I’ve heard of two bank robberies in my area of town in the past year, but the local television stations never mention them in their broadcasts. Why not?
Also, housefires don’t seem to be covered unless there is a fatality.
How do local T.V. stations decide what and what not to cover in their newscasts?
We get warm, fuzzy, human-interest stories, which can be inspirational,
but they often don’t cover crime rates unless they’ve gone down, etc.
They’ll cover the opening of new chain stores, but not the closing of them.
(Have tried to search the archived threads, but keep getting that darn error message.)
Wow, JungleLove, where do you live? Most local stations I’ve ever known (Northeastern PA, Los Angeles, Buffalo) specialize in doom-and-gloom.
Whatever station you’re watching, they probably cover the warm-and-fuzzy stories for the same reason, though: Their marketing gurus told them those kinds of stories are more popular amongst viewers. Look at it this way: you’ve only got 22 minutes in your local news broadcast, and after news and weather are covered, you’ve only got about 17-18 minutes left. You can’t cover everything, so you have to make a choice on what you’re going to cover…might as well cover something that sells.
Well, in an hour newscast, we’ve really got more like 44 minutes …
Not to mention the time available in a four hour long show from 5 AM to 9 AM every day.
But I nitpick.
At our station, like many others, daily coverage decisions are made with a fairly large number of factors in mind, actually. Some of it comes down to what the consultants have told us to do, yes. We pay fairly large sums of money for detailed audience research that is supposed to tell us precisely what our viewers want, so we do strive to meet those goals.
But story selection is based also on a whole set of factors like - does this affect a large number of people (war protests shutting down the city at rush hour, for example.) Is the story particularly interesting from a political, economic or social angle (a teacher’s strike, a contentious vote in the legislature, an outbreak of a disease, etc.)
And, honestly, some stories get on the air for no other good reason than this - we have great video of the event. Television news has to walk that fine line between entertainment and information - some do it really well, some do it really poorly, most are in the middle someplace.
But if we’ve got killer video of a warehouse going up in flames and exploding, you betcha that sucker’s making it on as the lead!
In Southern California there are LOTS of bank robberies and very few get covered on the news. For the most part, they are very quick and people don’t know they’ve happened. They only get covered if somebody starts shooting or if the FBI wants to alert people to a repeat offender.
Yeah, and if your political gathering/march/show of support isn’t “correct”, it doesn’t matter how many people you have on hand, as long as you’re well behaved.
In many large cities, bank robberies are fairly common, and unless there were injuries or hostages, these events only merit at most a sentence or two.
One of my local stations have gone to 90 minutes of local news at dinner time. You would think they might then cover fires or robberies in greater depth. They do to some extent but the tendency is to expand “soft” news more.
My WAG, hard news is unpredictable but the stations have to fill the 90 minutes everyday, so they concentrate of soft news. You report what you find and you find what you look for.
Around here, housefires definitely are covered. When I first moved here, I thought, WTF? Why are there so many fires? Then I figured that they just report every single fire, because there isn’t much else to cover - not as much crime or political corruption compared to the more urban areas I used to live in.
I remember hearing about those stations WTF and WAG. My grandparents would go off on how the shows were better back in those days. They were bought out in the early fifties though.
In Buffalo, New York, house fires get very heavy coverage. There’s a strong volunteer fireman culture in the area, so interest in fires of any sort is quite high.
