Media, Shmedia

In these days of explosive media coverage, leading up to tomorrow’s big day at the polls, it’s easy to forget the other media coverage and news going on.  Most WNYers were delighted at the return last week of Channels 4 and 23, both taken off Time Warner Cable’s lineup after a contract dispute between the cable giant and LIN, the parent company of the local CBS and CW affiliates.

I am thrilled to have them back, if not for the fact that things feel back to normal even when the definition of “normal” changes every day, then for the fact that I can again watch CBS News Sunday Morning, the best television program. Ever. It’s like watching and eating and smelling and listening to the Sunday New York Times.  Wondrous!  If that wasn’t back, how would I have found out about the town in the midwest (or the south, or somewhere else) whose mayoral race this year is made up of dogs and other domesticated animals?  I mean, really.... I would NOT have known about this had it been for my beloved CBS morning show.

Forget about Oprah.  I don’t care much for her.  Or the litany of shows on the CW about gossip and girls and girls who gossip and whatnot.  Enough.  And I don’t need CBS’s explosion of shows with initials in the title: CSI, CSI Miami, CIS New York, CNS SVU, CSI Your Mom’s Backyard, CSI Cheektokentonawanda, NCIS, NCIS Miami, NCIS New York, NCIS Your Mom’s Backya.... well you get the idea.  I don’t watch CBS News, locally or nationally, but I do love their sunday morning show. I like my pancakes with dog mayors.  Good work.

How do you feel about The Buffalo News’s new site design?  Their site’s framework is still the same, with print sections and columns getting easy-to-access navigation trees at the top of the screen.  But the layout of headlines and stories is changed to a grid of bigger headlines, lots more links to adjacent stories, and more entry points to the News’s blogs and video content.  They’re pushing both vlogs and blogs in order to show the variety of news services the printed daily newspaper offers.  It’s smarter, if not as visually newspaper-like, than the last layout’s incarnation.  It works for what we’re logged onto the page for in the first place: News.

I was reading this month’s issue of The Atlantic magazine (also debuting a redesign in print, the seventh official design template of the magazine which has been in print since 1947), and saw a story in their resurrected Dispatches section called Buffalo Shuffle.  In the short piece, a column about the state of affairs for the Buffalo Bills and their Toronto flirtations, writer Gregg Easterbrook tells of his history of his hometown (a Kenmore boy), which is to say, the history of Buffalo.  We all take the preceding decades of developments and disappointments as our own – don’t we? – as if I, all of 26 years, had something to do with the 1967 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs which led the team to battle the Green Bay Packers in the first-ever Super Bowl.  Because I really had something to do with that one right?  Maybe it was the baked goods I made for the team.  They were tainted, bad eggs.  Sorry fellas.

While Easterbrook is admittedly a sports fan (as where I am not, more so of baked goods and halftime shows), and therefore more (apparently) fitting to share with national readers his declaration that the end of the Bills’s heyday was also the end of the city of Buffalo’s heyday, I guess we have to trust him on this one.  Except to say, he’s absolutely wrong.  I admire Easterbook’s stance that the success of a national sports team puts a city’s fans and population on a heightened sense of hope (and despair) whenever their team wins (or loses).  He’s not wrong about that one.  The closest I can recall to that is the Bills’s 1990s Super Bowl quad-fecta.  Of course we lost every time we went, but we did go for four years.  How amazing did we all feel all year long?  We felt like winners and not in that “second place is first loser, so cheer up!” sort of stupid congeniality prize shistuff.  I remember feeling like the world was ours, even if we were about to drop it into the dark abyss that is the galaxy.  We had it for a brief moment, and for that time, the city, its population, its businesses, its attitude and spirit were riding high.

So I get what he’s talking about.  But unless I read it wrong, I think he misses the point when he says that it’s been “downhill” for the Bills and their Buffalo since that day in 1967 when Kansas City threw us in the smoke pit.  Here’s a quote:

The sense of civic excitement was keen on that 1967 day; the Bills were the defending American Football League champions. But Dudley Meredith fumbled the opening kickoff, giving the Chiefs an easy touchdown, then—no, I can’t go any further into that awful memory. Forty-one years later, looking up an account of the game, just coming across the name Dudley Meredith sent a chill along my spine. Kansas City met Green Bay in the first Super Bowl, and for Buffalo—the team and the place—it’s been downhill since.

Excuse me?  Is he entirely wrong?  No.  The economy took a turn for the worse in those days and it was not a little hiccup in the back of our throat.  It was a big deal.  But was it because the Bills danced around the ball instead of kicking it?  Maybe I’m reading this wrong, and maybe I can’t understand Easterbrook’s stance since I don’t know what it’s like to bundle up and head out to the stadium for eight Sundays a year in order to cheer my beloved team on.  Maybe I’m a loser for merely having it on at home while doing the laundry and making soup for the week, or for expecting Prince and one of the NSync boys to come out at intermission halftime to entertain us.  Sorry if I’m lame.  I’m just more of a civic cheerleader than that.

He does follow that quoted graf up with this point, which eases the tension within the article.  I’m back on his page now:

All true sons and daughters of Buffalo share a magic-realist belief that the city’s fate and the Bills’ are intertwined. Since that long-ago loss, Buffalo’s steel and grain-milling industries have gone from boom to bust. The city’s population has shrunk by nearly half. Abandoned grain silos line the urban lakefront like timber Paul Bunyan forgot to harvest. Had the Bills won the first Super Bowl, none of this would have happened!

Um, how about none of this would have happened if you had kicked the ball.

Too soon?

Photo courtesy Getty Images.

Posted by on 11/03 at 03:30 PM