TV – Yawn – Is anything good on tonight?

10/25/2007

Paul Munnis


Likely the biggest value of TV is its ability to teach. That has never been harnessed very well. PBS had a goal of teaching classes over TV but people wanted entertainment and so PBS has gone that route.

In the classroom, we see TV used as a part of Distance Learning and the technology has proven expensive and requires specially equipped rooms. Not all teachers can handle instruction with remote facilities incorporated into the audience.

Some material is static information and lends itself well to being packaged for TV and taught to a student via lecture. With a bit of editing, good clips can be integrated to make even more interesting lecture materials. Algebra is such a course. The last time I was in Britain I saw a morning series on mathematics being taught over ITV and I was so impressed that I called the studio and asked for the distribution rights for North America. I was told that all of the English speaking TV public service stations were in a reciprocity agreement to share materials and that PBS had the rights for North America. I never have seen them broadcast that series as yet. History is good for teaching over TV and the History channel attests to the success of that and so Cable puts it up in the premium channel tier where it isn’t available to many kids in need of it.

One problem with TV as a learning tool is that the material is broadcast and then it’s gone. If you want to review the material it isn’t available for review. The Internet overcomes that problem very nicely. TiVO is a help but the hard drive soon fills up.

Other materials such as a lab course on how to dissect frogs is all about obtaining hands-on experience and is not just about static knowledge. It is experiential and the student needs to experience things and TV is not a good media for that.

The News used to be a good dynamic use of TV but it has now become so editorialized that it’s killing TV. The Lou Dobbs TV news show is a good example of bad news broadcasting. It’s broadcast during the dinner hour when few are watching it.

You would think that live TV coverage of financial markets would be good but the CNBC version uses political commentators to praise Bush for his no new taxes strategy and that is a substitute for objective analysis of both policy and the cause/effect relationships of policy to return on investment.

I see that Rupert Murdoch is now bringing a FOX Business News onto the cable stage and I predict that it will flop for the same reason that CNBC Business Channel is a flop.

Actually Murdoch is lionized for his investment smarts but I won’t buy the stock of any of his protégé companies. The reason is that he is buying up technically obsolete media and his holdings are declining value trash. He owns the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper with shrinking readership. He owns FOX-TV a news channel that alienates half of America and is a media (TV) outlet that is rapidly moving away from a centralized newsroom model towards a distributed Internet model.

Advertisers are chasing the Internet audience and that is leaving traditional TV and Newspapers with empty wallets. Some like the NY Times are wondering if they can still meet payroll if the trends persist. In the meantime the Internet advertising model is propelling search engines like JATO fuel.

I would invest in Google long before I’d invest in FOX and I’d invest in news syndicator on the Internet long before I’d place a penny into the Wall Street Journal. Rupert Murdoch is an old man and he is spending his fortune on his hobbies and so be it.

I have had to chuckle at the Bushies. They came to Washington with the propaganda bent and have used it to shape public opinion. Yet everything they do eventually fails and public opinions then turns against them. Why is that? Largely it is because they are really lousy communicators and they fail to educate the public and sell the public on their rationale for a policy or for an action. The result is that others end up shaping the real public opinion while the Bushies come away with egg on their face.

TV is short on programming and production costs are climbing for quality material and so reality shows are the business model that came from Britain for low cost programming and it’s doing the bulk of the entertainment now. You would think that a Math Education Channel that really teaches people mathematics and the application of math to real life events would really fly but the common denominator is to dumb things down and leave teaching to the public schools. Sounds good but quality measurements show that we are turning out an inferior product. In fact in math -- lots of kids are being left behind.

Maybe somebody will start an Internet Math TV channel, eschew ad revenue, and encourage engineers, scientists, and doctors to develop YOUTUBE like snippets showing the application of math to real life. If the Webmaster puts the theory module in first and then the application modules follow right behind then we will have a great national math channel that some people (of all ages) will use.

I’m getting old now but if someone doesn’t do this soon then I’ll have to do it for it needs doing and a grant to do it is likely available.

TV has the potential but it has fallen short – maybe the Internet can succeed.