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In just four months I’ll reach the age of 80. Some of my older friends say I’m young so I expect to age more rapidly going forward. Some days I feel good; other days, I feel I have aged overnight. I don’t believe I have Alzheimer’s or Dementia but my memory is terrible. I simply can’t remember names. Maybe I do have Alzheimer’s.

I remember my father when he reached 80, he was a healthy specimen and went to the YMCA every day and swam laps. When he couldn’t do that, he would walk a few miles. He lived into his late eighties.

Back when I was growing up, my father would watch the local news and Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News. It was the first nightly network half-hour news program. If Walter Cronkite said it, my father believed it was true.

At that age, I didn’t pay any attention to the news, I would be out playing or riding my bike.

When I was in The Air Force, I would watch Batman and Robin on TV. To me, they were great shows. I still didn’t pay attention to the news but was interested in the weather.

When President Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963, I gathered around the TV with several other airmen and watched the news of the assassination. It was unimaginable that someone would shoot and kill the president of the United States.

My last tour in the U.S. Air Force was St. Anthony Air Force Station in Newfoundland. It was located on the northern tip of Newfoundland but is gone now. There were no receivable TV stations and news or shows to watch. What a blessing!

Several years after I got out of the U.S. Air Force, I noticed that my father was watching the news on CNN. Pay cable TV had arrived. He now had the ability to watch news all the time. He still watched local news but didn’t pay much attention to network news.

In the nineties, other cable news networks popped up, including MSNBC and Fox News. Fox News was the first conservative leaning news network. MSNBC leaned to the left and I guess it was the start of the “them and us” era of TV news.

Opinion shows with conservative and liberal guests became popular. Fox heavily leaned Republican; MSNBC heavily leaned Democratic. CNN leaned left but tended to have more news content. Newsmax, a heavily leaning Republican news station, arrived recently.

National TV News Stations have mostly become political. If you’re a Democrat, you watch MSNBC. If you’re a Republican, you watch Fox. The NBC, ABC, CBS and PBS network news is also political and leans mostly to the left. CNN, at times, doesn’t know what it is but mostly leans left.

The opinion spoken by the hosts of the shows and their guests is questionable at times and truth in reporting is not always a concern. The news, reporting and opinion is slanted towards their viewing audience. In other words, you select the station where the news is customized to you and your political views.

Me, I would just like to see the news for a change.

Al Klemm is a Washington resident and a former Beaufort County Commissioner.