October 23rd, 2009 By Justin Williams
Jacob Newkirk posted this video from WEHT’s morning newscast where you can see the anchors devote over a minute to pitching McDonalds’s McCafe mocha drinks.
So much for journalistic integrity I guess. If fear-based news teases aren’t going to pay the bills, McDonalds will.
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April 24th, 2009 By Justin Williams
If you don’t know, I’ve been doing a weekly radio show on WNIN-FM each Friday at 12:30PM since September of last year. I don’t make any claims that I do a good, professional radio program, but I put my all into it and think that it improves each week.
This week is one of my favorite shows I’ve done and I think it’s something many of the readers around here would be interested in listening to. I invited Mizel Stewart III, the editor of the Evansville Courier & Press to come on the show and discuss his thoughts on where journalism and the newspaper industry is heading.
It’s no secret that newspapers are having a hard time. The Courier itself has had its own round of layoffs and introduced the new mini-paper earlier this month as a way to cut costs. Mizel and I touched on that, breaking news in an online world, the role of Internet commenters and more.
If you’ve got 29 minutes and are interested in stuff like that, be sure to grab the show.
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April 24th, 2008 By Justin Williams
As I was watching Lost tonight, I couldn’t help but notice the news tease for the special report on ABC25’s 10PM newscast tonight. The story is about the possibility of teenage sex offenders roaming the halls of the schools. It looks to fit all the criteria of modern broadcast journalism teases:
There is another ad they played towards the end of the episode that started with the phrase “Kids molesting kids.”
I really can’t imagine Edward R. Murrow promoting a sensationalistic story like this in his newscast. If someone thinks this this is actually legitimate journalism, I’d love to hear the argument. I personally just see it as fear mongering as a method of getting ratings.
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February 1st, 2008 By Justin Williams
Jeff Lyons’s rough Tuesday made the NBC Nightly News last night. I found the clip online and uploaded it to YouTube.
Thanks to the tip from Diane in the comments of the previous post.
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April 27th, 2007 By Justin Williams
While I was sitting at home yesterday trying to recover from this nasty flu bug going around town, I was watching a lot of Daytime TV. For about two hours of my day I watched Regis’ return from his bypass surgery followed by The View. During both of these shows there were several spots run previewing a story on the ABC25 news at 5 about lock bumping. For the uninformed, lock bumping is when a criminal has a special key made that he can just jam into a lock to open it. It should be noted that there have been absolutely no lock bumping cases reported in the tri-state area. Let’s see how many are reported in the next few months.
There’s nothing wrong with reporting on this type of story. My problem was with the teasers that ABC25 kept putting on the air with the ominous music and fear mongering dialog. In my opinion, the spots were preying on the fear of the viewer: if you don’t tune into our news, you might be a victim. What’s worse, there have been no reports of bumping in town, but the teases didn’t offer that up. They played out as if it was something that was happening frequently in the area.
This isn’t just a local thing. It has been happening with local news outlets all over the country. Opie & Anthony have a recurring bit on their morning radio show that highlights some of the worst of these news teases. Previous show favorites include teases that warn viewers that frequent hiccups could be a sign of cancer, how a law could _shut down religion, or city officials wanting to pack all it’s sex offenders into a single city block (it could be in your neighborhood!). If I had a VCR, I would have recorded this clip and sent it in. This is fear mongering at its greatest.
Am I the only one that is frustrated with what mainstream news has become in the past 10 years?
photo courtesy of dewitt
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