“I don’t watch TV. I have a fireplace.”That funny line comes from “Lou Grant,” Mary Tyler Moore’s CBS newsroom comedy, uttered by an elderly lady to Ed Asner’s Grant, the TV station news director.The oft-heard Port Townsend version:  “I don’t watch television.”I don’t watch TV, either. I keep an eye on it.As TV critic for three major daily papers for more than 20 years, it was my job to watch TV. A lot of it. I was cranking out five TV columns a week, and it’s been hard to pull the plug entirely. (Getting paid to watch TV for the morning paper in Honolulu was a couch tuber’s dream gig.)TV, the joke goes, expands your mind … 40 inches.The folks in PT who don’t own TVs often tell me they stream Netflix movies.OK, but if 99 percent of what’s on TV is garbage, as it assuredly is (“Storage Wars,” “Duck Dynasty” or “Keeping up With the Kardashians” anyone?), you could also argue — and I would — that at least 95 percent of movies are garbage, too.It’s the same Hollywood “magic.” As the old Tinseltown adage goes, “It’s the same old crap. It’s just the flies that are different.”Insightful L.A. critic John Barbour once noted, “TV is an art form — trapped within an industry.”The same thing goes for music and movies.Bad for Youngsters? When our children were growing up, the TV was on a lot. It had to be. “Hey, Dad’s working here! Five columns a week, kids!”No reading in THAT house, right?But .. .both our kids grew up as book lovers, and both graduated from academically esteemed Reed College down in Portland. TV did not stunt their love for reading, academics or critical thinking. Having a dad who was constantly ripping the television industry (crassness is cynicism in action) caused them both to dislike and avoid the pandering tube to this day.TV Inside Jobs: I also wrote a network TV comedy series in Canada. So I appreciate Tina Fey’s great take on TV writers’ cynicism: “If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.”Later, I took a break from newspapers to actually work inside the industry I long covered, as a news writer for a major TV network affiliate down in the San Francisco area.My first week on the job, one wise newsroom exec told me the difference between writing for print and writing for TV: “If you say ‘That’s water under the bridge,’ you have to show water, and you damned well better show a bridge.”TV news is picture-driven.So, just like many of you here in PT who don’t have a TV, I get most of my news from the internet (the NYTimes, etc.) and from print (as you’re doing here).But I would hate to do without such thoughtful, insightful TV journalists as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell or CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.These days, when comedy provides blessed relief from the ongoing political train wreck in Washington, I’d also hate to miss the funny, well-written political monologues from Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, John Oliver and Bill Maher. Humor and satire have never been needed more. And TV is where you find most of it.So, watching TV has always been, to this critic, like panning for gold. But I’ll take it over a fireplace any time.(PT resident Bill Mann has written the humor column for USA TODAY and CBS’ MarketWatch.com. He’s always looking for funny items — and funny people. He’s at Newsmann9@gmail.com.)