circumstances.  What can they do? They have to determine who else they can rob. At first they think it should be Kelly Ripa, but our main character falls in love with her instead.  But he finds a perfect mark: someone who demonstrates how unappreciative he is of his own success. Someone whom they feel deserves to be robbed.

And thus -- Let's Rob Ray Romano.

The past two episodes were just that -- their plan to steal from the guy whom Everybody Loves.  Romano plays himself. A sad, pathetic, malicious version of himself.  I never really liked Ray Romano. Nor have I had much respect for him. But now? He gets points for being able to laugh at himself. It's kind of how I felt when Neil Patrick Harris played himself in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.  Romano does wonderfully.

And you know what's great about all of this? The show is on again for two more weeks!

I'm excited. This is good TV worth watching.

These next 14 days or so will be when most of the TV networks will be airing their season finales. And as has been the trend, there's been very little worth watching.  At least from my point of view.  So here's six ideas I have that could help the networks dig them out of their holes.  Which, of course, they won't do.

1. Lose the extended hiatus for serialized shows.  I know that these are the big budget shows, and that it takes longer to finish an episode of Lost or Heroes than it does to do an episode of My Name is Earl or Deal or No Deal.  But the big break is what's killing these shows.  No one cared when Lost came back.  Heroes lost a ton of viewers over their break.  Jericho got canceled cause the break killed it.  A two to three month break on these shows kills interest.  People invest themselves into these stories, and when the stories go away replaced with <insert talent show here>, it's hard to maintain that level if excitement.  Either lose the breaks, or make em shorter.
2. Homogeny drives viewers away.  There's a large LACK of variety on network TV.  Game shows, reality TV, sitcoms, and crime dramas rule the airwaves.  On pretty much every network.  And when you've got 3 spin-offs of CSI, 5 spin-offs of Law & Order, 4 talent shows, 3 big money game shows, and countless cookie-cutter sitcoms on EVERY network, they all look alike.  People are going to Netflix or the cable networks because that's the only place you can find something slightly different, even if it is just reruns of Star Trek or I Love Lucy.  Heroes was a breath of fresh air, and Family Guy capitalizes on all the edgy potential that The Simpsons had their first 3 seasons.  Other than that it all looks the same.  If it's all the same, I've seen it before, and don't need to see it again.
3. Too many commercials.  Everyone complains about this, but it's not getting through to the networks.  I know they make their money by selling commercial time, but that's also time that we have to sit and watch a commercial for Flonase for the 8th time today.  And no, smaller commercial breaks more often isn't the answer either.  This is the one part where product placement is a good thing.  Or product sponsorship, like when Lucky Strike would sponsor an episode of the Honeymooners.  One big long commercial at the beginning, another at the end, and less inbetween.  Use that model on a good show and my ass will stay on the couch.
4. Talent means more than loyalty.  This is aimed squarely at Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, and a few other shows that have been on the air for ages.  They're staples of the network, I understand that.  But just because they WERE good doesn't mean that they still ARE good.  I stopped watching full episodes of SNL after Chris Farley died.  And I stopped watching it altogether after Will Farrel left.  It's just not funny.  I can't tell you the last time I watched a new Simpsons episode.  The shows still have good premises and promises.  But the staff is complacent.  Fire the writers, and for gods sake get Lorne Michaels away from SNL.  That man thought Rob Schneider was hilarious at the same time that he made Chris Rock entirely unfunny.
5. Bring back special episodes and events.  I'm not talking about an episode of Law & Order that mirrors whatever celebrity in legal jeopardy has the headlines this week.  Every episode of The Office it seems has been advertised as "very special", without actually BEING special.  I think it may beat the "very special" record held by Blossom next season.  TV movies and mini-series were watchable because they were either a train wreck (the legion of Amy Fischer tv movies), or were something that we would otherwise never see out of Hollywood (the several Dune miniseries on Sci-Fi).  But they were something that was truely different in the TV schedule, at least for a week or two.
6. Stop trying to compete with HBO and Showtime.  You just can't.  The rules aren't the same.  The Black Donnellys are going to feel muted, restrained, and outright censored compared to The Sopranos.  Reruns of Sex and the City without the sex neuters the show.  And Dennis Franz's bare ass on NYPD Blue doesn't make you edgy.  They're playing rugby with one decade of experience.  You're playing football with half a century of experience.  Don't pretend you're playing rugby when you know how to put on an amazing game of your own.