This brief essay deals with an attempt to teach students how to watch a network news show. It is a somewhat painstaking but entertaining experiment which allows the teacher to demonstrate that televised news has unique properties that can be distinguished from those of the print media. It avoids the ideological debate that televised news is biased—left or right—and focuses attention on the adversarial and dramatic properties that inhere in the visual media as practices by networks that are competing for ratings. And it has a modest goal, minimizing such important but ultimately judgmental inquiries as to whether the networks should have allowed live interviews with American hostages who were menaced by off-camera terrorists, or whether their coverage of Hanoi's celebration of the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon took sufficient note of the boat people.