We had some severe storms pass through here on Sunday afternoon/early evening. Two small tornadoes touched down in some fields outside of Madison even.
OK, two confirmed tornado touchdowns, that’s something to break into shows about.
Our local weather guy then spent the next hour showing on radar where the tornadoes were and then showing how the storm dissipated shortly thereafter and there was no more threat at all.
Missed the entirety of Extreme Home Makeover even.
Our local Fox news hit an all-time high…err, low, last year with their undercover report on a prostitution ring in a local park.
Their promo title? “Sex, Slides and Videotape”, of course.
Oh yeah, Houston news is just as bad. Wayne Dolcefino has an obsessive crush on HISD and he loves to stalk government workers. My favorite was when he ambushed some poor guy who was cruising match.com on the [gasp!] taxpayer’s money! Thank god my non-profit doesn’t receive city funds. I can just see it now:
“Non-profit employees are using the internet to surf for Dope!”
Right now the news folks are into health scare style reporting. “The SCARY Effects of Too Little Sleep” and some reporter staying awake for 44 hours straight then he’s gonna [gasp!] take a driving test! :rolleyes:
I live in Southern Ontario and get both US local news (Raaahhhchester) and my local news. It’s pretty much a joke for us up here…making fun of how terrible “your” locals news is. This isn’t meant as another Canada vs. America thing, but really, it never ceases to amaze me how bad your local news casts are. Not just the stories, but the overall production always appears so cheap and sleezy. Our local boadcasts are much more “professional” and real events are covered. And I nobody does those ambush stories or those “product X could be killing you” stories. And our newscasts aren’t obsessed with fires as so many of yours seem to be…
Perhaps some US people have seen Canadian local news?
Car chases and video clips of odd, meaningless happenings in distant lands spring to mind.
The quintessential So. Cal. local news story is a car chase ending in a huge explosion, that took place in Uzbekistan, where someone just happened to have a video camera on it.
well, I just googled “Denise Dufala”- definitely hot, but not “holy God, she is totally freakin gorgeous!”
Brief hijack- Favorite News-ish babe- The Weather Channel’s Kristina Abernathy.
I think it’s like this everywhere. Call it the era of “infotainment.” Also, as there are increasingly longer newscasts – as most of the ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates in big cities seem to do 90 to 120 minutes at the dinner hours now – there needs to be more to fill that time, and then we sink into the sensationalism.
My personal favorite filler (read: why is this crap on the “news”) is the thinly disguised commercial for a product under the guise of a consumer protection report that “compares” various products to see which is best. “Consumer Affairs” reporters seem to be universally afflicted with notions that they’ll be the next David Horowitz and go far, far over the top.
One of our New York stations did a report last week on that study comparing low-carbohydrate diets to low-fat diets. In more than 8 minutes of jabbering (over the ubiquitous images of headless fat people daring to simply walk down a public street and people shovelig stuff like pizza and ice cream into their mouths) they never mentioned the fact that the study showed that the differences between the two approaches were marked at first, but at the end of one year they weren’t that far apart. It may as well have been a commercial for all of those products with the big red inverted Victory logo on them.
Can any Pittsburgh Dopers tell me if WPXI is still doing those sweeps month deals with all the restaurants that had bad inspection reports? They always had the worst teasers – “See which Pittsburgh area restaurants were cited for roaches in the kitchen! Rodent droppings! Dangerously unclean prep areas – a week from next Friday on your Channel 11 News!” :mad:
Shit like this is ridiculous. If something is dangerous, the viewers should be told right up front. If it’s not dangerous enough to deserve to be at the top of the show, don’t fucking hype it as if it is. And the reverse–why are you showing five minutes of American Idol “speculation” and then simpering into a thirty second spot on the War? Can we get some priorities here?
It comes down to, I think, a difference of opinion in what purpose the news is supposed to serve. I believe it should inform, educate, and instigate thought. They think it should entertain and make money, which will never change unless the whole TV news industry is revamped.
Anyway. this is one of my biggest pet peeves, and it’s why I almost never watch local news anymore. I read the paper instead.
I don’t watch television news at all any more, local or national. I find I get better information by reading it on the web – BBC, CNN, and Reuters to a pretty decent job of keeping me informed of what’s going on in the world. As for local news, I tend to miss most of it.
Honest to goodness teaser I heard a month or so ago: “A common household product can prevent your infant from suffocating! Find out which one tonight at 11!”
You mean like “The Newsroom”? Now THAT was great Canadian news!
