Study Shows...Our Local News at 11:00 is Crap...No wonder we are Sheep!

[KoKo]

Tape at 11 -- But Not Much Tape
Maybe it was like hunting a baited field. Afterall, it's easy to predict that local television news won't cover local politics. Politics is too hard. Car chases and house fires are easy.

So it should come as no surprise that researchers watching local news found big city, local television news spent 8 times as much air time on car crashes than covering local election campaigns -- including federal races -- in the weeks before the 2004 elections. The study analyzed 4,000 local newscasts from 11 major markets. Some of the findings:

* Seattle: Time spent on intro music and teases outnumbered time covering the Washington Governors race by 14-to-1
* Nationwide: Paid advertising by candidates in news programs outdid local coverage of those races by 5-to-1
* Nationwide: More than 50% of local newscasts carried a story on the Presidential race but only 8% carried a story on a local race

Sen John McCain is using the study to bolster his call for tighter controls on media ownership. Critics of allowing companies to buy up more stations claim big companies make less of a commitment to the local communities where their stations are actually located.

http://watchingwashington.blogspot.com/2005/02/tape-at-11-but-not-much-tape.html

[jjtss]

1. I haven't watched the local news for 10 yrs now

Glad the rest of the world is catching on.

[Warpy]

3. I try to time it for the weather forecast,

which is generally 17 minutes past the hour.

At least the weather forecast has a slim chance of being right.

[hatrack]

2. Yeah, I just call it the Yellow Tape News

The first 15 minutes invariably consists of yellow tape around crime scenes, yellow tape separating corpses from crowds of photographers, yellow tape framing an overturned SUV for the cameras, yellow tape next to a schoolyard where blow-dried fools work on eye moistness so they can tell us about the tragic death of little Eric or Javier or Trekesha with just the right sad gleam in their eyes, yellow tape and flashing lights at the big house fire, world without end, amen.

Then two minutes for the rest of the planet, and five minutes of Wacky Weather!

But my personal favorite? Here (Kansas City) it's the full 10 minutes-plus one station devotes each Friday night to the High School Football Patrol.

No, I'm not making this shit up.