I grew up in between two cities, Baltimore and D.C. and therefore had to put up with twice as many stupid-ass local news programs. On top of that, the local newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, is also annoyingly provincial. For TV news now, I only watch the national outlets on cable. I still read the Sun, but only because it’s not overtly political like the Washington papers are. Sometimes I’ll supplement it with a USA Today.
Thank god for ITN. I watch it whenever I can on this random channel that shows all sorts of things that have apparently no connection at all. It’s a little Brit-focused, but it covers world news about a zillion times better than the local news. Of course, when I turn on the local news (usually Channel 2 KTVU in the Bay Area), that’s what I expect to see - local news. If I’m curious about houses sliding off cliffs in Daly City or clips of the Gay Pride Parade or the murder rate in Oakland or disease killing all the grapes in Napa and Sonoma, where else am I going to get it? So the local news serves a function. When I want more international and national news, I head to CNN, or check to see if ITN is on, or most commonly, go to the internet. I have several newspapers from all over the world bookmarked and often check them to see what’s going on in other locales.
But I do hope you like Cleveland sports MomCat, since that’s ALL that the local news can seem to carry.
Oh… That and the latest scare tactic to get you to watch tonight:
** SEE WHAT’S GOING ON IN YOUR CHILDREN’S SCHOOLS THROUGH OUR HIDDEN CAMERA EXPOSE!!**
-Tonight on FOX8
Sounds like you’ve seen some Cleveland news casts!! 
Even the weather reports are idiotic here! And it doesn’t have to be snowing.
Worse, still, is the local paper, the Plain Dealer. The Plain Insipid, really. The first issue of this rag I received had a picture of a boy and his dog on the front page, above the fold. :rolleyes: A common pursuit of mine whilst I was unemployed for a bit last year was going through the paper and finding those articles that should have been on the front page instead of the human interest crap they had printed. At least with cable and the 'net I can find out what I want to know without too much hassle.
Ah, Monster, you’re evidently in SoCal somewhere. So, what do you think about the pornography (to the rest of you, I shit you not they literally showed porn) they ran during sweeps week this year?
That’s nothing. We get the same StormWatch 2000 bullshit dialogue here in LA for two centimetres of rain. Last week the wind blew, and three drops of rain fell, and someone saw lightning! Wow!
I truly don’t know why they bother with local weather-casts. Once a year they should do a forecast: “Stupidly hot and dry!”
And the other drivel we get on local news (and it’s all local; I have to watch BBC to get international news) is all the “health” stories about cosmetic surgery, or “new results” of studies that I heard about five years ago.
I want my CBC!
On one of the local ( Pittsburgh ) stations they actually refer to the radar as the StormTracker 2000 with a straight face.
Even if there is nothing on the scope. :rolleyes:
I don’t watch much TV but I do like to turn on the news at 6PM and catch any big stories of the day breaking. I used to favour one of our local channels until the day a still photographer employed at their studio died of a heart attack or something. The lead newstory that day? A long mushy obituary complete with pictures of this fucking dead nobody I never heard of. I actually checked again at 11 PM to see if they were that fucking stupid as to run it again as their lead and they were. I have NEVER watched that channel again for ANYTHING. They do not exist as far as I’m concerned. My time is valuable to me and if I want to see news I don’t want to be tricked into watching their inward looking masturbatory self inflation. Frankly, if one of their plastic fucking talking heads died I would be almost as pissed off if I was subjected to a lead story about that. They don’t say anything when one of their talking heads quits and goes to another station.
I almost never post in the Pit but I must say I enjoyed this.
At my last job (Morehead Planetarium,) we’d ocassionally get visits from the local news when something marginally interesting was happening in the skies. Usually they ignore the really interesting stuff and focus on the events that are very unlikely to be spectacular or even visible. Last time I was interviewed was earlier this summer when there was a large solar coronal mass ejection headed towards Earth.
