Of course that for those people who don’t notice the bulletins from the National Weather Service that have been taking up a third of the screen.
I also hate how every story has to have a “local” connection.
“A plane crashed over Montana killing everyone on board including Jane Doe, who’s roommate’s brother’s girlfriend’s nephew’s mother-in-law lives on the south side.”
Journalism major checking in here. (Okay, so that was 12 years ago, so what?) I will never, NEVER forget an incident that literally left me with my jaw hanging open regarding local newscasts.
It’s October, 1987. The stock market has just suffered its largest one-day drop in history. The five-o’clock news runs the stock market as its lead story. At six, the local newscast leads – LEADS! – with the story of a police horse that got spooked downtown and kicked a car.
I cannot begin to fathom the decision-making process of the story editor: “Okay, we’ve got an event that has cost millions of people billions of dollars that happened today. We’ve also got an image of a dent in a car that was kicked by a horse. Let’s roll with the horse.”
I understand the need for catchy video for broadcast, but geez! I remember bringing this issue up in class the next day. While the majority of the class sided with me, one poor schmoe thought the editor was correct to focus on the local story. We laughed and laughed at him.
Our ratings leader here has often has a “top story,” a “cover story” and a “leading off tonight” story.
And of course, from time to time they also have a “special report.”
This reminds me of a scene from one of The Simpsons’ Christmas specials:
Maybe I should’ve have used the quote tag, because I don’t exactly remember it word for word, but that’s the general idea.
Also, October 19, 1987, the day of the biggest stock market crash in history, is my little sister’s birthday. Go figure.
Two of my two big peeves have already been mentioned. Congratulations to…
Southpaw: “I also hate how every story has to have a ‘local’ connection.”
Yeah, exactly. “Earthquake kills a hundred thousand people in China. On the phone, we’ve got a guy from North Seattle who’s related to someone who was on the outskirts of the disaster.” Or, translated: “Instead of giving you thoughtful analysis, we’re going to give you the same old human-interest sob story, because market research tells us the majority of viewers can’t follow anything more complicated than your average soap opera.”
And…
spooje: “Thanks, Dan, I’m standing at the scene of where something happened 4 hours ago.”
This is really bad here in Seattle. Almost every newscast here features a live report with the microphone jockey standing on the steps of City Hall. “This building, as if you haven’t already seen it on every previous newscast, is where something really important happened in city government this morning.”
Actually, this was the source of a humorous (in hindsight) blooper a couple of years ago. The anchorwoman introduces the “on-the-spot” reporter, who has clearly been sitting in front of city hall for a few hours, editing tape in the van, and otherwise killing time waiting for this segment.
The reporter says thanks for the intro, and then picks up the report. Behind him, a few people are standing around, like they do. After a few words of background, the screen cuts to videotape, but the reporter keeps talking live over the pictures, instead of the pre-recorded voice-over they often use. (Maybe he didn’t have enough time.)
Then, maybe twenty seconds into this bit, the reporter’s live voice-over does this: “…the council members stressed they will be scheduling a HHRRG UHRF <crash thud>” <silence while video plays>.
Cut back to the blonde talking head. She’s sitting in the studio, staring dopily at the camera, clearly confused and a bit shaken. “Um, we’ll, um, be getting back to, uh…” She fumbles through an improvised explanation and moves on to the next pre-written TelePrompTer’d segment with obvious relief.
Turns out some local crazy had been there at the scene, and decided to tackle the reporter. Nobody was hurt, thankfully, which is why it’s okay to think this was funny.
And that takes me to my third big pet peeve. The reason the anchorwoman’s discomfiture at the unexpected development struck me as being so broad was because of its contrast with the previous story. She had just wrapped up a bit on a horrible plane crash, and was reading off facts and figures about the death toll with exactly the same vaguely authoritative tone she had used to recap the day’s stock market performance. I was sitting there feeling grumpy about that, about how news anchors rarely vary their tone and/or facial expression regardless of how amusing or horrifying the story they’re reading might be – and then the live reporter got tackled. Yes, talking about a disaster with multiple fatalities is A-OK, but then something unpleasant invaded her tidy, comfortable little world.
Anyway, I got a lot of dark amusement out of the incident. Maybe it’s just me.
