[ Wednesday ]
Old News...
A few years ago (about twenty, to be fair), satellite dishes (downlinks) were leading edge consumer items. If you could pony up ten to twenty thousand dollars, you could pick up satellite feeds for 'free'. These were not the 18" dishes that are so common today...the ones from RCA/Hughes such as DirecTV or from the Dish Network. They were the 3 meter dishes, some solid, some mesh, with low noise amplifiers (LNAs) and motorized arms for tracking the orbitting birds.
When dishes were first available, hobbyists and early adopters bought and assembled the devices, and watched the few available channels from the emerging satellite industry. It should be noted that these transmissions were not intended to be viewed by ordinary consumers. Many were raw network feeds from one coast to another, or from a field reporter back to an editing room, etc. Others were programming designed to be re-transmitted by cable companies to their paying subscribers.
Those lucky enough to have a dish in their backyard or on the roof of their building could intercept these signals from HBO, NBC and the like, and watch commercial-free broadcasts. I remember picking up Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show at 7:30 or 8:30pm ET as it was being sent from the west coast to New York for editing, complete with a live mike and video during what would normally be the commercial spots. It was always interesting to see the taped version later that night, and how it differed from the live shooting. It changed not only the way that I viewed televsion, but also my perception of the medium.
Fast forward to present time...
Today, satellite dishes are visible all over the landscape, but their purpose has changed. Dishes compete with cable companies, and are no longer gadgets for hobbyists. Scrambled signals did away with that part of the market, and many of those solid 3 meter C-band dishes became expensvie bird baths. Today, if one wants to see live or almost live coverage, one may choose between the major news networks, or the Internet. Personally, I prefer gathering my news from the Internet.
The war in Iraq has brought this to the surface again. In an effort to stay up on current events, I turned the TV to one of the cable news channels. I got a clip here or there for 30 seconds, followed by 30 minutes of analysis by, in some cases, a news anchor. And if a commercial spot came along, forget about the live action on the screen. "We'll be back to the war in two minutes and five seconds, after this word from our sponsor!" could hypothetically have been the message. I figured that, just like twenty years ago, there had to be a better way.
The Internet...
Since the graphical Internet became popular, I have browsed the same sites that the major media outlets use...Reuters, AP, UPI, etc. Try this little experiment: look up a story from one of the wire services...not the top story of the day, but something of interest like you might find on page two of your local paper. Make a note of it, along with the date and time. Now, wait to see how many days pass before it appears either on network news, or in your local paper. That is what is happening at this very moment.
If you want to view or read breaking news or see good coverage of the war, go to a site such as Reuters.com or even the Al Jazeera site. Some of the footage will be raw video, with or without audio, and in some cases, very graphic and perhaps disturbing in its content. But you get to interpret it for yourself, without Peter, Dan, Tom, Shep, Wolf, etc. It's like watching Monday Night Football with the sound 'off'. And more importantly, at least to me, it is the 'current' in current events, unlike the 'old' news that you will see on this evening's television news or in tomorrow's newspaper.
MM [20:20]
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