The Pecan Park Eagle

I guess the only good answer to out title question is – we’ll have to wait and see. For now, the Astros and Rockets are the two paying client/subjects and the  distribution for the new Houston-hub sports network is mainly or completely through Comcast. Those of us who use DirectTV or other satellite television service will have to wait and see if the new project work out distribution plans through a wider body service providers.

The company word, if we go by what they are saying in current articles, is that CSN Houston plans to bring back the best of the old HSE network with the focus on Houston sports and the local teams that people care about.

Good plan – but how do they measure caring? Are we talking about local teams that draw big crowds, just those that contribute to the underwriting of the new network’s operations, local professional teams only, or local college and amateur sports as well? As far as I know, the football Texans are not an underwriter of the new network, but I will presume that something like the little hope “blip” that they are creating on the local scene will get some coverage. I also presume that UH, Rice, TSU, HBU, and St. Thomas are local schools with major feet to minor toes in athletics that could qualify each of them as Houston entities that people care about and that worthy foreign (out-of-town) schools like UT, A&M, Baylor, TCU, and LSU would not quality as local sports groups deserving of central focus attention from CSN Houston.

Maybe I’m wrong.

Back in 1956, when I was starting my undergraduate work at UH as a radio-tv major, the fairly new world of commercial television was a whole lot simpler than it is today. It was only simpler because our cultural understanding of its potential was so limited, Back then, it seems that most of my professors were treating television as though it were simply “radio with pictures.”

The goal was to develop interesting programs that people would watch through the minefield of advertising that sponsors put out there much as they always had done on radio. We lacked all the technical apps of videotape, satellite immediacy to live events, digital advancements in sight, sound, and special effects, and the Internet that would transform the medium into the “monster creative force on the loose creature” that it has now become.

In a way, I see “reality tv” as a manifestation of our narrative deficit at the good storytelling bank. Because we cannot keep up with the demand for more and more quality materials, we turn the technology over to everyday idiots, allowing same the time and space to make idiot-ass-celebrities of themselves.

CSN Houston has my best wishes for a successful expansion on the sports narrative coverage of local sports, but not as “radio with pictures.” Even home-based, we need more than the faces of disgruntled sports fans on camera to achieve that end. All the life lessons and deeper human interest components are located in these places: the backstories of our athletes and other local sports figures and entities; the data, artifacts, people, places, and events of local sports history; and the relevance of sports lessons to our larger life as the Houston community.

In brief, it is my hope that CSN Houston can become a breakthrough digital age narrative informer that does not settle completely for the same hackneyed “soundbites at ten” format that characterizes most others.