Growing up with TV all my life, I tend to take it for granted. In the present day, TV’s seem to be going out of fashion, or at least cable. A majority of people I know, including myself, usually find ourselves watching shows, videos, or movies on our phones, laptops, or tablets. Occasionally the TV in my suite is used for a movie night here and there, but that’s about it. Whereas I remember when I was little, I would wake up, watch TV. Eating lunch, watch TV. Bored, watch TV. Going to bed, watch TV. I remember when I would run off the school bus to sit down and watch some cartoon on Cartoon Network until it was time for me to do homework. It was a constant in my everyday life, as I’m sure it was in many others, but one day that just stopped being the case. One thing I’m sure I didn’t run into too much when I was younger and watching television was politics. Maybe there were some veiled political comments in my shows that I was too young for, but until later on in life, it wasn’t something I encountered.

As seen in the reading and the documentary we watched this week, Rod Sterling: Submitted for your Approval, television has seemed to flip and flop on the idea of politics being a part of the shown programming. Obviously, around the 70’s shows started to pop up that had a bit more political commentary in them, both direct and not. But then, there’s a change of heart. Once real life becomes “too political” all traces of commentary almost disappear from any entertainment type show. News channels still exist and such, reporting on the pressing current events of their time, but entertainment shows start to change. You can also kind of see this within the Rod Sterling documentary. He discusses the desire to make social and political comments and discussions, but brings up that no one would want to buy that show and allow him to broadcast it. To get someone to purchase his show The Twilight Zone, he had to veil it as something magical and fantasy. Even after being seen as something fantastical, Sterling still had to disguise his views and lessons within fiction of the show. He would never be able to make an episode about racial tensions or lynching, or the evils of man happening in his very present, but changing that into something people can feel distant from at first glance, he was able to broadcast it.

Even with television never being sure it’s opinion on politics in shows, this mass media brought consumers to a higher level of awareness than before, regarding what was happening in the world. Kennedy’s assassination, images from Vietnam, etc. all were shown to a brand new audience and it gave people a much more confrontational form of news that other mass media doesn’t seem to provide. The images from Vietnam sparked protests and then it was clear how different the public’s participation would be in events like this. To this day, television and internet push this kind of awareness on the public, that with out these methods of mass media, might have never come to exist. You can see it today with Black Lives Matter and even recently the reveal of forced sterilization in ICE camps. The everyday person is seeing this news and the horrible brutality and injustice against BIPOC, and can find ways to act on their opinion about this. Throughout the BLM movement, I’ve noticed a lot of debate about television news verses social media/the internet, mostly about who is reporting about what. I wonder if television is possibly about to go through another time of shows with no political presence and only news commenting on that kind of thing. Maybe things have progressed too far for that to be able to happen. The time we’re in now seems to be so similar to the past, yet so unbelievably different.