Tonight, I’m sad. I’m angry. I’m emotional as hell.

NWI, or Newsworld International, probably the only reason for why we (me and my Mom) continue to keep Directv, is signing off as of 12:00 am tonight.

I found out a month or two ago the fate of this network. Al Gore (yes, the former VP) heads the group which bought NWI last year. Unfortunately, the group decided not to renew NWI’s contract, and decided to replace it with its own news channel, Current.tv. Its a news network which, expressly, will dedicate most of its content to the 18-to-34-year-old audience in the United States. Personally, considering that this is the same group to which is dedicated most of the content on the MTV Networks (MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, BET, etc.), I would like to designate this demographic as the D.F. (dumbf**k)…hold…hold on a minute….

(goes to the television, does a long salute to the TV as all of the NWI staff make their last and final goodbyes to their American and Caribbean audiences)

(TV goes black………..then a show called Google Current comes on the air, with an MTV-like interface…..)

(I turn off the TV….possibly for good….the room is dark, save for the computer screen)

*sniff*

Sorry…..I’m…just feeling crappy right now.

Its over.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have just witnessed the (possible) death of the best news channel on US cable/Satellite television.

I have just witnessed the demise of an era, and I am gladdened to have seen it to the very end of this network.

And the end of good American television.

*huh*…….I wonder if this is what death feels like.

I mean, shit, this is the same thing that happened to TechTV! When f**king Comcast decided to replace a good, solid and diverse TV network for those who happen to focus on things of a generally electronic nature with a sorry excuse of a channel for videogamers, I was deeply outraged, as were millions of other viewers.

I missed Unscrewed with Martin Sargent and Laura Swisher (which covered, in its own way, the 2003 recall election with such guest candidates as cult-figure/child actor Gary Coleman, porn film director Lorraine Fontaine, well-endowed adult film actress Mary Cook, and Mary Jane advocate Bruce Martin Margolin), The Screen Savers with Patrick Norton and Leo Laporte (who now hosts Call for Help on G4TechTV in Canada while operating a now-popular podcast, This Week in Tech), Eye Drops, Call for Help, TechLive, and several other programs which were as diverse in content as most shows on US televsion *aren’t* these days. F**k Comcast forever!!!

*ahem*

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Its hard to say goodbye to something which has become a part of your personal life for sometime within its 11-year tenure on American television. I couldn’t find an alternative elsewhere on US television, not with CNN, and *HELL NO* with Fox News.

NWI, during its existence, became a provision of fresh air in a nation(s) which is chock-full of sterile, biased, redundant news “coverage” which only benefits those who are in power, be it economically, politically, or socially. It based its news coverage upon a concept which has been dead on US and Caribbean television for over a decade by now, and now only exists on the Internet and Internet-based networks: “contextual journalism”.

This approach took each story in its rawest, most complex form and simply translated it into basic English (and not just within the language context, either). It never blew anything out of proportion, and it gave to the audience the least-biased telescope on the story. It broke the story down in order for it to be at least partially digestable for the common viewer, and it gave the viewer the exclusive right to taste the story for his or herself.

This approach, as different as it was from average American-made news television, had made NWI both a valuable cultural asset for Canada’s news media and an eye-of-the-storm type of asset for the US’ news media. Thus, with the departure of NWI from the scene, Canada has lost its best-possible connection to the U.S. and its citizens, while the U.S. has just witnessed the full and final passing of exceptionally-approachable, exceptionally-simple, exceptionally-intelligent news coverage from television, save for maybe PBS, which has a minimal news service of its own, but nothing that could replace NWI in its coverage of the events which have, more or less, affected us Earthlings, no matter where we may be (even the Discovery shuttle mission) for over 11 years.

I will miss Bill Cunningham, Sandra Lewis (who hosted the last broadcast), Ron Izawa, Chris Henry, Terry Glecoff, Nerene Virgin, Karen Hawryluk, Helen Mann (who hosted the very first broadcast), Henry Champ, Jordan Kerbel, and several others whose names escape me at the moment, and I will miss them all sorely.

However, as this is the month of August, which is known in the US as the “television debut month”, and given that US/American-controlled-or-sponsored media is becoming increasingly too sterile, pasty, and polarized for the tastes of many Western Hemisphereans, there are what former British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan called “winds of change” on the horizon of international media.

