War vs. Basketball

The BBQ Pit
1

Just to be clear, I am strongly opposed to the war in Iraq, but I have nothing but good hopes for those who will be fighting that war, and I sympathize with those who will have loved ones involved who will be eager for every scrap of information available.

That said…
http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaab/news?slug=ap-ncaatournament&prov=ap&type=lgns

I do not have cable. This is because I just don’t enjoy watching television all that much. The few network shows I tune in for, plus the good HBO shows I’ve been able to download, are more than enough to satisty my need for the glass teat.

However, there are times when the TV is worth its weight in gold. For at least a couple of weekends in March, I know that I can park my ass on the couch, beer fridge in reach and Foley catheter in place, and subject myself to a steady stream of quality basketball on God-bless-it network television.

But this year? Instead of that highly anticipated matchup between Creighton and Central Michigan, I’ll adjust the tinfoil flags on my rabbit ears only to find Dan Rather spouting inane Texas-isms, young wives holding young babies holding tiny American flags weeping about the day their man had to leave, and endless loops of poor footage of expensive missiles going down chimneys, cutting off before we have to see the people inside burning to death.

Look, CBS…just because you can take five minutes of news and stretch it into 24 hours doesn’t mean you should. A lot of people are going to need something else to think about, and basketball is a prime candidate. (Especially when Kentucky’s going all the way!)

Besides, those who want 24 hour coverage of the war and have cable can find it elsewhere. Right-wingers have Fox News, left-leaning centrists have CNN, confused people have MSNBC, and progressives have…well, we can go read the damn Nation, I guess. Even those who don’t have cable would still be able to find all the war they can handle on ABC and NBC.

Come on, CBS–be an island in a sea of bullshit. If, by chance, something of importance happens in the war during the Xavier vs. Troy State game, you can run one of those little message things across the bottom of the screen. Break in at halftime, if you must. Just let us enjoy some damn basketball.

Dr. J

2

Interrupt March Madness for some piddling invasion? :eek: Have the network execs gone mad?!? That’d be like cutting off an NBA playoff game to show live footage of a white Bronco crawling down some LA freeway with a horde of police cars in tow. It’ll never happen. No one in charge of programming could be so misguided.

What was that?

Oh.

Never mind, carry on your business. I was never here. I didn’t say a thing.

3

IMHO, when the country’s at war is when we most need the release of sitting on a couch and watching a ballgame.

There just won’t be enough going on with the war to really justify a round-the-clock coverage on a broadcast network. I know they’ve said they think they must do so to satisfy the FCC public-interest mandate, but I disagree. The broadcast networks didn’t go round-the-clock for Gulf War 1. They did, IIRC, one night’s worth of coverage when it started, then just broke in with any substantial info as it became available. They left the 24-hour coverage to CNN. Surely the FCC doesn’t really think that everyone has to go to constant coverage for this, what’s the point?

If I want to see the war, I’ve got all three news channels next to each other on cable, I can just tune in and browse between them. Since I’m not fighting in the stupid war, I should be able to get away from it if I want to by watching normal programming, why must I be trapped into watching what I imagine will be a boring coverage of some war I really don’t give a crap about? I don’t mean to be insensitive to the people fighting there, I wish them all the best, but I just think that after 9-11 and that coverage I just don’t have the interest or the desire to immerse myself in this sort of thing.

4

all I can say is, I bet the networks are pissed the war won’t be happening during a sweeps week!

5

What is likely to get bigger ratings? War coverage that is being duplicated on at least 8 other stations (some basic, some cable) or the greatest sporting event on earth that would offer some alternative viewing option. It’s not as if games run 24 hours a day. Between games, give us news. When games aren’t on, give us news. Something major happens, scroll it by and inform as necessary.

Then again, I have Dish Network and I get every channel a game might be on so I am a little more flexible here.

6

Hmmmm…college basketball or a war. And people wonder why Americans don’t know what’s going on outside the country.

7

All’s I have to say is if they interrupt a Duke game or the Final Four there’s going to be a fight. And not the big woo-ha we’ve got big guns and a desert country to point them out either.

8

Well that’s just silly. This isn’t an either/or situation. If CBS shows basketball, there will still be hundreds upon thousands of outlets to watch, listen, or read about the war and surrounding issues. And, I think people are still intelligent enough to watch some basketball games while also keeping current with world events. It’s not like hearing the Stanford-San Diego score is going to push out the knowledge that Iraq is located in the Middle East.

9

Ugh that pissed me off when that happened.

10

No, sorry. War is so infinitely more important than basketball it’s ridiculous to even be complaining that a network is covering the war rather than basketball.

If it needs to pre-empted, it needs to be pre-empted. That’s that.

11

No one is arguing that basketball is more important than war. We’re suggesting that you can be both concerned about what’s going on overseas AND enjoy a momentary diversion from the war and destruction by watching basketball.

