Does your local news suck too?

The BBQ Pit
1

So I’m here at home chillin on the 'net, watching TV and the local news comes on. Well there were 4 different shootings, a dead man on an I-95 off-ramp, 3 stabbings, 2 rapes, a police department dispute…and all this other
negative-crap I couldn’t give a fine fuck about. You just gotta be a loser to watch this stuff on a nightly basis. So I changed the channel.

But really, the only time the local news has ever proved useful is in the weather department, and weather related events–like snow. Otherwise, they suck shit. Actually when I was in high school, we had a school walkout or protest to the scheduling system which I led on. Like the crazy lad I once was, I flipped off the local news crews while they were shooting. I got suspended from school for 3 days. So I got a vacation from school for 3 days. Yay! Now that I think of it, I’m glad I did it. My local news sucks, they are a disgrace IMO, and more people should flip them off!

Does your local news suck too?

Or is it really cool?

2

I have been on a news fast since all the Y2K hype. I occasionally watch “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central - it gives me about as much useful information as my local newscast.

3

Yes yes yes - the local news sucks Big Time.

All they do is ramble on about football. God forbid they cover important current events, local or national. Noooo…gotta make sure that every facet of football is covered! Gotta go to some geek fan’s front yard, and show how he decorated his whole house (and yard) with the team colors. Oh yeah… THAT’S important local news!

4

The Gazette sucks big floppy donkey dick. It’s another Southam ragsheet-that-pretends-to-be-a-newspaper, except this being Montreal, it’s also the anglo-angst-ragsheet-that-pretends-to-be-a-newspaper.

Our news reporting is, in general, quite good, especially from the CBC. I’m always staggered when I watch American TV news and see what kind of trivialities they focus on.

5

I loved the 30 minute story they had about this 6 year old girl that could sing “Mary had a little lamb”…off key to boot. Meanwhile, there was a bank robbery in Van Nuys with 2 police officers shot…and what did that get? a 30 second blurb.

6

I love cheesy local news if I’m traveling. This past weekend in Indianapolis the second coming of Christ would not have been able to wedge itself between the Bobby Knight stories.

As for my own local news, we have one commercial station that is trying to make one of its newscasts more like McNeill-Lehrer and less like Jerry Springer. I still find it boring because I don’t live in Chicago, have never lived in Chicago, and wouldn’t be heavily affected if Chicago vanished. I like living where there is less news to report.

7

You have not seen bad newspapers until you’ve seen the Kingston Whig-Standard, also a Southam broadsheet. In Southam’s defense it was always bad, though.

The Whig-Standard tries to be both a local newspaper for a small town AND a big-city world events newspaper, but Kingston is a remarkably inward-looking town and small minds usually prevail, so they decided to put the local news on the front page and the national/world news on an inner section. The effect is hilarious:

Page 1: CITY COUNCIL AUTHORIZES $500 TO UPGRADE STATUE OF SIR JOHN A.! MAYOR REFUSES TO GIVE MONEY TO PARK BENCH SPRAY PAINTING PROJECT! DAFT OLD PEOPLE WHO’VE LIVED HERE FOR TEN THOUSAND YEARS COMPLAIN ABOUT EVERYTHING! ON PAGE 2: LOCAL INTEREST STORY ABOUT THE TOWN CRIER!

Page 14: NATO, Soviet Union engage in massive nuclear exchange; 600,000,000 slain in ensuing holocaust; world’s major cities swept away in a sea of fire; civilization doomed. Page 16: How this will affect Kingston.

8

Funny you should bring this up. Just the other day, I e-mailed the local news station re: 6:00 p.m. female anchor, and asked if she was related to someone at the TV station because that’s the only she could have gotten that gig.

I want to jump through the frigging television and strangle her. You’d think after over ten years of anchoring, she would feel comfortable enough to stop the hemming and hawing, stammering and tripping over her own tongue. God, she’s a stupid bimbo.

Let’s not even get started on WHAT they report on. I guess they leave the important stuff to the big boys at 6:30.

9

Can there be any major metropolitan area with local news as bad as Detroit? It’s TERRIBLE!

