Tonight's Local Network News Complaint

Having lived for 5 years in Birmingham, with a Fox owned-and-operated affiliate (WBRC), that sounds scary accurate.

 

I know I'm kind of lame because I have a print background, but I think I might have asked Obama what he was going to do to make sure the Florida primary delegates would "count." Seeing some local TV news folks suddenly thrust into a political story is sometimes hilarious TV.
Anchor: And now we go out to Orlando with a live update from Suzy Spraytan outside a private Barack Obama fundraiser.
Suzy: Right Brad. I'm here with Sen. Obama. Senator, so what do you think of Central Florida? Now I know you're from Chicago, but don't you think the Magic are awesome and got screwed by the refs in the playoffs?

 

Local news in Orlando, every last one of the stations, is atrocious. I've never seen such a collection of inept people.

The NBC affiliate there has local morning news until 7 a.m. and the Today Show. They run a scroll of news headlines and weather items and you cannot watch that scroll any morning and not get into double digits on the number of typos and grammatical errors you see. It's like they've plucked some employee's 4-year-old to oversee this.

 

So you're saying I shouldn't be upset the 22-year-old kid who interviewed me for a part-time sports job at that NBC station never bothered to notify me about said job after saying that he would do so in just a few days? I'm not surprised. About 10 minutes into the interview, it was clear that I had more journalism experience than the kid and his news director combined.

As for their professionalism, let's just say I was a little put off when they actually stopped the interview to follow the station's breaking news story on the verdict of Wesley Snipes' tax evasion trial.

 

I like your point, RSC, but here's another way to view it. If each reporter is getting to ask a question in a non-press conference format, then the local station very likely wouldn't have wanted to use the Q&A done by another reporter/station.

So regardless of that point, the more accurate question to them by be: "Why did you waste your one shot on this crap?"

 

The CBS affiliate here did an "investigative" piece on arsenic in picnic tables the other night. That was the biggest steaming pile of horseshit I've ever seen.

They went out and randomly tested a few picnic tables in parks in three different cities in the area and "discovered" traces of arsenic in in the wood in three or four tables.

Of course they never indicated how high the levels were or whether or not the levels they discovered were even considered dangerous. Nor did they mention that, for years, the chemical mixture used to treat lumber included a miniscule amount of arsenic.

If you played in a playground that had an picnic tables or wooden playground equipment as a kid you were exposed to arsenic. As far as I know it's never killed anybody. Hell, I worked in a lumberyard in HS and handled the shit on a daily basis.

Nah, they just implied it's too dangerous to send your kids to the park anymore. That was pretty much the gist of the report.

 

Old lace, on the other hand ... that shit's deadly.

 

Agreed.