This is a real sore point with me. Obsessing over the weather is silly, but harmless…but making the news into an endless stream of violence and tragedy seriously impacts our view of society. TV viewers tend to forget that they’re seeing the daily occurrences that transpired in an area of, say, 500 sq miles and 5 million people, condensed to 30 minutes. So if you see a murder every day, you think that it’s happening in your neighborhood every day: when in reality, it’s a one-in-a-million event.
And we wonder why parents don’t let their kids walk to school anymore.
Man, here in the Louisville, KY area, we had a pretty massive snowfall (for the area, anyway) back in 1994. Got about 17 inches overnight. Kentucky was woefully underprepared for it. To the point where they shut down every highway into and out of the state. In other words, THEY CLOSED Kentucky. If you were outside of it, you had to stay out. If you were inside it, you were not allowed to leave. The authorities would not let you come back, even if you lived there. It was like that for around five to six days.
Since then, if there’s even the HINT of snow, the salt trucks are out en masse.Seriously. A few years ago, they were expecting a dusting. Salt trucks were out all night.
I totally agree with this. I hinted at it in my post.
The Baltimore I live in and the Baltimore on the local news are two different planets. And not just because I live in a whiter part of town. It’s just not an accurate portrayal.
Yeah, any given story, I think that people know that it’s not a perfect representation, but taken as a whole, day after day. . .it’s part of the culture of fear. And it ISN’T harmless.
Further, this should really bother people: Their supposed “Special Interest” stories that are clearly just advertisements for other things owned by the same media conglomerate. I’m talking about things like “ESPNZone” opening in Baltimore. No, a new restaurant opening is not worthy of a 10 minute piece with on-the-street interviews, prepared statements by the manager. Exterior shots of the restaurant, maps of the streets, and info about parking.
They’re not running stories about the new coffee shop that my neighbor Joe is opening down the road.
But the ABC affiliate is owned by the same people who own ESPN and so, we’re getting a story about the restaurant opening.
I wholeheartedly agree that Local News is the worst thing on TV. It’s worse than “Reality TV”. It’s worse the porn. It’s worse than preachers. It’s amateurish and negative.
Although Marvin is a local icon to some, he will always live in infamy to others as the muckraking reporter who did the exposè on “The Chicken Ranch” AKA the LaGrange, Texas landmark brothel immortalized in the play/movie “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”.
He’s about 100 years old now, had so many face lifts they used calf skin last time, and wears hip blue-tinted Harry Carey-sized glasses. They wheel him out every night to report on roach droppings, rat hairs, and ice machine slime or to do a tearjerker story on how one of “Marvin’s Angels” did free cranio-facial surgery on some impoverished Mayan girl.
I seem to recall many years ago that Minnesota’s KARE 11 hired a new sportscaster away from a station in San Francisco. I can’t remember his name, but it was hard to pronounce. (The marketing campaign leading up to his arrival was based on that fact. That was the first warning) This guy thought he was the funniest sportscaster on the face of the planet, and he was going to show us midwestern dullards what funny was.
Strike one: He didn’t bother to learn the pronunciation of the names of local towns. (I don’t know if this was on purpose.) Every week, one newscast ended with “prep sports extra,” and he would merrily mangle the names of the schools and cities.
Strike two: He would ad-lib jokes on the air. He would say something, and pause for the laugh, and they’d pan to Paul Magers, staring at this guy with the “I can’t BELIEVE I have to share an anchor desk with you” look on his face.
Strike three: Pro football season was fast approaching, and he’d get to do a weekly Vikings sports Extra, interviewing Coach Green. The management didn’t even wait for the first episode. They just fired him and promoted from within. The guy didn’t last six months, if I recall correctly.
As for universal: Well, I live in Japan. There’s no local news as such, but the national NHK news has the same mix of crap. In a 50 minute newscast, they’d spend around 15 minutes on news, 15 minutes on weather, and 20 minutes on sports. Plus, some of that news time would be spent on fluff like this:
However, they do give more time to the news, often extending the length of the broadcast to do so, when major events happen.
When I was living in Champaign, I waited three long years to see if the local news would manage to not mention the University just ONCE. No can do. Champaign-Vermilion local news-bringing you every trivial detail that concerns U of I, every single day of the year.
Don’t forget my pet peeve, the video press release.
Some PR drone: Let’s take a blatant advertisement for some new medical treatment/electronic gadget/household device and shoot it to look like a news segment, fake interviews and all. Hell, let’s even sometimes leave in spots where a local guy can edit himself in to make it seem extra authentic. Then let’s mail a thousand copies off to every local news team in the US.
Local news producer: Hey, free news! In the mail! Now we only have to fill seveteen minutes with our own crap!
Dunno if you’ve seen “Bowling for Columbine” - I hadn’t intended to until I was visiting an inlaw who wanted to watch it - but that’s one of Michael Moore’s main points. I’m fairly liberal, but I was rolling my eyes occasionally until he swooped in with this point and tied up a lot of his arguments into his “media feeds the culture of fear” argument and I sat there, dumbfoundedly impressed.
More on the topic, I think Chicago’s newscasts are fairly professional as local news goes, but they still wouldn’t be mistaken for a national news show if you turned the sound off and looked at the set layout/camera work, much less if you had the sound on.