12

Sorry, Neurotik, but I have to agree with the others, especially RexDart.

I don’t watch basketball, but I think it will be all right to have that on one channel while every other station will be showing repeats of war footage for hours at a time.

As Rex said, after 9-11, I really don’t want to be saturated with these images day-in and day-out. Watch another channel, listen to the radio, read a magazine or newspaper, check it out on-line. One TV network showing basketball instead people dying won’t hurt anybody.

13

Spoken like a true Kentucian, DoctorJ. If I may hijack this thread a bit, how far do you have the Cards going? I say they lose to Oklahoma in the Sweet 16. Nothing needs to be said about how far the Cats will go, of course. I think you and I already know the answer to that one.

14

Every channel should be showing people dying (that came out wrong, but you get my point). You shouldn’t get a diversion from this war. It’s not just another TV show. It’s not just something going on. Those American troops aren’t going to get the option to change the channel. Neither will the Iraqis.

15

So I suppose you won’t be going to work either, or driving? Or listening to music? Just the same news blurbs (since there will be very little information at first) repeated over and over? Sounds like a good way to drive yourself insane.

Some of us have therapists that have advised us specifically to do anything but listen to news about the war. what would you suggest they do? Sit in the dark?

16

Right jbj. Don’t you remember how this country was affected by 9-11, Neurotik? After only a few days people were shell-shocked from watching carnage 24-7.

There is a huge difference between patriotism and media-inspired masochism.

As for those soldiers, they weren’t drafted: they joined the military and now the military is going to hold them to what they promised to do.

17

And if I’m not mistaken, even the soldiers have a radio and television network that allows them to…

wait for it…

watch sports.

18

Yeah, well, I get your point, but that’s impossible. There are plenty of non-TV diversions, so even if it was on every channel, there’d still be many other ways to waste some time. Given that, and given that a lot of other channels will feature all-war all-the-time programming, I wouldn’t have any problem with CBS sticking to college basketball. Though I do have the cable channels in question, so it’s not a huge deal to me.

Personally, I have no interest in watching war coverage, regardless of the alternatives. I wateched about an hour of 9/11 coverage and then spent the next week or two avoiding network tv (and the cable news channels, but I never watch those anyways). Coverage of these types of events appears to be repeating the same information over and over, broken up with a parade of “experts” speculating about the event. How is this worthwhile? The actual information that each day produces could be delivered in a 30 minute nightly news program, with enough time left over for a update on the latest panda-mating news at the San Diego Zoo.

19

How about this for a compromise? Have the basketball video but the news audio. Admittedly, basketball vocabulary doesn’t have the same ties to war that football vocabulary has, but I’d bet it’d synch up pretty well. Heck, I watched the Darlington 400 yesterday while listening to the press confrence in the Azores.

20

Actually it is “just something going on.” It’s something that’s been going on pretty much nonstop somewhere on the planet since television was invented. It’s been going on somewhere on the planet almost everywhere almost all the time for the vast majority of human history. War is about the most everpresent, constant, and frequent event in the world. Frankly, it’s not that unique or special.

I get your point, you think that if people are basically forced to watch what you expect will be a bloody conflict that they’ll better understand the costs of war. Maybe so, but there’s alot of things we’re better off not seeing. Maybe I wouldn’t enjoy a nice bbq pork steak as much if I had to watch a video tape of hogs being slaughtered every time I cooked one, but I’d much rather eat a nice piece of pork than have that image in my mind, and it’s my choice. We choose all the time to block things out for our own convenience, to make our decisions easier. Since John Q. Public doesn’t make US policy decisions, I say let him have the freedom to ignore the war and any or all of it’s consequences, just as he and everyone else in this country basically ignores 99% of the wars that are going on right now across the globe.

Since I’m neither an Iraqi nor, as of this moment, a member of the American military, I should have the freedom to basically ignore the war if I so choose. I didn’t make the war, I didn’t start the war, and I personally oppose just about every single foreign policy decision over the last 50 years that has created the situation in the Middle East that’s forcing this government’s hand. I’d rather watch a basketball game then watch 4-5 hours of the same stupid footage of some smart bomb hitting a munitions factory, so that’s what I’ll do. And when the games aren’t on, I’ll just head out to the park and play some disc golf, or go up to the gym and ride the bikes that aren’t near the tv sets, or go for a drive in the county.

Let CBS have their games, and let people keep the freedom to avoid witnessing life and death. Those soldiers are out there fighting this war, and the reason we have a standing army is so that at least some segment of society doesn’t have to face the constant torment and upheaval of war. If you thought about how marvelous that was, that after centuries and millenia of war being everpresent in the lives of everyone from beggar to king we finally have a world in which some people don’t have to confront bloody death on a regular basis, you’d appreciate just how great the freedom is to turn that channel.