Now the LA Times tells us “reality” shows are fake. I’m bummed.

The CBC, as one of several attempts to overcome the ratings disaster that is the NHL lockout, came up with a viewer contest to name The Greatest Canadian.

All summer, the network and its website asked viewers to nominate the most significant Canadian citizen, past or present. This fall, the network aired documentaries about each of the top ten figures (all male, and including two of the network’s own air personalities).

On a Monday-night live special, the winner was announced. It’s T.C. Douglas, founder of what’s now known as the New Democratic Party and originator of the nation’s universal health care system.

Douglas, a prairie populist of the old Depression-era variety, remains a big reason why Canada’s now a more progressive, more Euro-oriented land than our sorry place.

(Incidentally, among the non-finalists in the contest: Margaret Atwood, Marshall McLuhan, basketball inventor Dr. James Naismith, Emily Carr, Shania Twain, Sarah McLachlan, and William Shatner.)

This is a huge week for TV goodbyes—Dakota-twanged aging anchorstud Tom Brokaw on Wednesday, preceded by quiz whiz kid Ken Jennings on Tuesday (or perhaps Wednesday; I haven’t kept up with how KOMO schedules Jeopardy! during Monday Night Football season).

We’ll all miss Dan Rather, who’s gonna retire from the CBS Evening News shortly after archrival Tom Brokaw leaves NBC.

I bet even the right wingnuts will miss not having him to kick around anymore. Conservatives hate Rather because, while he and his show often cowered to Republican White Houses (remember the show’s Reagan-era slogan “We keep America on top of the world”?), he didn’t cower passive-aggressively enough, or consistently enough. It was Rather who got the blame and invective when a 60 Minutes story about Bush’s draft-dodging included some maybe-faked-maybe-real evidence. (The evidence wasn’t all that vital; Bush could still be proven a dodger without it.)

In recent years, Rather’s magazine-show segments (and his election-night scripted homilies) have outshone and out-rated the Evening News, the distant third of the increasingly irrelevant old-network newscasts. In Rather’s early years, the newscast was a tightly-paced headline service, packed with 22 minutes of solid information and infotainment. Today, it’s down to 18 minutes of stories you’ve already heard on cable or online, punctuated by long promos for stories coming up later on in today’s show, on tomorrow’s show, or on tomorrow morning’s Early Show, or on tomorrow night’s 48 Hours Investigates. Rather seems to spend more time telling us what he’s going to tell us than he spends actually telling us. Even the show’s remaining “news” content is usually padded out with relatively timeless filler features about, say, how the recession’s affecting heartland construction workers.

Rather’s departure will give the network the opportunity to re-invent the newscast. It needs to turn it into something that will play off CBS’s higher rated magazine shows, while drawing viewers toward its affiliates’ local newscasts, and preferably while keeping CBS News differentiated from the likes of Fox. Can it be done? Stay tuned.

…in quite the same precise way as supposedly “wholesome entertainment” that’s actually creepy/offensive/horrific. I’m thinking right now of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, “Starving Artist Sale” mass-produced oil paintings, the old Today’s Chuckle front-page newspaper joke, Leave It to Beaver, The All-New Leave It to Beaver, and retro diners decked out in Fifties Fetishism.

Thus, I suspect I’ll love that new kiddie movie, The Polar Express.

First, it has Tom Hanks (my vote for the most overrated ham actor since Richard Burton) in not one but five roles, including Santa Claus and a ten-year-old boy.

On top of that, Hanks and the rest of the cast have been digitally transformed into hyper-realistic versions of the paintings in Chris Van Allsburg’s original book—figures that were haunting in an intentional, moody way.

The result, according to several reviewers and online essayists, is a “creepy” spectacle filled with “zombie-like,” “dead-eyed mannequins.”

And it’s in 3D at Imax theaters!

Sounds like entertainment to me.

I’ve been on a political-news fast since this morning. I’m refusing to get bitter, depressed, or frustrated.

I’ve been cleansing and renewing my mind with Looney Tunes and Doctor Who DVDs, with Comcast digital cable’s opera music channel, with the coffee-table book Playboy: The Photographs, and with the last two stories in my main man D.F. Wallace’s anthology Oblivion. And I’ve been trying to jump-start my one-month novel, to little success thus far.

Tomorrow, I’m likely to spend the day locked up with my yet-to-be-written novel. I might read only the sports and living sections of the newspaper. I’ll go out later that evening, but will instruct my schmoozing companions to stick to discussing personal and/or upbeat topics.

I’m sure that within a few days, I’ll have something to say about the national tragedies. Until then, let me remind you of a certain famous fictional political organizer, “Boss” Jim W. Gettys.

As played by future Perry Mason costar Ray Collins in Orson Welles’s film classic Citizen Kane, this “W.” is an admitted “no gentleman,” a crook and grafter. He’s the target of the egotistical-yet-populistic publisher Charles Foster Kane’s short-lived political career. (In the first draft of the screenplay, it’s clearer that Kane isn’t running for office directly against Gettys, but against Democratic and Republican candidates who are both in Gettys’s pocket.)

It ends badly. Gettys finds and exploits a scandal in Kane’s personal life. On election night, Kane’s right-hand man instructs the press-room staff at Kane’s New York Inquirer to use a pre-set front page headline, “Charles Foster Kane Defeated—FRAUD AT POLLS!.”

Kane wastes the rest of his life as a grumpy old conservative hermit, with no sense of humor and horrid artistic tastes.

Dear God, please don’t let me end up like that.

…the Kerry-smear “documentary” Stolen Honor. PAX TV has been running it in infomercial slots. A subtitle every minute or two refers to the film as a “documentary;” it’s closer to plain-ol’ commentary. The ex-military officers narrating the thing all have the patented angry scowls popularly associated with aging war hawks. I didn’t catch who was credited with sponsoring the telecast.

Both Presidential candidates are scheduled to appear Saturday on America’s greatest television series, Sabado Gigante!

…who was on MTV the same time Adam Curry was, now on Comedy Central’s Tough Crowd: “Yasser Arafat is dying. He’ll be missed. Just like he was missed by the Israelis twenty times.”

…the international financier who kick-started several anti-Bush “527” groups, is now speaking on C-SPAN. He’s mentioned Bush’s steadfast belief that he can create his own reality, and his projection of a comforting sense of total certainty. Soros’s interpretation dovetails nicely with my own previous comparison of Bush’s zeitgeist with New Age motivational lingo.

Soros closes: “His campaign is shamefully exploiting the fears generated by 9/11… If we re-elect President Bush, the war on terror will never end. The terrorists are invisible, so they will never disappear. It is our civil liberties, however, which might disappear instead.…”

…the title of its election-night live special: Prelude to a Recount.

…The World According to Bush, which aired last week on CBC, is now viewable online.

…isn’t getting a lot of Presidential commercials anymore, here’s the Philly Daily News’s look at the latest deceptive, fear-mongering Bush ad.

…the PBS doc The Choice 2004 in its entirety online.

And on Friday, for our readers in the north, CBC’s Newsworld cable channel (alas, not the main, viewable-on-Seattle-cable CBC channel) is rerunning the French doc The World According to Bush, depicting the prez and his family as “one of inconceivable family secrets, painstakingly concealed.”

…to see the most talked-about TV moment of the week, Jon Stewart’s thorough demolishing of the Crossfire twins.