Recovery in Japan - Where Is the Media?

How well is the recovery effort in Japan going? During the days and weeks immediately following the earthquake, tsunami, and resulting nuclear power station problems, newspapers and television networks around the world informed the public with a constant stream of status reports. As time passed, these reports disappeared, to be replaced by new hot stories. The news media think the public requires novelty in the news. Ongoing situations do not receive the attention they deserve. Instead, we focus on the disaster, military action, or political scandal of the current day or week. That's also why good news is seldom reported. Good news tends to be ongoing and background information rather than a spectacular event (except for the occasional royal wedding). The other peculiar habit of the news media is that they highlight one to five major events on any particular day, when there are many more newsworthy events happening in the world. Perhaps this will be one of the nails in the coffins of newspapers and television news. They are limited by column space or scheduled time. Internet news is expandable without confines. A web page can either scroll indefinitely or reference links to cover every worthwhile story that is happening anywhere. Now if they paid appropriate royalties to all their copied sources, they'd have a truly superior news presentation system.

Save That Old TV Set

The government is bombarding us with information about the transition of broadcast TV signals from analog to digital in February, 2009. They and all of the broadcast TV channels are saying that if you receive your TV signal via an antenna, you will need to purchase a digital convertor box to continue to receive broadcast TV signals on older analog receivers. This information is absolutely correct, but it implies that your older TV sets without the convertor box will be useless. This part is incorrect. Analog TV sets without the convertor box will still work fine for wired applications such as playing back your video tapes and DVDs. They can also be retained in case you want to someday connect to cable TV networks. They are useful if you want to play back tapes from your camcorder or digital camera. They can even be connected to your computer for larger screen photo and movie displays if your computer has a video output. Older TV sets will be especially useful for permanent setups of video games. Updating to digital and high-definition TV receivers is fine, but don't face those high costs until you feel you are ready for them. You don't have to panic and spend a lot of money replacing all of your equipment. THEY ALSO DON'T TELL YOU THAT THE MOST CRITICAL COMPONENT IN THE CONVERSION TO BROADCAST DIGITAL TV IS YOUR ANTENNA. A weak analog TV signal will give you a snowy or wavy picture. A weak digital TV signal will give you hesitating freeze-frame pictures or a blank screen. With digital signals the picture is either very good or it isn't there at all, and you won't know whether your antenna is good enough until you actually try it.