Last night in the Cleveland area we had over 400 school closings (for Monday) reported already before game time. For example, my mom works for a school and got “the call” around 5 PM Sunday.
The NBC, ABC and FOX channels out of Cleveland ran school closing notices at the bottom of their screens all night. CBS, where the Superbowl was, did not have such notices.
I mused that CBS told the local affiliates Thou Shall Not Interrupt Our Broadcast With School Closings. Fair enough - but how far can CBS go with that?
What about Amber Alerts or emergency broadcasts, say, for a tornado? How about Very Important national news?
And, did anyone else see school closings on CBS during the game?
Both the Louisville and Lexington CBS affiliates were running school closings yesterday evening.
As for specifically during the game… I think they did at halftime, but I can’t remember for sure if they did during play. My guess would be no, because to do that they have to switch from hi-def back to standard definition and they’d get complaints from all the people with shiny new TVs.
Why not contact the CBS affiliate station and ask them?
They could have if they wanted to. The right to interrupt network programming for local news bulletins is standard in a network affiliation contract.
Odds are they just didn’t want to take thousands of calls from angry viewers complaining that the station was cluttering up the football game with all those school closings.
Our local stations around here will run school closings, weather bulletins, etc. all through prime time network programming, but they’ll magically disappear when the commercials come on, and reappear when the shows come back.