The Voice of Reason said:
Getting ready for work this morning I decided to turn on the television to see what happened overnight and what the weather was going to be like for today. Instead I saw two local anchors talking with some professor at a local college about their Facebook account. You call this local news? :
And you're just realizing that morning shows run features now because....? How long has it been since you watched local morning news? YOU ever try to fill two hours of content, especially when every station, every BUSINESS is trying to accomplish more tasks with fewer resources?
If you're going to damn local morning news for talk and "fluff", then you should also go after the network shows, too. Have you seen the fourth hour of the Today show lately? Or the third, or second? Count how many times
they do segments on fashion, food safety, cooking, health, the latest fear scare over anything, exercise, author interviews...
Even the evening news on the big 3 mostly run the hard news of the day in their first blocks -- 7 minutes of hard news. After that, you might get a reader or VO of a hard news story, but the rest is analysis, feature, feel-good stuff...
I call it filling time. What is ironic is that this station (WHAM TV) wasn't broadcasting on their regular channel (13) but instead over a cable channel the station is affiliated with (The CW network).
Why is this ironic? Where is the irony? Doesn't it make more sense, than irony, to run a show such as this on a channel that is not a source of news, but more of entertainment? Besides, it reminds viewers that the CW is programmed by WHAM (I almost typed WOKR); it is cross-promotion of the WHAM product, the revenue is all theirs from the spots, etc.
The point I'm trying to make is why do these morning TV programs even bother to air so-called news programs after 7am if all they are going to do is run the same news from the previous day, along with segments like the one I mentioned in this post? Personally I think it's a waste of time and personnel.
Again, damn the morning network shows, too. But at least they do some hard news in the 7AM hour. Would you have the same criticism for some morning radio shows, even Beth & Chet on WHAM, who do what you would call "filler" with Lighten Up with Liz, or author interviews, or lotsa chatter between them and John Ditullio? How about the D & C, which has cut back staff, combined the local and business section for many weekdays, seems to be adding more white space lately (not as much as the Post-Standard), and uses suburban bloggers (NOT professional journalists) to help their coverage? Will you criticize their "Living" section, too, and call that a waste of time and personnel? How about WXXI, which does local news for four minutes at the top of the hour, and 2 minutes at the bottom in the morning, between 7 and 9 - the rest is nationally--produced content from NPR. And NPR does features on new media all the time. Do you criticize that?
And they run the same news from the previous day because all that happens overnight is spot news -- WHEN it happens. Plus, your
average viewer tunes in for local TV news something like 3-4 times a week, if research memory serves me correctly. They can't help the un-average viewer who tunes in at 5, 6, 11, 5AM, 6AM, 12P...Yea, you're going to see repeats, because there's only so many people on a staff to produce so many different stories. And it's not all repeats. A good producer will look at stories coming up later that day, and write those, as well. And they do. News gathering is a complex
system, not easily explained or described. When was the last time you tried to get past a gatekeeper of information, had a FOIL request denied by a secretive administration, confirmed a lead with two reliable sources, or pitched a story idea that is in the public interest, but doesn't "appeal to our demographic"? You wanna read a good book about it:
News from Nowhere, a 1973 work that was one of the first (if not the first) to explain the system of electronic news gathering in the U.S. There are way more after that, but it explained the
commercial model of broadcast journalism that has evolved in this country since the 1920s. And that's what we live with (for a little more time, at least).
As vapid as it may be, they did talk about Facebook because Facebook has finally reached a tipping point with adults -- for reasons too many to discuss here. It connects individuals and creates new communities. It's being studied by sociologists, marketers, communication researchers, new media researchers...
Whatever. You don't like it, don't watch it. I don't. I keep the radio on in the mornings. There is an off switch. You want everything to look like the Jim Lehrer News Hour? It's show business. You might as well damn 99% of television, then.
Pardon my rant, but unless you've worked it, run it, lived it (ESPECIALLY in these economic times)...Walk a mile in their shoes.
Whatever. I gotta get back to work.