They went through this phase where they were reporting on how flammable and dangerous things are, complete with demonstrations. Like halloween costumes, and Christmas trees. It got excessive. We wanted to write a complaint letter but it would have to start, “We shouldn’t be writing you on this paper because…IT’S FLAMMABLE!!”

They do things like play 911 tapes (WHY!!!) and send a camera crew to a school bus crash…EVEN WHEN THE BUS HAD NO KIDS ON IT. That’s nice for all the parents out there, seeing the breaking news story, the bus wrecked into a pole, the guy on site looking tense… only to find there wasn’t a single child involved.

I must stop before I REALLY get going.

10

There’s a station in Raleigh, NC that won’t report any piece of news unless it can somehow be connected to “the heart of Carolina.” The used to be pretty bad with the weather too…wouldn’t report on any storm that wasn’t bearing down on Raleigh. They’ve gotten better though after the last few hurricanes.

And they also have this thing for reporting every other story “on the scene,” whether the “scene” directly relates to the story or not. Example: when that Thomas bus company announced the school bus/brake recall, they sent a camera crew out (at 5:30 in the morning!) to the nearest school so Buffy could read her story in front of some nice yellow buses.

11

Doppler radar.

The hype walks among us.

Nice when it first came out, yeah we got to guess the weather pattern a little more clearly, and the fluorescent green splotches for rain made some pretty interesting Rorschauch (sp?) tests.
Now, every station has one, labeled as they can outdo each other: Double Doppler (one on each coast!), Super Doppler, and Doppler 9000, pinpointing that "rain will hit <city> at 4:37 pm. (I kid you not on the time. And guess what - they’re still wrong!)
My sister has it worse: Triple Doppler, with the accompanying hype. (They are in the center sweep area of 3 major Doppler towers, so that, in her words, “if a snowflake farts, the stations can report it”).

Or maybe it’s not the hype, it’s the stupidity (in watching the meteorologist still get it wrong).

12

Detroit does this one better. They name the STREET.
“We can tell you when the rain will cross Woodward Avenue–EXACTLY! Thanks to Doppler 7000 Radar.” Christ, HOW is this helpful?

“Honey, go close the windows because a storm is coming… NO! Wait! You’ve got an extra 30 seconds, go ahead and finish your beer first, thank god for Doppler 7000 radar.”

13

I pretty much gave up on local television news when the L.A. area CBS affiliate (still KNXT, then) allowed Burl Ives to get up on the air and embarrass himself (and the rest of us) with a live performance of the FIRST original folk song in honor of the comet Kahoutek.

Or perhaps it was the time the same station brought Orson Bean aboard the week of Thanksgiving (during a year of particularly high unemployment) to announce to the world that he was thankful to be unemployed for Thanksgiving – because he had just finished providing the voice of Bilbo Baggins in the Rankin-Bass production of The Hobbit, and he was going to be able to live of his paycheck from that for the rest of the year.

My favorite part of the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times is when Howard Rosenberg writes one of his screeds excoriating some or all of the local news broadcasts. I honstly think that by this time he should be able to submit the same thing once a week:

“I’ve made it abundantly clear by now that only a moron would continue watching local newscasts in the greater metropolitan area. Any person of discernment does not watch local newscasts, and has no interest in reading about what depraved, incestuous shenanigans the local stations may be up to, and I refuse to submit myself to such dreck any longer for the sake of morons. So I cracked a brewski at seven o’clock last night and watched another fine rerun of The Simpsons on channel 11.”

14

**BWAAHAHAHAHA!!! Love it! D@mn near wet myself laughing so hard. Hope I don’t show up on radar! :smiley:

15

Yet another slam on the local Indianapolis news casts:

During the month of May, when that @#!$ racetrack on the west side of town is busy, the Chinese or the Russians could be lofting nuclear missals towards the center of town and it would be reported AFTER we were (breathlessly) told which driver for what team in which car went .001 MPH faster than anybody else today.

Thing I love most about Cleveland: No Indy 500 hype!!!

          --MomCat (former 30-year resident of Indianapolis)
16

A little late here but still relevant.

It’s not so much that they all suck and only seem interested in out-doing the other local stations, it’s how much they report on this pisses me off.

