Gary's essay again brings up my problems with mass media, especially with TV.
Why does the evening TV no-news simply repeat day after day the same stories? ONCE would be entirely sufficient. They go on endlessly about traffic accidents, burglaries, murders, drug crimes, child abuse, leaving no room for anything positive,except maybe the routine ONE story about vets helping poor kids,
or Marines collecting toys for tots, or maybe even the Food Bank.
For five negative crime reports, they offer one positive story about people being helpful. My local NBC Channel weekly broadcasts charming footage of Wednesday's orphan child, but we never ever are told if the poor kid got adopted, nor if this segment ever gets results. Thus, IMO this program merely serves as more sensationalism. (At least the crime stories usually end
up telling us if the perp got tried and sentenced.)
Now we all must convert to digital TV. I just might decide to dump it, and view what I want online.

I applaud your civic initiative, Jo. If no one tells producers why we don't consume their product, they may never know. It seems reasonable that they'd reconsider what they do, actually make, to be more responsive, if they want to accommodate user demands and needs. Makes me wonder "what if" more people did as you, individually or in groups.

TV networks ain't necesssarily gonna know (automatically) when individuals stop watching them (or watch less), since pollsters don't track everyone (I was called but once in my life by a pollster); newspapers and magazines have a one-to-one relationship, however, known as subscriptions and magazines stands sales.

So if someone's to stop watching tv (unplug the plug-in drug) it would take a letter or phone call for the tv executives to know about it ... and why.

No, I don't have emails for any executives. Rather, I do a great deal of investigative research via phone. That's how I got through to a vice president at a tv network, who gave me his "Fear is our greatest product" quote. (He may be a VP at another network by now; who knows.) In the ecology of today's communications I wonder if anyone reads unsolicited faxes or emails, whereas a phone call is quite evidently present (albeit at a much lower baud rate); "in your face," as they say.

I don't know if Republicans or Democrats have been better than the other when it comes to these questions: a blog reader might wish to chime in. I recall Ken Burns' adaptation of "Empire of the Air," where the air waves were shown being colonized, as it were, by the gummint; I remember when FCC still required a certain amount of air time to be devoted to community, eventually squeezed down to one-minute bytes before being jettisoned altogether.

Top-down isn't the perspective, however, I prefer. It's this bottom-up vista, such as with blogs, which is so much more interesting today. Here we create and consume our own content, and thus we also have access to each other. As opposed to us and, say, Stephen Spielberg, or Rupert Murdoch.

P.S.
Seeing it from their p.o.v., another reason why digging out the good news is harder for news media, than the bad: the wire services and police blotters are all easy feeds, like an open faucet; going out and finding something else, on the other hand, requires "enterprise reporting" (giving a report a long leash, and an investment of time), investigative journalism, more labor-intensive (like sushi), etc. Here again the idea of "civic journalism" can be a pivotal point of departure: the journalist has only to consider his or her self as a neighbor, part of a community, in an active sense.