…and now he’s an anchor at CNN…
I was watching a Simpsons rerun on Fox this evening (the first Treehouse of Horror!) and during the news promo, John Beard (the guy who makes a living saying, “Another aftershock rocks the Southland!”) said, “Yadda yadda yadda…and, are college students getting high on things you can find in your own medicine cabinet?” Where did you go to college, Johnny?
And I also love the “How did you feel?” bits. Remember the scene, early on in Broadcast News when Albert Brooks was trying to wring a quote from some guy, who responded with “F—, f—, f—, f—ity, f— f— f—. You gonna use that?”
“Depends on how big a news day it is.”
Obviously, they went to the Les Nessman School of News Broadcasting. Remember the time Les talked about the mountains of the eastern US as being “Appala-CHEE-a” and about golfer “Chai Chai Rodrigweeze”? 
Seriously, one of the things that bug me about the news is the way the anchor and the remote reporter attempt to make a report look like a conversation:
“Now with that report, let’s go to Sue Brown live on Main Street. Sue?”
“Thanks, Bob. As you can see, Main Street looks like a war zone tonight…” She goes on for a while before Bob cuts in.
“Sue, what happens now?”
“Well, Bob, according to…”
I guess what I’m asking is, why did news reports become news conversations?
Or the sports reporters (all of them) who always ask the same question of whatever player they can grab after the game:
“Biff, your team won. How does it feel?” Or if necessary, “Biff, your team lost. How does it feel?”
Of course, Biff’s answer is always the same, which makes me wonder why they bother asking in the first place: “Well, we came to play today, and we played against a good team, and we played a good game…” And so on.
Although our local broadcasts still use them (live, and quite often run out of time and are cut off talking).
I HATE the commercial within a commercial. The broadcast takes a break for 3 minutes of commercials, comes back for 20-30 seconds with a teaser about an upcoming story, and then goes for another 3 minutes of commercials! 7 minutes of time wasted…I can’t believe that advertisers are willing to put up with this! I’m certainly not sticking around for that long, I’m flipping through all the other channels of commercials. Half the time I end up staying on some other broadcast. Of course the teaser isn’t about the Mid-East crisis and a shocking resolution, but “Elizabeth Taylor is dog tired…” and then a 15 second story about her dog in quarantine for 3 months in England, ignoring any information about the virtual eradication of rabies in GB.
I first noticed this on the ‘News Tabloid’ shows, most noticeable Dateline and their stupid Timeline or Spotlight. Okay, Timeline you can play along, but WTF is with the Spotlight?!?! They show an animated silhouette of someone and give little clues as to who it is, and then at the end of the show, “it’s Max the butler from Hart to Hart, who had a boil lanced today.”
And what the heck is with Entertainment Tonight? “The most watched entertainment news program in America”. They are masquerading as News people now? Yeah, they ask the hard questions like “Do you like ass kissed here, or over here?” What a smarmy bit of political crap. And I don’t understand why they have to try to fit real news items into entertainment, such as the upcoming elections…is Richard Gere attending a fundraiser really news?
Oops, sorry, this turned into something of a rant…
I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread…Sue?
ditto for most of the above comments. here’s my examples:
I happened to live right near the place Jimmy Hoffa was last seen (at the time). For months, every night the news trailer was “more on the Jimmy Hoffa disappearance, exclusive interviews!” and they’d stick a mike in front of some guy who’d say “Yea, we still don’t know anything”. Reminded me of the SNL “General Franco is ** still ** dead”.
The “local” connection with international news events. Here, they don’t even pretend that there’s a connection, it’s all “we’re in DeWitt with a local couple to see their reaction to the fighting in Bosnia. gee, we’re not really sure where Bosnia is, isn’t it right by the K-marts?”
One day as we were traveling to a local art show, we witnessed a plane (small one person type) go down. We stopped at the airport to leave our names in case the FAA needed to contact witnesses, and left (they didn’t need extra people there). We got home too late to hear the news story about the accident, and wondered about the pilot’s condition. So, we called the newsroom, explained we’d seen the accident and wondered about the pilot. After telling us that the pilot had indeed died on impact, the reporter went on to ask if we wanted to be interviewed on camera about it. yuck.
Rehearsed news… I once saw an interview done by Katie Couric. In the middle, Katie asked (what I thought) was a very intellegent question. It was going to get to the meat of the interview. About three seconds after the interviewee started talking, there was a film clip rolling about the exact question that Katie asked. How did these people know what question Katie was going to ask???
