I’d Never Have Watched It Anyway

Seems as though the Communist Broadcast System (that would be CBS  to you lot) has decided to cancel some TV show because it sucked.

CBS has decided not to renew the “modestly rated” but notoriously inaccurate military drama [The Code] for a second season, Deadline reported on Tuesday, just one day after the first season finale.

Whatever.  When I was flipping through TV channels on my DirectNOW service the other day, I discovered that CBS has withdrawn all its channels (including the “free” CBS broadcast channel) from the service (which, by the way, is the only service I’m allowed at my apartment complex, to my infuriated irritability because AT&T).  In the future, it seems, the only way I’d be able to watch any CBS channel is to subscribe to their poxy service.  Like that’s going to happen.

No great loss.  It’s irritating, of course, but not really a problem for me.  Other than golf’s Masters  tournament, there’s not a single fucking thing on CBS that I would watch for free, let alone pay for.  (And I’ll just stream The Masters  from somewhere — and if that’s impossible, I’ll just forget about the whole thing.  It’s not like golf viewership is going great guns anyway;  as Baby Boomers are starting to die off, their patronage of golf in general is not being replaced by the younger generations, so fuck ’em too.)

As it is, I’m rapidly getting sick of having to subscribe to every fucking thing I want to read or watch.  Netflix is getting the evil eye from me too, because frankly, their content is starting to suck.  (As with all this nonsense, the demand for content is quickly beginning to outpace the ability to create quality material, so I doubt I’d miss much.  Ditto the so-called “premium” cable TV channels.)

There’s not a single newspaper (paper or electronic) I’d subscribe to either except maybe Britain’s Daily Telegraph, but it doesn’t carry enough U.S. news to suit me.  (As an aside, I loved reading the dead tree Telegraph at Mr. Free Market’s place when I was there on my sabbatical, and if I lived in Britishland I’d subscribe to it in a heartbeat.)  As for American newspapers… oh please, they all suck.  Barely a week goes by without my getting some solicitation to subscribe to the Dallas Morning News, to which my stock response is:  “Stop publishing all that leftwing crap and I’ll think about it.”  It’s not like the DMN  was a quality paper to begin with.

And my habitual response when seeing something like this is simply to click the “Exit” button because I refuse to pay for the whole newspaper when I’m only interested in reading the (very) occasional article.

Not even if it’s a “free” subscription, because just I know you’re going to sell my info to every list strip-miner in the world.

News magazines?  Don’t make me laugh.

Let’s face it:  the news business nowadays is awful.  It’s not just a political issue, either.  As that little pissant in the Obama administration said, young journalists nowadays know absolutely nothing.  My corollary is that the older ones may know a little more, but they’re  all rancid Commies like has-been CBS anchor Dan Rather, so why should I bother with any of them?

Oh, and by the way:  AT&T’s DirectNOW doesn’t offer One America News (OAN), probably the only news channel worth watching for more than five minutes.

Oh well.  Less time reading or watching bullshit-masquerading-as-news means more time available for the range. Just for the hell of it, I think it’s time to break out the old Browning 1885 High Wall (.45-70 Govt).

Now that’s  what I call entertainment.

9 comments

  1. I don’t have any TV service except Prime/Firestick and Netflix which gets more sucky every month. I used to enjoy sports until the chattering heads, who never shut up, made it unbearable to be a viewer. Now I only watch the occasional entertaining movie that I find by looking at a hundred or so choices and from time to time I watch an older sitcom or cop show mostly ten years old or older. My wife watches the funny talking Brit mystery shows while she knits, other than that the thing stays turned off.

    I gave up on TV news years ago, here in the San Antonio area it is even more stupid than Dallas which I did not think possible, yet there it is. Same for Newspapers which have been going down hill for decades. Through the 1990’s I was an advertiser in the Dallas Morning News and I watched the writing turn to crap as they started using more wire service and press releases while not replacing the old beat reporters who actually knew the city but hired young inexperienced, fresh out of college kids who had trouble writing complete sentences and the editorial staff had been cut back so far the stories went to print as written by young lefty idiots. All of this was, and is going on while advertising rates went up and circulation (DMN got caught lying) was falling.

  2. +1. 99% crap on the airwaves today. We have a mid-level ATT package with a few channels my wife enjoys. I’d just as soon watch ‘Tank Chats’ on YouTube. At least I can watch them on our flat screen TV.

    I was chatting on the phone with our oldest son Sunday evening. On this topic, he made the comment that he was trying to do more reading, and had in fact just finished Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls”. He remarked enthusiastically “I’ve never read anything like that before”. Warmed my heart it did.

    Another +1 on 45-70, especially out past 200 yds. I started casting and loading for that round in 1978. Now have five rifles in that caliber, including an original Trapdoor Springfield rifle.

  3. I built my own newspaper feedly.com – that’s where I get the RSS feed of your site in my favorites so I read you and Mike Williamson first thing with the morning tea.

  4. i have dish and can get cbs with a digital antenna. not that the have anything worth watching

    COMMUNIST BROADCASTING SYSTEM. seems to be what they are anymore

  5. ” having to subscribe to every fucking thing I want to read or watch. ”

    It’s kind of hilarious watching all these content providers spinning up their own new streaming platforms. Do they really think people are gonna pay $8-10 a month each for CBS, NBC, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Disney, etc.? (No, I’m sure they think THEIR platform will be the one people spring for.)

    I pay for Netflix & Hulu and I barely watch Netflix these days; I just haven’t gotten around to cancelling it yet.

    1. Of late, Hulu has the content my family and I watch anyway. They also have stuff that just the wife and I watch (e.g. South Park, Letterkenny). We cut the cord a while back and we’re actually looking at cancelling Netflix and we’ve been Netflix subscribers since they were DVD delivery only.

  6. Not even a TV in the house here, but the computer takes up the slack time. As a kid I stopped watching TV when I discovered Star Drek was a powerful propaganda outlet, and then I began to see it everywhere. I read books, listened to music, and it was a real treat to see movie in the theater. Now even the movies suck, they’re all comic book fantasies with political agendas. Hollywood is incapable of making anything honest or truthful.

  7. The warehouse I spend all my non-office time in didn’t have cable or internet availability when I moved there eleven years ago. It does now but I haven’t felt the need to reconnect. I knew it was time to cut the cord when I turned my cable box in so long ago. The kid tasked with keeping me as a customer said “Why Mr Kephart? You’ve been a customer since before I was born!” I buy and watch dvd movies, series and documentaries, mostly old stuff. I’ve never been a sports ball fan so it’s not a burden.

    Just think. I’ve only seen a handful of commercials in the last decade and the only place I see cable news is in the waiting room at my Cadillac dealership. I don’t have a smart phone and the three days a week I’m at the shop, I’m totally off the grid. It’s glorious !

  8. North TX papers: Has the Star Telegram succumbed to the sickness that has befallen all the others? When TX was first starting to turn red, that was the site for news – but that was a long, long time ago.

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