How long ago was this, Evil? I worked in local commercial television news briefly in the late 1980s and what I found was a bias not handed down by corporate ideology but based on laziness, a lack of imagination, expediency, an unwillingness to take risks (preferring to do the same old thing), and an attitude that was more fit for entertainment than for the serious business of informing the public. Fifteen years later, I think all those things are still there with an additional, growing tendency for corporate parents to steer news departments in the direction of the sensational and irrelevant.
That being said, I too believe that the OP is nonsense.
As corporate ownership increased and a profit came to be demanded from newsrooms, the focus became ratings and cost cutting instead of public service. With some media corporations, I can tell you how their newscast is going to look without actually seeing it because the all use the same consultant-driven flavor of the month.
Also, at least one station in the market will lean toward sensationalism as a way to attract younger viewers. It’s usually the station in third place (or lower in some larger markets). Local news on Fox stations also have a tendency to do news with exclamation points. And you are also on point about being lazy with stories. With five hours or more of content to fill every day, the empasis is on production, not quality. Therefore, people under deadline will usually choose the easy way out.
An irony is that this intellectual laziness is accompanied by frenzied, round-the-clock activity. Local TV news is really one of the greatest wastes of effort in our time.
Unfortunately, that simply dances around the issue ; we have no way of determining if you would have been dinged by your bosses had you decided to pursue a story that challenged someone’s sacred cash cow.
Just because a rabbit can run across a field is no proof the field isn’t mined…
Can you think of anything that could be done to change all that?