By Kathy A. Schaeffer

From the very first sputtering of a new-fangled gadget coming to life that freshly conceived contraption called a television set, people have had a fascination with "spying on" other humans sharing the planet. Perhaps it made the populace realize that no one was alone in making mistakes; or perhaps focusing on someone else's life for a little while made their own problems and shortcomings a bit easier to deal with.

I'm not sure when our fascination of watching what other people were doing began, but it was alive and well when Allen Funt's "Candid Camera" was put on the network schedules in 1948. It must have been fun to see people in funny predicaments as our parents and grandparents laughed while thinking THEY would never be caught doing anything so embarrassing!

During the decades that followed, families gathered around the television set after dinner to hear the nightly news with newscasters like Walter Cronkite or Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. They announced the news of the day and people listened. These newscasters became like a part of the family during those years and even dinner times were planned around the nightly news.

The Huntley - Brinkley report started on NBC in late 1956 and painted a whole new face on broadcast journalism. Huntley worked from New York City and Brinkley from Washington DC and everyone knew that not until the now infamous "Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet" did people get up from watching the news.

These newscasters took the country through the Vietnam War, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and they were there when Neil Armstrong first stepped foot on the moon. Families in 1962 relied on the television news along with newspapers to keep abreast of what was happening with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The news was not immediate, but at least there was no waiting for the morning paper necessary.

Chet Huntley signed off for the final broadcast to be done with Brinkley with the words "Be patient and have courage - there will be better and happier news someday, if we work at it." That was in August of 1970.

Well, it's more than three decades later and we're still waiting for the better and happier news. What's more, we can now see things like terror attacks the moment they happen. We can see embedded reporters go off to the front lines with our troops, and we can go right into people's homes as shocking things are happening there. Has any of the curiosity from Allen Funt's day about how others live been dulled over the years? I'm not sure, let's explore.

The Good, the Bad, and the Extremely Ugly . . . There is good. In this category would comes things such as being able to flash amber alerts for missing children all across America in a matter of seconds. There is immediate warning of danger when bad weather is bearing down on a particular area. We can see a midnight mass on Christmas Eve as it is happening and we can celebrate New Years Eve at Times Square when we're actually in our pajamas and safe at home. So there are definitely some good things about live television, yes.

When cable news became popular, we were all of a sudden faced with "all news all the time" and how convenient it was! We didn't have to wait until 6:00 any longer, we could find out news the moment it was happening. What would our great grandparents say?! We were on the front lines in wars and we were in police cruisers while in the middle of a high speed chase. We were even in real courtrooms and the Perry Masons of yesterday suddenly became real attorneys with real clients dealing with real crimes.

Now enter the bad and extremely ugly. Things were taken to a new level on that clear September morning in 2001 that none of us will ever forget. We collectively, as a nation went numb. This wasn't a matter of hearing on the 6:00 news that something had happened, we saw it as it was happening (repeatedly as it turned out) and it was as horrifying seeing it each time as it was the last time. Live television was all mixed in with rewinding tapes to show the horrendous event happening countless times that morning and in the days and weeks to come.

I turned the live news on that morning just as the Pentagon attack was happening. I quickly caught up on what had already happened in New York. That was the moment at which "live television" reached its worse point for me personally because my dearest friend was in that area and for all I knew, near the Pentagon for a scheduled appointment that very moment.

I remember the time moving in slow motion and everything had a surreal air about it. Thoughts of "no, this isn't really happening, I missed something or misheard" wouldn't leave my head. Without live television that morning, I would have already gotten the "I'm fine, figured you'd be worried" call from my friend before I even knew that anything had happened. That scenario might have saved a great deal of anxiety.

But I couldn't do anything to change it at that point, and live television was part of that morning as it has been before and since. It has come much too far to think it will ever be different now. And frankly, would anyone want it to be different?

The first broadcast for television was in London in 1936. Surprisingly, by 1945 there were only nine television stations in operation and three of those were in New York City. Only seven thousand working television sets were to be found in America. Obviously America mostly found out about the end of World War II through newspapers or radio broadcasts and not the evening television news except for perhaps a few thousand families.

By the time Howdy Doody debuted in 1947 and The Ed Sullivan Show in 1948, many more people were finding ways to have televisions in their home. Also in 1948, hundreds of new station licenses were applied for and issued.

I have no plans to go through the entire history of television in this article, but I just took a moment to ponder the bumpy ride from the warm and cozy I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver days to seeing planes hitting buildings and thousands of people dying before our eyes.

Things were much easier when we were very young children. "Live television" then was taking time out of our busy toddler lives to ponder just how on earth those tiny people got into that box and why they were so tiny to begin with. We wondered if they ever get out and I'm sure that many of us took a peek behind the back of that box to see if we could catch some of those magical goings-on.

So to return to the original question, is live television a blessing or a curse? I guess it just depends on which time we happen to be watching. At any given moment with the cable news, we can see daring rescues, natural disasters, or mass destruction. With offerings from other cable stations, we can find out how to cook by watching someone making the same recipe as an example and we can learn "how to" do just about anything pertaining to home maintenance or crafts. We can sit down after a very demanding day and find cartoons twenty four hours a day to make us laugh. We can find out how to dress the kids for school with live weather and we know when to head for the basement if we are in the path of a tornado.

I'd have to say that given all the pros and cons, I would have to vote for live television being a definite blessing. As long as we use discretion about what we watch and allow our children to watch, there is a big world out there and being up to date with what is happening in it seems to be a very wise choice.