TV news loves to play footsie with police. When it works, TV gets a cool story with insider access. And police get vital info to the public— or, more often, public credit for arresting bad guys. The media does this at its peril sometimes. Folks in crime-ridden areas see TV trucks and think “the man” [...]
Archive for May, 2008
14 May
Wednesday’s bright spots
Items of interest in Wednesday’s early evening newscasts (and we spent way too much time looking for something interesting and finding little. Our mood is foul as a result): Beth Galvin’s report on WAGA showing that the fastest growing population of AIDS patients is African American women over the age of 50. Bill Nigut’s cameo [...]
13 May
Old School
Bloggers can be awfully self-righteous, present company included. Many see the “new media” as superior to the old. And when they break a story, bloggers can beat their chests as strenuously as any ladder-climbing TV news guy. So it’s been with the Soulja Girl story. The video of a disturbed young woman’s too-long verbal abuse [...]
13 May
Part of the background, now
Today’s AJC covers the war in Iraq with a four-sentence World in Brief. The brief notes four deaths in Sadr City. The war gets no other coverage. If this is a milestone– and we think it might be– it’s not a good one.
12 May
It sounded like a freight train….
That sound you heard Sunday night was the tornadic fury of WGCL’s news judgment imploding. On a day when tornadoes caused states-of-emergency in a half dozen Georgia counties, WGCL led its 11pm news with a Ryan Deal “exclusive” on a Craigs list scam that misled a couple of metro families, who were too embarrassed to [...]
11 May
Emmy nods
NATAS announced its Southeastern Emmy nominations over the weekend. The list includes some eye-openers. It appears WSB got “team coverage” nominations for two stories it covered the same day– the Americus tornado, and the Bluffton University baseball team bus crash on I-75. March 2 2007 was a sick day, news-wise: Two genuinely disastrous stories broke [...]
9 May
Toothless investigations
TV news overuses the term “investigates.” WSB is especially guilty of this. It devotes an entire web page to “2 Investigates.” The site has thirty stories on it, ranging from “Harmful ingredients in your makeup?” to “Glenn Burns talks tornado impact.” In other words, it ain’t Woodward / Bernstein. It’s not even Richard Belcher or [...]
8 May
Squalor
When a phone rings in a TV newsroom, there’s a pretty fair chance it’s a tenant calling to pitch an expose on his landlord. These calls are so common that news personnel keep their guards up about stories describing “nasty” conditions at apartment complexes. Such stories rarely appear on TV as a result. Thankfully, the [...]
6 May
WXIA’s malaise
What world does WXIA occupy, exactly? Is it the same one as the rest of us? A look at its news begs that question night after night. It promotes itself as telling “the stories that matter,” if we’re not mistaken. Translated: If it comes from a crime scene or from something scheduled, like a meeting, [...]
6 May
Rock video
There are things TV news can do better than any other news medium. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of knowing where to be with a camera. Last night, WGCL showed that Broad St. in downtown Atlanta is such a place. Harry Samler produced a terrific piece on drug use and drug dealing there– just blocks [...]
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