[Nateman]

In Soviet Russia a joke said there was only two channels on TV .

#1)Nothing but propaganda 24/7

#2 ) A menacing figure appears, points right at you, says your name and then "You should be watching channel 1!"

Sorry Cokie but I'm done with watching channel one

[TomGuy]

Sorry Cokie but I'm done with watching channel one

Over the years in various areas where I have lived, the local broadcast stations (NBC, CBS, ABC) have put the evening news on at different times, usually 5 or 5:30.

I sometimes would watch one network at 5 and turn to another at 5:30.

I began to notice a pattern:

Many nights, the networks ran exactly the same set of stories, just slightly varying the order. Some of those stories were almost word-for-word on both news casts.

I was amazed (sarcasm) that, out of the whole wide world, night after night, those 3 networks could only find almost exactly the same stories to run. [The local news had more variety than the national news did.] That was over 20 years ago. I realized they were all the same, just different letters for identification purposes.