The Local

We’re big fans of our TiVo, but we don’t hold much stock in its ability to recommend and record shows it thinks we’ll be interested in. To be fair, we haven’t really done our part—by constantly jabbing the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” button every time we’re watching the tube. This is a function of being fully immersed in TiVo behavior; we simply don’t channel surf at all, going instead straight to the current playlist of shows we’ve specificially asked TiVo to record. No passive TV watching, no ratings, no meaningful associations or recommendations. People we know who do not have TiVo (or any of its inferior copycats) often say they aren’t interested in digital video recorders because they don’t want to increase their TV viewing. But this is precisely the point of TiVo—it allows you to watch only the programs that you want to watch, when you want to watch them, accelerated through the commercials and the slow bits. We watch a lot less TV than we did before TiVo. (We’ve reached the point where we wish reality had that ingenious button that sends you back in time thirty seconds.)

Still, the TiVo can’t help itself from quietly recording things, apparently to keep itself occupied, and if you scroll down your playlist, you’ll notice what it’s been doing in its downtime. Last night, we noticed that TiVo had speculated that we might be intersted in a new program called “Tom Friedman Reporting,” which turned out to be a camera crew following the Times’ best columnist (and Minnesota native) around, watching him do his job. This was on the “Discovery-Times” Channel, a cable channel we’d never heard of before. Anyway, the estimable Friedman was, in this episode, sauntering around Europe trying to answer the question “Does Europe Hate America?” Well, not ten seconds into the program the answer becomes painfully clear: Yes! With gusto! But it is Friedman’s particular genius that he spends the next hour speaking with everyone from Americans at Oxford (Rhodes and Marshall scholars) to islamic high school students who claim Osama bin Laden as a personal hero. Much of this material Friedman turned into a series of columns a few months ago, but gathered into one place and one TV program, it was an artful piece of reporting. Friedman brings together a tremendous amount of material, and he’s sharp enough to debate even the most convincing Parisian peace activists (“You are against using force always, even if it means to displace a violent tyranny? How do you feel about America liberating France from Hitler?”; “The EU is shutting out American cosmetics companies for trace carcinogens—and yet, you can’t eat in a French cafe without having smoke blown in your face the entire meal?”)

Like any great acrobat, Friedman makes his job look easy. With clear, clean prose, he handles the world’s most pressing issues with a compassionate and reasonable voice, and he does enough behind-the-scenes reporting to have a firm grasp of the issues. (Behold, the rise of the EU and China, and the twilight of America.) Friedman is loyal to no party, he is merely loyal to the facts. If we could establish an award for “most trusted news analyst,” he would not only be at the top of our list, he would be the only one on our list.