Next year, Al-Jazeera (the reincarnation of BBC’s Middle Eastern division), the famous news network which has brought Arab-centered news to most of the Middle East and has gained notoriety in the West for claiming first dibs on Osama Bin Laden videotapes, will break ranks with other Middle Eastern newscasters and become the first of them to bring Arab news to the West, particularly the United States (FCC permitting and Nielsen allowing, of course) and Canada (CRTC permitting as well), in English. Well this is going to be interesting, lol.

Furthermore, Telesur, which has been described as “the Latin American Al-Jazeera” and is jointly-sponsored by Venezuela, Cuba, Uruguay, and Argentina, first broadcasted its television signals last Sunday. Currently, being headquartered in Caracas, it has news bureaus in Colombia, Bolivia, and Brazil (which also has its own similar Portuguese-language venture, TV Brasil International), but NBs in Argentina, Cuba, Mexico City, and Washington D.C. are in the works as we speak. By the time that it is fully operational, it will be available not only to Latin America, but also to the U.S., the E.U., and North Africa via sattelite.

You know that the folks on the Hill are having a field day with this one. And its possible that maybe NWI’s demise was timely in these regards to change in the structure of world, and US, news media.

Japan is making its presence known through its now-rather-popular-in-a-cultish-way exports to the West, particularly in anime, manga, j-pop (and the succeeding waves of k-pop and c-pop which have followed), and in the most recent game show phenomena, such as Takeshi’s Castle (known to the US as MXC: Most Extreme Elimination Challenge) and Hey! Spring of Trivia. With the offering of NHK’s Newswatch and What’s On Japan via NWI, it has probably made some inroads into American news viewers’ television sets. Thus, with the axeing of NWI upon a butcher block of greenbacks, NHK may evaluate its impact upon America, and, if all goes well, will widen its English-language horizons in a similar manner as that of CCTV, China’s state television network, to the point that it may offer its own English-language network on a full-time basis, be it through cable/satellite (with their foreign language packs and all) or, even better, on the Internet with streaming video (.asx may be preffered in that wise), since, of course, it also has Radio Japan, which broadcasts online live via Real Player. Furthermore, ITV News in Britain may have to do something of the same in order to increase its American audience and compete with BBC World. Its newscasts are extremely popular in Great Britain and, thanks to NWI, the United States as well; plus, whenever they present a graph or diagram in order to demonstrate the issue at hand in graphical terms, I’ll say that the effects are sometimes close to hilarious (particularly, if at no other time, the April general election for Parliament. 3-D graphics galore!!!).

Meanwhile CCTV (Beijing), DW-TV (Berlin), and, of course, CBC (Toronto) needn’t worry that much about their American audience: both of the formers already have their own 24-hour live streams on the web, while the latter has updated Hourly Newscasts from CBC Newsworld, plus Canada Now (which is also featured, with local variations, on the local divisions of the CBC web domain, but was never shown on NWI for some reason) and the ever-famous National with Peter Mansbridge (who, in most American viewers’ opinions, was the best alternative to Tom Brokaw, who is friends with Peter and was featured on CBC’s coverage of the elections last year). CBC may, in the light of NWI’s demise, expand its online newscasting to include the rest of CBC Newsworld’s original programming in order to accomodate American viewers. Furthermore, DW-TV’s broadcasts and documentaries are still being shown on LinkTV, which may be the last-ever bastion of community-based news and information programming on U.S. television (LinkTV also has Mosaic, a Peabody Award-winning newscast which showcases segments of daily newscasts from several independent or state-owned broadcasters in the Middle East, so you might want to check that out), while CCTV has a few Mandarin-speaking channels on most international packages for American cable/satellite.

However, nothing will be able to replace NWI by itself, since I was particularly fond of Bill Cunningham’s Special Assignment (he’s retiring this year, as well as the CBC’s Washington correspondent David Halton). I’m going to miss it’s presence on TV, and I may not turn on the TV anymore (Mom doesn’t watch TV at all, though, so its no loss on her part). Life after today isn’t going to be the same as it was before. As things have changed in this manner, it seems like, while it is necessary to move on from that which is past to that which is new or has already become an alternative, its rather hard for me to look at the world in the same way as I used to. Change, for the most part, is always like that to anyone who is easily sentimental or nostalgic. It nags and even rips at your soul, as merciless as it is. However, it is still necessary to allow such changes in order to become better people.

Yet and still, though, I do hope that Newsworld International can return to the U.S. and Caribbean, as negotiations with other cable/sat providers are still pending at this moment (as the Exec. Pro. himself explained on the last broadcast). Who knows? It may happen eventually.

But for now, as Ron Izawa always put it at the end of World Watch, “Thanks for Watching”.