Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Stopping to Watch the Local Network News

This is not to say I am stopping in my tracks to watch the local network TV news, but I am stopping, ending, bringing to a halt, going kaput with the stupid, stupid local TV news of the Treasure coast in Florida. Instead, I’m going to read the weekly Hometown news and a local newspaper, and not because I am so in love with the paper clutter in my house.

What bugs me was at first happening with the local Fox news channel. But then it is Fox : so I ignored Fox, even though it was broadcast at an earlier time, at 10 PM in the evenings, compared to 11 PM of others. But now, the disease has spread and caught on with NBC, CBS, and even ABC.

What is so annoying to me--and I am sure to many other viewers as well--happens when the newscasters introduce the headlines of what they will say next or whenever they will say it--maybe at the end of the newscast, one never can guess when.

“Boil water warning. Is it in your town? Stay with us.”

“Coming right up, the position of the governor on a vital matter.”

“Straight ahead will come what an important expert said about something that concerns us all.”

“The deadly bacteria. Is it in your neighborhood. Coming later.”

“Stick around to find out--after the commercial break--if something’s brewing in the tropics.”

“Credit cards? Find out where the fraud is. Coming after these messages.”

You’d think these people are writing fiction instead of giving the news. They use any trick to raise the tension and create expectation.

Worse yet, the critical news they announce they’ll offer us sometimes comes either after several commercial breaks or at the end of the newscast. Then sometimes, it is so short that the viewer thinks he missed it--that is if he doesn’t lose his attention by that time.

News casting is a serious business. The ethics in pursuing and presenting material has to be fair, unbiased, accurate, complete and honest, and above all, it has to treat the viewers with respect. Even when the news promised suffers from tabloidosis, it has to be broadcasted as promised and on the time it has been promised.

It is not the content, in this case, that is so annoying to me, but the swindling tactics the TV news uses on the viewers. I am sure the public will catch on to this foolhardy practice and the ratings will eventually go down. Or like my husband, some viewers will leave the TV on and go brush their teeth or switch their attention totally to something else while not paying attention to what is said. How would the local TV news like not to be taken seriously, then?

Degraded standards of keeping the viewer glued to the idiot box only serve to alienate him.

The point is: No viewer likes to be talked down to or to be treated like a moron, especially when the real morons here are those who manage the local news.