Used to be, local television news in the United States went something like this:
15-20 minutes of news
5-10 minutes of sports
5 minutes of weather
I don’t know how it is in the rest of the country, but in Cleveland, on all stations that broadcast local news, it’s more like:
10 minutes of sex offenders
5 minutes of news
10 minutes of sports
5 minutes of weather
Seriously, local news around here is obsessed with sex offenders, even outside of sweeps weeks. Every night, it’s some guy who lives 950 feet away from a school instead of 1000, Myspace scares, “Your landscaper could be a sex offender!” stories, and so on, ad nauseaum.
What’s the deal? What are the origins of sex offender-mania?
It’s just part of a larger trend of news as fear-mongering. They take something you never considered worrisome, and make you scared of it. People love that, and they’ll tune in every night to see more of it.
Agree with AskNott. Despite the fact that they are a daily occurence, the local news stations all feel a need to feature a fire. Fire looks good on camera.
News aims for the lowest common denominator; local news often misses low. Other than for sports and weather, I find all the NYC local news useless.
The purpose of all commercial TV programming is to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. If sex offenders do that better than fires or snowstorms, then sex offenders it is.
I’ve always thought the driving force in local news was good, old-fashioned laziness. It’s so much easier to report a fire or a flood or a sex offender or a car crash than it is to report on pending legislation or police reform or something like that. Add in pandering to the lowest common denominator and you get the “News by eight-year-olds… for eight-year-olds!” phenomenon.
Only to a point. As much as I like to make fun of local news, there’s always the WBBM-TV experiment back in 2000. Give the people real news, intelligently presented – and they’ll bail on you!
And I suppose that’s because people who have an interest in real news have already bailed. Whatever viewership is left only has an appetite for mayhem, sports and weather.
It’s right up there with, This common food product that you likely have in your cabinets could KILL YOU!!!. Watch at 11 and we’ll tell you what it is!! (of course it ends up being something that can cause allergic reactions to .00001% of the population)
It’s all about scare tactics and the idea that if you don’t watch our news…BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN!
That should be fairly easy to test for. If they grow bigger in warm weather and smaller in cold weather. then they are full of mercury.
And I am full of recycled food
