An Hour’s Worth of Non-News
This is unscientific, of course, but eye-opening. Just what is the local news telling us? Not much, if you break it down.I kept a tally on Monday night’s 5:00-6:00 local news on WCVB, the ABC affiliate in Boston.
During that hour, they covered 35 news and general interest stories. Wow, you say? But wait, they also aired 10 “teasers” (the topic of news they are going to cover in a minute or so), 24 commercials, and 25 promo ads for local and network programs to be aired later.
The local weather was covered in four different slots, sports in two. Stories about celebrities got two stories. There were four crime stories, two involving Hispanic men, and two implicating teenagers. Nine stories required talking head “experts.” Six of those were white men, three were women. The women experts appeared on national news stories, and were government spokes.
There were no stories about the environment, unless you count three “general interest” ones: great white sharks off Cape Cod beaches, felling of the tree Anne Frank wrote about, and a follow-up on the Sea World killer whale that drowned its trainer earlier this year.
Five other reports were about fires, car accidents, a sleep study (not local), and salmonella in eggs.WCVB has a lot of reporters, and they are racially and ethnically diverse, but except for a couple of them, it’s difficult to know just what their “beat” is, in journalist terms.
Do you wonder why we’re so dumbed-down? None of the stories had a context, or background information.
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You'd expect more from Massachusetts. How does network trickle down, I wonder. ABC way behind Jon Stewart in actual truthiness when we were sold the iraq war -- and all of it packaged as entertainment. JMU's freshman gov course is big on evaluating sources of news. I think / hope its a trend in colleges. Meanwhile it's all tabloids at the grocery news stand.
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