We can complain about “500 channels and nothing on” all we want, but the fact is that TV has never been better, though I doubt if anyone would claim that TV news, either on the networks in the evening or all day on the cable channels, is one of the reasons. Network TV news was a crippled beast when Network won its Oscars and a dying animal when Broadcast News got seven nominations, losing to Moonstruck, Wall Street and The Last Emperor — all movies that would never get made today unless they found backers at HBO, Netflix, AMC, IFC, Amazon or Hulu.
It’s hard not to conclude that the people who called Network prescient were usually the sorts of people who believed that TV news told hard truths and that newspapers were signs of a healthy democracy. And it’s a worthwhile rule of thumb that whenever something is called prescient, it’s usually because it’s predicting something as dated as the evening news.
