Though I’ve never been a huge fan of the medium, I simply cannot watch much TV anymore. Not outside of sports anyway, and even that with reservations. For all of the nonsense in college and professional sports, and there’s a fair bit of it, at least what I’m watching on the screen is real.

The fly in the ointment when it comes to watching sports on TV is the advertising. These days it seems that it’s not possible for me to comfortably watch sports on the major networks with my kids because the commercials are largely for gambling and adult products. I like watching football with my kids, but I don’t like having to explain to preschoolers why gambling is something to avoid and why ED is a solution in search of a questionable problem that they don’t need to know about right now anyway.

In TV, sports advertising has come full circle. When I was a kid it was alcohol and tobacco interests that ruled the roost. Though one of those is much more pernicious than the other, I never thought that it was appropriate to pitch either on broadcasts where large parts of the audience were not of legal age to consume either.

Baseball is an exception to all of this because of the MLB app, which allows games to be watched without commercials. Nirvana. We get to watch the Cincinnati Reds without any need for conversations about anything other than baseball.

If you’ve been to an MLB ballpark lately, it’s apparent that MLB takes the family aspect of their sport seriously. That’s smart. You don’t develop a love of baseball when you are in middle age. You have to be raised with it. MLB makes this much easier than any other major professional sport. Good for them.

All of that said, being pitched things that are vulgar and unnecessary in TV commercials isn’t nearly as offensive to me as watching any network news broadcast. Inappropriate advertising may necessitate unfortunate conversations that my kids shouldn’t need yet, but the latter may precipitate the downfall of democracy.

When a sporting event is more real that the content of most TV news, I’m not sure how much longer we can sustain a way of life that depends on good information. I expect most TV dramas to be not particularly great fiction. But not the news. After watching TV journalism reach its peak decades ago, my disappointment in its steady and inexorable decline is boundless. You don’t get much news on TV anymore. Instead you get titillation, speculation and opinion — none of which makes the world a greatly better place.

It’s not just CNN, or just FOX, or just MSNBC, or just One America or just any one of the other major players; it’s all of them. All it takes is about 15 minutes with any of these broadcasts for any fair-minded person to want to stick a fork in their head.

One of the left-wing media’s main bludgeons for the un-woke is our participation in institutional racism. Curiously, this didn’t seem to slow liberal TV news down one bit when it came to covering the disappearance of the very white-privileged Gabby Petito, around the clock, for weeks.

This despite the fact that hundreds of Native American women go missing in the same general area in which Ms. Petito was found, each year. Media response by the very same outlets? Crickets. The unfortunate story of Ms. Petito happens to be ratings gold, and you can’t, I reckon, let a little thing like integrity get in the way of an advertising bonanza.

I recently viewed a news segment on this very topic (the Petito coverage) in which a panel of liberal talking heads agonized over the focus on a single white woman in a missing persons story. During most of this segment, the chyron at the bottom of the screen contained continuous updates on the search for Brian Laundrie. They just couldn’t help themselves.

Ms. Petito was the victim of a terrible crime. Crime should be newsworthy. But by focusing on one disappearance among many thousands, the media has distorted this issue so badly that it’s on par with professional wrestling when it comes to a rational view of reality. This seems to be the media’s best superpower.

The right-wing media is equally full of hypocrisy, and all you have to do to figure this out is try to watch 15 minutes of their COVID pandemic coverage without yelling for help. Even though I’m a critic of the response to the pandemic, and therefore not unsympathetic to the point of view that some things are amiss, that’s a far cry from the anti-vaccination, anti-science, anti-democratic nonsense coming from vaccinated newscasters who appear on TV because physics works and who are able to be paid handsomely to push anything that winds up the rubes because our society, despite its flaws, is stable enough that their paychecks are good.

Yeah, I think I’ll just catch a game instead. The Bucs versus the Saints this weekend ought to be fun.

Idaho Press Club award-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist. writer and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding mountain bikes and motorcycles and playing guitars. His video blog: “Howlin’ at the Moon in ii-V-I” may be found at facebook.com/HowlinattheMoonin251 and on YouTube at bit.ly/2SN745k.