Now I spent a long time talking to the guy (who aparrently had no science background whatsoever) about what a CME is, how scientists knew it was coming, how the SOHO spacecraft is able to take pictures of the Sun’s corona, and tried very very hard to downplay the concept that the event could cause much in the way of disruptions to satellites or power lines. Sure it happens once in a while, but not most of the time, and surely not this far south.
So what do they focus on? “So, if your cell phone isn’t working in the morning, you’ll know why! Back to you, Bob!”
I love the URL of the online version of the news story. These CME’s are also known as geomagnetic storms. But the article’s URL is:
http://www.wral-tv.com/news/wral/2000/0607-geometric-storms/
I can’t for the life of me figure out what a geometric storm is.
For clarification: CME is not the same as a geomagnetic storm… the CME can cause a geomagnetic storm if it happens to come towards Earth.
an anchor on fox32 is always doing expose’s on homelessness, then they babble for 20 minutes about sports.
another channel is always has these little specials “danger at the cosmetics counter” “are you ignoring the warning signs of _________” ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
then my local newspaper has a section for h.s. football, and a section for the other sports.world news only gets 2-3 pages.
originally posted by dropzone:This past weekend in Indianapolis the second coming of Christ would not have been able to wedge itself between the Bobby Knight stories.
so accurate that it is scary,dropzone, there was plenty of coverage in both local papers, and all the columnists here are panicking becuase they will not have anything else to write about. boo hoo!
There’s an anchor on our local CBS affiliate who has been there nearly since the station started back the late 50’s. Lately, (well, the last 20 years) he has developed the tendancy to go off the tele-prompter and wing it. Not good. Back in the early 80’s he was “reading” a story about an unidentified homeless man found dead in a Dumpster that morning. On the 6:00 news he said the following:
“The homeless man found in the Dumpster today is still dead at this time.”
Whew! I thought the zombie army has starting recruiting again! Of course, he meant to say that the man was still UNIDENTIFIED at this time.
I’ve seen this guy stammer and stutter over the simplest text. A man with that much on-camera experience should have that problem.
As for ALL the local stations, they tend to cover pro sports relating to teams in the state (Braves, Falcons, Hawks) and leave you to seek out CNN or ESPN for the rest.
I live in the Portland, Oregon metro area. There was a time when I thought the local news was adequate, even good. But then several years it got really, really stupid.
The height of the stupidity was the helicopters. One station, I think it was KGW-8 (the NBC affiliate) got a helicopter. The next thing you knew, the channel was saturated with advertisements hyping their new toy, and all kinds of stories were covered by a reporter riding in the helicopter. Even if the story was utterly mundane, such as a student getting suspended from school because of something he wrote in the school paper, the station would have a live aerial shot of the high school as the reporter would introduce the story. Just how is seeing these sites from the air supposed to enhance our understanding of the story?
Another station got a helicopter. Same thing happened to them.
Then it got truly absurd when KATU-2 (the local ABC affiliate) decided to get not one, but two helicopters. That’s right. TWO HELICOPTERS! And they can barely justify having only one to begin with. KATU was then flooded with ads hyping “The Power of 2” ad infinitum and ad nausem. IIRC, one of the ads showed nothing but the two helicopters flying around in formation while “Ride of the Valkyries” played in the background. :rolleyes:
Speaking of ads, I got tired of seeing ads hyping the news program while you were watching that news program. It’s like seeing an preview for the movie you’ve paid to see right before the movie itself actually starts.
During the chopper wars, KGW started hyping a night-vision camera set-up that was installed on their chopper. Lord have mercy. I would much rather hear about the quality of their journalism than about whatever new electronic gizmo they’ve got. Hey, I know you must be happy about having two helicopters, but you do you really need to spend so much time carrying on about it? If by some miracle there are reporters or news directors from any of the TV stations that serve the Portland area actually reading this post, here is a little heartfelt memo from me to you: Merely having a chopper (or two) and night vision does not necessarily make you better reporters. Ditto for the futuristic-named weather radar systems you’re hyping.
