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Thank you ABC NEWS for being there last night

FreddyE1977 said:
WPPCProductions said:
I didn't catch the news on tv,but I got the newsflash the old fashion way,The radio.

You are far luckier than I then. Several weeks ago we had a major blizzard with widespread power
outages. Most people were having to rely on their radio for news. It was a weekend. Our all-news
station was running medical infomercials and ouir "full service" station would not break out of their
Ask the Handyman program.


Yes I mostly get the news from the radio,at that time I was getting ready for bed.btw I can imagine what would happen if this special report broke in on a last minute of the basketball playoffs,if scheduled at that time.fans will be outraged over that.I'm shoched that the other nets did not break into their programming.
 
imhomerjay said:
And what did you expect, Julius, CBS to dump out of the NCAA tournament for a vote that was hours away? ::)
No. I'm just saying that NBC could have moved its golf coverage on one of its sister channels or even the golf channel so that the local 6 PM newscasts and Nightly News can air so people can be informed about the health care story.
 
The reality of news coverage has changed with the cable nets taking over what once was a network TV obligation. Today, a story must meet some tough standards before it warrants breaking into other programming. It is all quite subjective, however, depending on what programming is being interrupted, and how that might effect total audience ratings and expectations.

Frankly, the health care debate, while important, was not good television. There wasn't much drama, or much to report other than a vote was coming, and the vote was already determined for the most part. So I think the big 3/4 got it right in this case.
 
Julius May said:
imhomerjay said:
And what did you expect, Julius, CBS to dump out of the NCAA tournament for a vote that was hours away? ::)
No. I'm just saying that NBC could have moved its golf coverage on one of its sister channels or even the golf channel so that the local 6 PM newscasts and Nightly News can air so people can be informed about the health care story.

Usually they would have been happy to take it, however the Golf Channel had their own important thing to air...their completely uninformative Tiger Woods interview which just happened to air after the Tiger-required embargo ended at 7:30pm ET, right when when Jim Furyk was just about to win the tournament. Suffice it to say that Transitions (the sponsor) was not pleased at all with Tiger, ESPN or the Golf Channel for taking away the most important moment of their tournament.

Last night was just a weird night for television completely and I'm more annoyed that CBS didn't use their massive lead-in to show the speech at 11:45pm ET instead of continuing to air a paint-by-numbers episode of "Cold Case" in the east. They could have even just cut it to let their stations air their news on time and keep an episode banked for later in the season like they usually do for a delay of that length.
 
Julius May said:
No. I'm just saying that NBC could have moved its golf coverage on one of its sister channels or even the golf channel so that the local 6 PM newscasts and Nightly News can air so people can be informed about the health care story.

Guess what....they have a sister station that was covering the news, which, again, at that point, was pretty much nothing that hadn't been reported much earlier. Nothing was happening then--no vote, not even the formal 2 hour debate window. (Oh, and they don't own Golf Channel, so they can't just send something there--it doesn't work that way, as you well know but choose to ignore.)
 
Diane Sawyer was almost giddy doing that report. Her field correspondent acted as if he was covering man landing on the moon for the first time.
 
The way I saw it, networks didn't have any reason to break in. Once the actual healthare bill and related reconciliation bill were passed by the House, it was 10:50 eastern. If I was running the show at one of the nets, I'd have had my correspondents rushing to get a package out in time for the 11pm local news rather than breaking into programming just minutes before a regularly scheduled newscast. None of my local affiliates ran such a package.

CBS's case is somewhat different, since they had a full hour before news.
 
The conspiracy theorist in me could believe that this was all part of a master plan to continue to keep the citizens in the dark about the bill. I mean with middle of the night, Christmas Eve morning and late Sunday night votes as well as all the closed door bargaining and negotiations, the leadership obviously wanted it out of sight/out of mind.

(Sarcasm mod...please do not take completely serious)
 
Mario-500 said:
There was no Sunday newscast (5:00 PM or 5:30 PM) in the Mobile-Pensacola TV market, as WEAR-TV has not aired such a newscast from ABC in years.

Add WFAA in Dallas to that list.....

KLTV in Tyler pulled something rather weird that evening. Tech difficulties happened to cause KLTV to run a World News slate and the first minute or so of WN before they switched to their "scheduled" program....an infomercial.
 
regardless what you may think of the politics, or the programming value....

Scheduling a vote that deeply affects all 300+ million of us at 11PM on a Sunday
when they know the country is caught up in March Madness is really crappy democracy.
 
FreddyE1977 said:
Scheduling a vote that deeply affects all 300+ million of us at 11PM on a Sunday
when they know the country is caught up in March Madness is really crappy democracy.

It says much more about the "country caught up in March Madness" than it does about the vote schedule.
 
That wasn't the "plan." Expectations were that it was going to be significantly earlier, but procedural stuff happens. And....what....the world is to come to a halt because of a basketball game?
 
landtuna said:
FreddyE1977 said:
Scheduling a vote that deeply affects all 300+ million of us at 11PM on a Sunday
when they know the country is caught up in March Madness is really crappy democracy.

It says much more about the "country caught up in March Madness" than it does about the vote schedule.

Agreed. Maybe our democracy is in such a fragile state because of this seeming lack of priorities. This has been an ongoing debate for the past 60 years, and has dominating the news for the past year. If the vote was scheduled for 3am on a Tuesday, ALL Americans should have been paying attention and ALL of the networks should have broken in to cover the debate and vote.
 
Since when is broadcast TV the only way to "pay attention" to something? Welcome to 2010, when people have a little thing called the Internet that lets them multitask. It's not as if the issue had not received substantial airtime already.

As for it being a 60-year debate, it's been off and on over that time, hardly a continuous 60. Every so often something would flare up, then quickly flame out and be ignored for another decade or more.
 
Of my local stations, WCVB did their own broadcast of the speech, as well as WHDH I believe. I'm not sure about WBZ or WFXT.
 
One more thing.....

The vote wasn't the end of something, like the checkered flag at Indy, but rather the beginning. I, for one, couldn't care less about the vote late Sunday evening. I would be sure to hear what happened when I tuned in Monday morning - before it was law.

Pass or fail the Earth would not stop spinning and life would go on.

The vote deserved to be reported but it was hardly the "breaking news" that has ruined most stations' credibility.
 
imhomerjay said:
Since when is broadcast TV the only way to "pay attention" to something? Welcome to 2010, when people have a little thing called the Internet that lets them multitask. It's not as if the issue had not received substantial airtime already.

As for it being a 60-year debate, it's been off and on over that time, hardly a continuous 60. Every so often something would flare up, then quickly flame out and be ignored for another decade or more.

I never said that broadcast TV was the only way to pay attention to something, but certainly larger portions of the American public get their information from broadcast TV, so it was in the public's interest to break in with this story. The cable news networks were all covering it, all the news websites and newspaper websites had it splashed across their pages, yet hardly a mention at the broadcast networks. All broadcast TV did was cement their irrelevance in 2010.
 
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