Ken
Looking for my bran muffin. Is that my BMW dealer on the phone?
At least you don’t have the dreaded “Small town that thinks it’s a big, bad city” complex we have here in Kalamazoo (yes, it’s a real city. Yes, it’s in Michigan. No, I’m not kidding, look at a map). We’ll have stuff like “MAJOR BREAK IN MURDER CASE!!!” When I tune in, it turns out that some guy got questioned briefly for a murder that happened a quarter of a century ago in Battle Creek. Bleh.
Yes, they are.
They even added a “certification” for their reporter, Becky Thompson- she is licensed as an inspector, I believe. It’s full time ambushing now.
What gets me is the indignant attitude the reporters take toward the people they are accusing. It’s like they are personally affected, and they go to great lengths to harass anyone who refuses to talk to them, implying that silence is admission of guilt.
Ah, but you haven’t seen her in person. Like I said before, she’s even more lovely in person. And she tries to maintain some integrity and dignity. Some days you know it’s just giving her pain to report some of the crap they make her report. Word on the street is that she has big objections to the direction the newscast is going, but she wants to keep her job, and stay in Cleveland. Only time will tell.
Oh My Goofness. Just for kicks, I checked out their website, and yep, she’s a “certified food handler.” I guess that means she’s legally allowed to fondle your hot dog. 
The madness must end!
Whenever I see that happening, I wonder why there haven’t been more incidents of people snapping and turning around and choking the ever-loving life out of one of these nitwit reporters, screaming “I’m not the boss! I’m not the owner! I make SIX BUCKS AN HOUR! I take out the garbage and clean the toilets! Why are you bothering me! Why are you asking me about all of this?! I don’t KNOW!!!”
Oxygen? Just a guess.
There is nothing viewers like more than to “pile on” public employees. There is a deep rooted resentment of public employees and it usually rests with the stereotypical assertion that state employees are lazy and do not work.
My husband frequently has to deal with these sorts of things as a public employee. He is extremely cautious of doing anything that might upset the public, even if he is allowed to do it, or it is minor. For example, I remember one time he came home from work and then said he had seen a fresh sweet corn stand up the highway about 20 minutes away and he is going back to buy some. I asked why he just did not buy it then, and he said he was in a state car and he did not want to stop for 30 seconds to buy a bag of it. He did not want anyone in the public seeing a state vehicle used for personal business, no matter how small. He takes his position of public trust very seriously.
Whenever he takes me along on his business trips, he pays for the whole hotel room, even though he could get reimbursed for at least his part of it. He will not take per diem because I am with him and he never even wants the allegation set forth that the per diem was used for me. Some of you may find this silly, but you would be surprised at how many times there has been a “gotcha” that really falsely accused an employee of corruption for doing what they are allowed to do. Once the public hears the story, they don’t care about whether or not it is proven false later.
Around Ohio, we have Eve Mueller who is a special reporter in Columbus. She loves to target sate employees. I recall one of her “groundbreaking” stories that showed how the Department fo Corrections had spent about 1.3 million over the past 10 years in settling medical lawsuits. It sparked a total examination of the department’s medical department. This despite the fact that 1.3 million over 10 years of medial lawsuits when you are caring for 48,000 prisoners a year is chump change. That is around 130,000 a year in malpractice. Compare that to a local hospital and I think you will see the difference. Nonetheless, news reporters like to line up and show the “wasteful” spending of state agencies. Yet they never really freak out when there is wasteful spending in the private sector that actually causes more harm. A good example of this is when they took state cars away from many individuals because it was giving them too many perks. This included taking the cars away from senior executives who, by the way, were promsied the cars when taking their promotions. These senior execs, charged with supervising security operations for an entire prison, supervising 400+ staff, make around 50-70k a year. A car, a piece of junk mind you and gas, to get to work only mind you( the cars were not allowed to be used for personal business), was provided to these individuals. Now, you compare that salary to a private sector individual who had the same level of responsibility and the comepensation is paltry especially given the fact that Corrections has some of the highest levels of stress out of all work places.
Nonetheless, the public lines up to talk about the “fat-cat” public employees wasting tax dollars. It is absolutely mind boggling and the only thing I can attribute it to is the bias that people have for anyone who is paid from tax revenue. We hold them to a higher, unfair standard, than we do ourselves as if we were compensating them adequately for that higher standard. Now if the executives in government made as much as Enron executives, I would be the first to throw knives, but this is not the case.
I wish I could answer, but I missed the actual broadcast, so if I ever have children, they’ll be constantly at risk of suffocation.