by Kevin Burton People worldwide are unplugging from the news, according to a Reuters Institute study. We just don’t want to hear it. I grew up with the Dayton Daily News on the doorstep every morning and the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite a regular part of the early evening. Local …
Category Archives: television
Will Bengals Say Goodbye To Eli Apple?
by Kevin Burton There were storms in the KAKE-land viewing area Thursday night, so I made a choice right away. I said and I meant it, that the very FIRST time our local ABC affiliate broke away from the NFL draft for something as frivolous as a storm warning, I was out. I …
Video Killed Your Imagination, Not Radio
I think I’m done writing about MTV and Clear Channel for the moment, but I have one more thought on that Buggles tune, “Video Killed The Radio Star.” I raised the question without answering it in my Friday story: “If you could get your favorite top 40 hits, with pictures, moving pictures, wouldn’t that …
Clear Channel (iHeart) Killed The Radio Star
by Kevin Burton In the old days we turned on our radios for music, for news, for sports and weather forecasts, and we got all those things. But what we really loved, and what kept us coming back for more, was the way those things were delivered, something that was woven throughout the …
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Raised On Radio: MTV And Killer Video
by Kevin Burton In J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Sound-Sweep,” the main character is a non-verbal boy who has the job of vacuuming up all the stray sounds in a world without music. He befriends an opera singer living in an abandoned recording studio. The opera singer is destitute, having been displaced from …
Why Do We Love March Madness So Much?
by Kevin Burton In the bad old days, being without a girlfriend, or a date, or even a prayer, on Valentine’s Day was a sharp searing pain to the psyche. Now by comparison, being without a basketball team for the big dance, or even the little dance, is a dull ache. March Madness is …
Note To Bengals And Self: Don’t Lose Stupid
by Kevin Burton Two takeaways from Sunday’s Chiefs-Bengals AFC Championship game, one a smirking aside, the other more lasting. To set up the first one, I remember when the late great John Madden had just left his brilliant career as Oakland Raiders coach and just begun what would prove to be a brilliant …
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Bengals Roar, Bills Snore, Cowboys Lose
My father used to say that NFL games were fixed. Then and now I scoff at that, but sometimes I wonder. Like Sunday, when Buffalo was so passive and so awful in a blowout 27-10 loss to Cincinnati. Maybe this is just me needing to adjust my expectations for teams as they coalesce …
When Thumbs Up Doesn’t Come, Then What?
by Kevin Burton When I was a sort of young beep baseball player, I had a team mate who always talked about heart guards. Beep baseball is baseball for blind players. The ball is slightly bigger than a softball and depending on who made the ball, it can be quite hard. When …
A Language That Goes Beyond Words
by Kevin Burton Surely you’ve heard this old joke: What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who speaks only one language? American. A wicked, sweeping generalization that. Not entirely fair. But …
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