Nertz! said:
So the Rally Monday thing was a staged promotional event, you admit it.
Seems silly that television stations would go nuts over something that was designed so that people would watch another channel.
Now the Phillies have been dispatched with efficency, they have shut up about the losers, leaving local televison news here back in to its normal non-news stupor and reporting on the killings instead of investigating why the police is not preventing them and the mayor seems to be fiddling with his iPhone while the city burns.
So, let’s see if we can follow the logic laid forth in this thread.
In an earlier post you state that the manager committing murder by beating the first baseman would be news, that reporting on a major sports story is, in fact not news. Yet above, you suggest the stations are now going back to a non-news stupor.
To return to a given state necessitates that one leave it. So, if stopping talking about the Phillies means they’re back to non news, the rational argument is that talking about the Phils was, in fact, newsworthy.
Moreover, the fact that something is staged does not negate news value. If they impact a significant number of people in the target audience, they have news value on that basis.
As for reporting about the police "not preventing" the murders, I've seen reports on every station highlighting one of the biggest underlying problems: a "don't snitch" culture. When you have dozens of people in a crowded bar but none manage to see anything of importance when a crime goes down, the police can only do so much. When murderers walk free to do it again because witnesses run away, the police can only do so much. Witness what happens when people do come forward, as in the recent armored car robbery. Not surprisingly, he was caught before he could kill again, because the community stepped up and told what they saw. The bigger problem is the culture; all the well-intentioned, good cops in the world can't totally overcome the attitude that police are the enemy.
Regarding Mayor Street, he's a walking policy disaster for the city, and by extension the region, but the iPhone thing is an intellectually lazy argument, just like when the anti Bush crowd whines about the President taking a vacation in Crawford. Chief executives, like them or hate them, good or bad, city, state or federal, are generally allowed to some "down" time. I use quotes around down because it was well established he was still engaged. Would we say that he's never allowed to see play or a movie? To attend a family picnic? To bowl, if he liked bowling? To go out to eat?
There's no reason to believe sitting behind his desk that day would have suddenly cut down the crime rate any more than Geogre Bush not leaving the Oval Office would impact the casualty rate in the war. Both are nothing more than easy pot shots.