Q&A between the on-the-scene reporter and the anchor back at the station. Just once, I’d like the anchor to ask a question and the reporter say, “Gee, I hadn’t thought of that. Let me get back to you”.
Remote interviews with only one camera. The scenes of the interviewer from in back of the interviewee were obviously taken after the interview was over. During these scenes the words “reenactment” should be required to be displayed at the bottom of the screen.
I’ve been at a scene where the camera crew was arriving just as a specific demonstration was ending. The crew asked them to do it again, so they could get it on film. Again, not news, a reenactment.
TV news is all junk. Everything I need to know is in the Wall Street Journal or the National Enquirer. And I don’t have to worry about duplication as these two fine papers never seem to cover the same story.
That’s not terribly unusual, and I don’t have any problem with that. Couric likely works with the producer and story editor on live interviews – they go over the questions she’s going to pose. No interviewer worth their salt goes into an interview without prepared questions, although they will alter the timing of the questions based on how the interview is going. (One of the first things I learned at Earl’s Journalism School and Pet Repair was NEVER ask your “money” question, the really tough question, first. You run the risk of the interviewee getting pissed and refusing to answer questions.) The producer of “Today” had the list of questions, they knew roughly when she was gonna ask each one, and they had a video reel cued up to start once a specific question was asked. No big deal.
It’s not rehearsed news, in my opinion – it’s news professionals doing their jobs. Far cry from the other stuff in this thread.
My sweetie looks upon me with barely-disguised contempt because I do not care to watch the evening news, the local news, the nightly news, the 6 o’clock news, the national news, or any other permutation of the same old shite. I used to live with my grandparents, and they kept the TV on to news shows all day long: CNN, MSNBC, local news, even the cable channel’s “Local Update” at 10 mins after every hour, if there were no other viable news programs on at that time. I can’t tell you how many times I would hear the same stupid, pointless story in a single day. Every program would rehash the stories told by the previous shows, especially on a slow news day. It’s part of my personal protest that I do NOT watch the news.
Oh, and I do dearly hate that little gambit where they mention the one thing that just might be interesting out of the whole show, and then they keep saying it’s coming up, right before every commercial, like it’s goig to be on as soon as they come back from the intermisssion, then when they finally show it, it’s right at the very end, and it’s 14 seconds long. If you blinked, you’d miss it! I hate that! I hate it!
I do sometimes feel like I’m profoundly uninformed because of this, but then I found the Internet, and the Straight Dope. Just about anything interesting/relevent that happens is likely to become a thread within a day or so, so who needs those dumb-ass televised news shows? I don’t! (At least not as long as the rest of you are watching it for me!)
Back in 1985 I went to The American Institute of Baking in Manhattan, Kansas. The school secretary had a brother-in-law who died in that big airliner crash down in Dallas/FT. Worth(pushed down by what became titled as a microburst). He was on his way home to Kansas City and two of the local news stations called the bereaved family and asked to come an interview them on film. One station took “no” for an answer, but the other kept pushing them until they had to get rude to make them stop calling. Ugh! What the secretary said was “They only cared about him because he died with a bunch of other people. If he had died in a single car accident they wouldn’t have given a thought to him.”
In the Katie Couric interview that I mentioned three posts ago, it was obvious that the tape was supplied by the interviewee. In otherwords, Katie had been told the questions to ask by the interviewee. Just before asking the question, Katie feigned a pregnant pause as if to be composing the question on an impromptu basis when, in fact, the question was well rehearsed beforehand.
Once when I was in high school one of the local news teams came by at the end of the day to shoot some footage for a piece on teen smoking. They were out by the buses at the end of the day, since lots of kids stopped to have a quick cigarette before hopping on the bus. I saw the cameraman deliberately pick out the dirtiest, creepiest looking kids and invite them to blow smoke at the camera. He was actually saying, “Blow some smoke at me!”
There was a big group of clean-cut preppie types smoking just a couple of feet away, but they couldn’t be seen at all in the clip that aired on the news. All you saw was a bunch of nasty looking kids who were so ill-behaved that they actually blew smoke at the poor cameraman. :rolleyes: I guess that was when I learned that you can’t believe things just because you see them on the news.