The National Anthem is Back on Television

You might be old enough to remember, at the end of the broadcast day, TV stations would air the National Anthem and then go off the air.

But then, TV stations learned that they could fill that time with bad infomercials and make money.

So the National Anthem went away.

But now it is making a comeback.

The NY Times writes that television broadcasters have been reintroducing the practice of playing the national anthem once a day, pairing it with the same flavor of patriotic imagery, but in high definition and with multilayered audio. Some viewers might hear political overtones, too.

Gray Television, which has 145 stations, mostly in small and midsize markets, made it a companywide practice several months ago. Two other companies followed: CBS, at its 27 corporate-owned stations, including those in New York and Los Angeles; and Nexstar Media Group, one of the largest owners of television stations in the country. Within five months, the national anthem has become a daily part of programming at more than 350 stations across the country.

Though almost every station is always on air, those times generally correspond with the technical end of each day’s 24-hour programming cycle, or in the case of the CBS stations, right before their early-morning news shows. It is also a time of day when commercials are relatively cheap, but the companies said that minimizing revenue loss was not a factor in scheduling.

Gray and Nexstar executives said the reason to bring back the anthem was simple: encouraging national unity at a time of deep division in the country.

I think it might take more than the National Anthem to bring this country back together, but hey, it’s something.

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