In Minneapolis, Minnesota, we have a local station, CH. 5, KSTP, that has news from 5:00 to 7:00 A.M., 11:00 to 12:00 A.M., 5:00 to 5:30 P.M., 6:00 to 7:00 P.M., and 10:00 to 10:35 P.M… Five and a half hours of local fucking news.

HELLO!! I don’t recall Minneapolis, Mn, being the hotbed of major news breaking events. I could really care less that little Cindy in Clokato won their local spelling bee.

Lets just cut to the chase, local stations, PLEASE. Fuck the network programming. Why don’t all three local stations go to 24/7 local news broadcasting.

Show us the new camera you have strategically mounted on a smoke stack in the middle of knowwhere. Give me hour upon hour of that too cute for her fucking pig-tails Cindy!!

Turn into the variety show that it already is. “Why look at Mike Fairborne up on the roof! Tell us what’s happening out there Mike? By the way, thats a funny hat your wearing. Did one of your kids get it for you?” ::WHa Ha Ha:: “No, Don, this is our new prize for people who guess our weather trivia challenge correctly.” ::WHa Ha Ha Ha::

Urghhhh…

17

I’m going to shock everyone here: Our local news is actually not bad. In fact, at times it’s good.

<waits for shock to wear off>

No, really. I’ve been all over the place, and seen what y’all are talking about. The news in Chicago was downright hirrible. But here in Denver, they’re not too sensationalistic. I could do without the above-all emphasis on sports, but other than that, it’s OK . Of course, I have an incredibly low opinion of TV news, so maybe my expectations aren’t hard to meet. :slight_smile:

18

In New York, the channel for news that you should watch is not on the networks, but on Channel 1. Everyone else does inane theater news (“Who had the stocking runs while performing tonight on Cats? Tune in at 10:30”), and bad movie hype (“Next up, and interview with Pauly Shore!!”) That’s not news!!!

19

The worst around here is when it snows.

Anchor: Our Big Story tonight, Winter Storm 2000! For our First Look, let’s go to Bob, who is on Richmond Road. Bob, how does it look out there?

Bob (standing on the roadside, with cars whizzing by at 50 mph): Well, Angie, as you can see behind me, it’s really coming down out here. Now I can tell you, these roads are slick and hazardous. The State Police have said that if you don’t absolutely have to be out tonight, you should stay home. Back to you, Angie.

Anchor: Thanks, Bob. It sure looks rough out there. Let’s go over to Brad for a Storm 2000 Weather Update. Brad?

Brad: Well, Angie, we’ve had about two inches of snow so far, and if you look out your window, you might see that the sun is starting to come out. However, our Badass Doppler 8700MF scan shows this storm system that should be moving in. We expect this to drop anywhere from half an inch to a full three feet of snow on the Bluegrass, so you should probably get to Kroger and buy every last loaf of bread you can get your hands on. Angie?

Anchor: Thanks, Brad. Now let’s go to Jim, who is out on Harrodsburg Road. Jim, what’s it like out there?

Jim (standing on the roadside, with cars whizzing by at 50 mph, presumably toward Kroger): Well, Angie, as you can see behind me, it’s really coming down out here. Now I can tell you, these roads are slick and hazardous. The State Police have said that if you don’t absolutely have to be out tonight, you should stay home. Back to you, Angie.

Anchor: Thanks, Jim, that sounds like good advice. Coming up, continuing coverage of Winter Storm 2000. And, in sports, a UK basketball player takes a dump! Later, we’ll tell you about a little girl and her courageous battle against gout. Also, in health news–have you heard of this obscure sydrome of vague symptoms? Find out what your doctor isn’t telling you, and about some new outright quackery that could save your life.

Dr. J

20

Ooohhh!

Another thing that gets me are the fucking teaser’s they toss around all day.

I’ll be casually watching the tube and have a blurb for the news come on, “Major food poisining is hitting Minneapolis! More at ten!” or the infamous, irritating, flimsy excuse for a news program, “Product recall. Dangerous product removed from shelves. We’ll tell you what in three hours!”

Assholes. If it’s so damn important, tell me now.

I’ve personally come to think that all the hours of earlier news is essentially a preview of what you’ll see at ten.