Yes, when I was growing up, we had three channels, no remote control, rabbit ears on the set, and the TV went off the air somewhere around midnight. We weren;t bombarded with senless, irrelevant "news" over and over and over again, and again, 24 hours a day. Heath Ledger's "accidental" overdose wouldn;t have even been the subject of controversy (simply because it wasn;t worthy of controversion [is that a word? who cares]) let alone would he have received more than a passing mention on the news. In fact, could he have made it back then as an "actor"? I don;t know. Movies about gay cowboys weren't in vogue back then.

I kindly suspected that he may have died of a drug overdose or something, but I didn;t want to speculate on that in my first post. The more selfish and irrational the behavior, the more the media swoons....