TVSquad

One of my pet peeves is when someone says that they're too young to remember something that happened in history. As if they couldn't have read about it somewhere. I thought of that after seeing this clip from Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher. It's Democratic strategist Paul Begala making a joke about Meghan McCain's comment that she wasn't born when Reagan was president so she wouldn't know what he's talking about.

Now, I'm not a big fan of Begala, but he does have point (though he could have used a more accessible example than the French Revolution, it would have been more pointed). I can't decide if McCain was being serious or if she was making a joke about Begala's age or if it's part of the "dumb blonde" joke she makes later in the clip. You decide.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in Washington. Today, CNN showed video of their live coverage from that day in 1981 (Bernard Shaw coming on the air live with the sketchy details, forgetting to put his mic on, staffers running around in the background). It's an interesting piece of video, because it shows how much TV news has changed in all these years.

If this were to happen today, we'd have helicopter footage of the shooting, a Google map of the area so we can all orient ourselves to what it looked like, and we'd have 17 different pundits, journalists, doctors, and lawyers on each of the 24 hour news channels (and the networks), telling us what this means politically, what it means medically, what it means legally, what people are talking about on the web. Maybe even how this will affect the voting on American Idol next week.

It's really interesting to see how much TV has changed in the past quarter century, and how a concept of a "CNN," a "24 hour news channel" was so intriguing and new and raw back in '81.

Where were you when you heard the news about Reagan?