Will someone tell me how this is supposed to improve the state of journalism?
They don’t run many ads touting their toys nowadays, but it’s too late for me. I don’t mess with the local news much anymore. It’s all the same now, especially during winter storms, when all of the idiot stations seem possessed by the bright idea to send some poor bastard to report on the rapidly deteriorating conditions near the mouth of the Columbia Gorge. If I want national news, I watch CNN Headline News. If I want sports news, I watch “SportsCenter” on ESPN. If I want local news, I usually just read the newspaper. About the only time I watch the local news is to see the sports report on the latest Trail Blazer game.
Shy Ghost
We had the chopper wars here too in Minneapolis. Everyone ran out and got one. Then they added the night-vision, stabalization cameras, and the ‘chopper-on-the-spot-reporter’.
To justify their expensive new toys, one station, ABC affiliate KSTP-TV channel 5, sent their chopper out to fly up and down a river in the fall. They made room in their schedule to air it. Not once but twice. For a full hour.
At one point, I think the pilot got a little bored, they decided to chase a moose around a field for a while. A suave narrator informed the viewing public that, ‘Stable views like these are just not possible with any other camera’, all the while the moose is running like mad trying to get away from it.
Do other FOX affiliates do the “FOX News Minute” thing, or is it just the LA station?
It always amuses me that in a half-hour long show they can only find 56 seconds of real news.
“Let’s see, can we fit last night’s bombing that killed 2000 people in Istanbul into our minute? No? Well then it’ll just have to stay out.”
“Oh, and don’t forget to show the 10 minute aerial footage of the downtown fire that they put out three hours ago. Everyone wants to see that one again.”
Last night, my local FOX station pre-empted the Simpsons so I could have the pleasure of watching a police standoff with a man who was sitting on the edge of a freeway ramp, nominally holding his 3 yr old son hostage.
WHO FUCKING CARES?
Guy is sitting there, not moving, a bunch of bored cops are holding a tarpaulin beneath him in case he jumps or throws the boy over, and everyone else is just sort of milling around. News reporters describe everything in rapt detail. I repeat:
WHO FUCKING CARES?
Now, never ever ever broadcast over the Simpsons ever again. If the President is assassinated, you’ll just have to wait a half hour. Otherwise I will dress up in a Homer suit, strap 50 lbs of plastique to myself, wander into your news room at 10 o’clock, and blow you all to hell.
I predict that within the next ten years:
- Local TV stations will run out of money for new helicopters and will finally come to the stunning realization that it would be cheaper to buy weapons to shoot down other stations’ helicopters. Camera crews will be equipped with Stingers and Javelins to bring down Channel 10’s Eye in the Sky.
“This is Jenny Peabrain for Channel Ten Eyewitness News, and boy, the traffic on I-70 is really backed up past the Hicksburg exit, and… HOLY SHIT! Break left! Break left!” (Sound of door gunner returning fire) “Flare! Flare!” (Loud crashing sound, static.)
- TV stations will begin running commercials not only hyping their own weather radars and systems, but insulting and slandering rival stations’ radars.
“Channel 6 says their Doppler StormWatcher 5000 is the best weather radar in the tri-county area. But the Doppler StormWatcher 5000 snorted nose candy in college and wants to steal your Social Security. Channel 8’s Badass Satellite WeatherEye 10000 wants to make the tri-county area prosper.”
-
TV stations will actually start blowing up stuff and burning down homes to get the news… whaddya mean 48 Hours did that already? (or was it 20/20?)
-
TV stations will fire on-the-spot reporters and instead will send camera crews to news events and have them recruit schmoes off the street to do the news. They might even have them compete for the right to be a reporter, like on “Survivor.”
(I am actually surprised this hasn’t happened already.)
Isn’t everybody in the San Francisco Bay Area pleased that Terilyn Joe and her Ronnie Spector-inspired hair found another local job?
Gots too many aspiring actors and actresses on it and the content is less than monumental.
DECAPITATE ALL TALKING HEADS!