If you want to be richly informed about the world and the most pressing issues confronting it, and if you want those issues treated thoroughly and fairly, and if you want to be treated as a person of intelligence, you can do no better than National Public Radio. (Disclaimer: I have worked for an NPR affiliate for the past 22 years, so I am not exactly unbiased- but if you don’t believe me, just ask any of the many millions of people who are NPR listeners and supporters. They’ll tell you!)
If, on the other hand, you enjoy being talked down to as though your education ended at the third grade, and if you want your news to be firmly rooted in the obvious with absolutely nothing in the way of background or context included, and if you want every editorial decision based not on whether or not the story is about something that truly matters but rather based on “is there a visual image to the story”, and if you think that the lead story for a July newscast should be “it’s hot out today,” then you need to stick with a local television station like WISN in Milwaukee. I don’t know what their current tag line is in their advertising, but if it were truthful, they would be billing themselves as NEWS FOR MORONS CREATED BY MORONS. I don’t mean to say that everyone who watches Channel 12 news is a moron (after all, I watch it) but rather that they might as well be since that’s how the good folks who create their newscasts seem to regard their viewers. . . like morons who need to be told on a July afternoon that “It’s hot outside” and “be careful not to over exert yourself” and “drink plenty of fluids” . . . or who need to be told on a December morning that “it’s cold outside” and “it’s slippery so allow yourself some extra travel time” or “be sure to bundle up.” It’s as though this station sees itself as a Mother Hen to its clueless viewers, modeling itself not after Walter Cronkite as much as on June Cleaver.
And if anything, it’s getting even worse. During the last snowfall, Channel 12 had “team coverage” in full swing, meaning that for any given newscast there might be four reporters stationed in four different locales, and each one reporting exactly the same thing- it’s been snowing! Lyra O’Brien is especially maddening in this regard. The last time she was “out in the field,” she stood next to a parked car and gave us a careful description of how its windshield had been pretty much clear an hour ago, but now there is about a half inch of powdery snow covering it.
As if we don’t what snow is – or don’t know that when snow falls from the sky, it tends to accumulate on flat surfaces like car windshields. It’s as though they are operating under the assumption that the citizens of Southeastern Wisconsin all emigrated from Saudi Arabia and need to be educated on just what this lacy white stuff is that falls from the sky during the winter.
It’s a horrendous waste of time and resources, especially when one imagines the worthwhile reporting of real news that these reporters might otherwise be doing were they not stuck standing in the snow somewhere in Milwaukee County, trying to think of intelligent things to say about snowfall in Wisconsin in December and trying to think of fresh new ways to nag us about “driving safely” and “bundling up.” Is this what the great medium of television was created for? To remind intelligent adults to wear their mittens when they go out of doors on a December morning? No wonder commercial television has been called a Wasteland. The potential of television continues to be wasted and especially so on local television newscasts, leaving plenty of viewers like myself mightily tempted to throw a shovel at the screen.
So far I have resisted the temptation.
But I’m not sure I can hold out much longer.