The media in general and television in particular has it share of critics, and in truth much of it is warranted. What the late Hunter Thompson called a “shallow plastic money trench� does indeed present at times large doses of inane programming and “hit-and-run� news segments that bear only the most passing of resemblances to actual journalism.
Often the latest sordid inquiry into the life of a celebrity has more legs than do serious questions about education or health care funding or elderly issues that could affect the real lives of real Americans.
All of those criticisms have merit but they only tell part of the story.
The truth remains, despite the IPods and the Internet and the Palm Pilots, that television is the most powerful means of mass communication ever designed by human beings.
It is a tool and like any tool it is neither good nor evil. The devil is in the deployment.
Despite the fact that such a powerful weapon is often wasted in mind-numbing, exploitative pseudo-entertainment, there are moments, perhaps all too few, when the force and pervasiveness of television can create amazing amounts of good.
Such a moment took place last week when WSEE-TV partnered with three local radio stations to raise sixty three thousand dollars for Katrina flood relief in a single day.
That’s an incredible amount of money for a town the size of Erie given that two other local stations had already done smaller telethons and the well established Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon was earlier in the week.
There was a lot of concern that the giving would be burned out by the time our local plea hit the airwaves but the worrying was unnecessary.
When the phones started ringing they didn’t stop, and car after car stopped by the station so that people could drop off what they could. One man brought a big jar of change. He didn’t have much but he said he just wanted to do something. We heard those words or ones like them expressed over and over again that day.
Television brought the horror of Katrina home to people thousands of miles away and it was television and radio in Erie that helped in a small part give people here an outlet for expressing their willingness to pitch in and help.
I’ll be the first to say that much in television is mindless and depthless these days, and with current economic realities that probably won’t change much in the years to come.
But thanks to the power of the medium it can also on occasion be much more, and it is for those few, fleeting yet shining moments that we who care about our business stay in it.