Hey, local-area readers — is it me or has Channel 7′s 11:00 p.m. newscast turned into a live version of FARK?
I know that it was Channel 7 who dumbed down local news in general when Ed Ansin bought the station back in the early 1990s with their “if it bleeds, it leads” approach to news, but since he bought Channel 56 a few months ago and rolled the newscast into both stations (56 at 10:00, 7 at 11:00), it’s like they just threw out any semblance of a “newsroom” and just cherry-pick stories off of goofy Internet news sites. Especially if there’s video. Some nights the LEAD STORY will be some lame-ass piece of satellite video of something that happened in Ohio or Alabama or some other place thousands of miles away. For me, though, I think they crossed a line on Wednesday night when they ran JibJab’s “Star Spangled Banner” video as news.
Lately, I also notice that they’re trying to have the anchors and reporters shtick it up with dialog and little bits of stage business. Last night they tried it with their “story” about the study that showed that women don’t really talk that much more than men by trying to get Randy Price, the male anchor, to say he’s interested in talking about “sports and carburetors” with other guys. Unfortunately, a) Randy is totally unable to ad-lib and 2) he’s gay, so the whole thing went over like a lead balloon (that’s not to say that gay men can’t be interested in sports and carburetors, but ol’ Randy ain’t fooling anybody).
I can’t really explain why we watch Channel 7 except that I have some deep-seated thing about watching NBC News (even when I was very little I was a big fan of the Huntley-Brinkley Report), and it has carried over to usually watching the local NBC station newscast. Of course, years ago that meant watching WBZ, who still have the best news programming in this market (perhaps even one of the best in the country), and there’s no reason we couldn’t switch except that we’re middle-aged and set in our ways about these sorts of things. But, sheesh! When I can predict the order of news stories on their program based on the most number of comments on FARK, it’s getting a little out of hand.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
