Well, I was home on Veterans Day here in the United States, and I can tell you that all the Cable and the Big Three TV Networks care about is the amount of revenue they receive from running commercials and attracting as many eyeballs as they can to their particular channel.
90th Anniversary of Armistice Day; 50,000 American soldiers who gave their lives during the First World War.
Does the Establishment in our society pause and take some time to remember them? The men who served our country and sacrificed their lives for their freedom to own commerical TV networks and stations, run mindless television programs, and receive millions of dollars for one minute television commercials.
The Answer: no.
There was nothing of any substance on television here in the United States about Veterans Day.
None of the major TV network affiliates (ABC, NBC, CBS) ran any special programming to remember the men and women who served and who are now serving this country.
There was nothing about World War One; nothing about the Armistice.
MSNBC ran about 6-7 minutes of Vice President Dick Cheney's speech at Arligton National Cemetery Veterans Day Ceremony, and then cut him off to run commericials and never returned to the Ceremony.
None of the other Cable News Networks (CNN, Fox News) showed any of the Arlington Ceremony.
I forget exactly what the other Cable News networks were talking about while the Arlington Ceremony was taking place; one station, either Fox or CNN (I think it was CNN) was talking about Michelle Obama and her impact on womens' fashion here in the United States.
CNN, about noon, did talk briefly about some WWII veterans' stories during the day (I saw about a 4 minutes segment).
None of the local major TV network affliates (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox) showed the Arlington Ceremony.
We do not have a two minutes silence that's observed in the United States.
The History Channel did run some military history programming; one show was about the Iraq war; almost all of it was about WWII.
They did run one of their "Dogfight" programs, which for about half an hour (including commerical breaks) did talk about American WWI Flying Ace Eddie Rickenbacker.
Then the second half of the show was about a WWII dogfight.
Only the Cable System Public Affairs channel, C-SPAN, showed the Arlington National Veterans Day Ceremony live.
For about 10 minutes, however, their microphone lost the sound, so they changed to some filler "talking heads" programming, but they were able to get the sound back on before the Vice President made his speech.
I watched NBC Nightly News at 6:30PM, and besides briefly mentioning that it was Veterans Day and showing Cheney lay the wreath at Arlington and Bush giving a speech at the USS Intrepid in New York City, NBC had no news segment about the First World War or the 90th Anniversary of Armistice Day.
If anyone knows if NPR Radio in the U.S. ran any special Veterans Day programming or about the Armistice and the First World War, I would appreciate your comments.
All in all, these Cable and TV networks disgust me.
It is all about making money.
That all said, there were quite a number of Hollywood movies about World War II on the Cable movie channels.
Public Broadcasting System (our public, non-commercial) also re-aired Ken Burns' 13 hour documentary about World War II called "The War".
But PBS ran nothing about the Armistice or any programs about the First World War.
Shame.
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