The News,
Last night I watched the third instalment of Frontline's series on the future of news. Frontline and Now are two shows I try to never miss on PBS. They both are way ahead of the game. If you want to see what the major news networks will be reporting on in a couple of months watch these shows. It seems really wrong that PBS should be so far in front of the major news networks, but after watching this series I can see why.
Every night I try to watch the evening news, usually NBC. However I usually get frustrated and flip to the other channels only to be frustrated by them and sometimes find myself watching German news on PBS. The two big things that frustrate me so are;
1. The Weather; very rarely is weather national news. Katrina is probably the only major news story recently, sometimes tornado's or hurricanes do deserve some recognition but not a leading story or more than a minute. I don't care if there is a foot of snow in New York, Kansas or Colorado. Hell if I don't have to shovel my driveway I really don't care at all. Local news is the place for the weather.
2. Unproven Research; at least once a week they do a piece about some research that shows promising signs that some medicine is going to cure cancer or some other disease. If you watch these shows you would think that cancer has been cured by now. They show these studies and don't release any of the other information involved and make people think something is happening soon, but really if the research pans out results are still far off.
About once a year they release some poll that shows that people are more familiar with X (the last one I see was the seven dwarfs) than the supreme court justices (or there congressmen, governor...). I think this poll is a direct result of shoddy news coverage. If I ran one of these shows every night we would tell you what happened in the Supreme Court, on the Congress/Senate floors and what the President did that day. It doesn't need to be deep coverage just a mention of what was going on. If they were on vacation, had a holiday or where just in meetings we would say that. It probably wouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. At least it would be much more informative than it snowed a 1,000 miles away from where I live or a drug that might (and I stress might) cure some disease thirty years from now.
Every night I try to watch the evening news, usually NBC. However I usually get frustrated and flip to the other channels only to be frustrated by them and sometimes find myself watching German news on PBS. The two big things that frustrate me so are;
1. The Weather; very rarely is weather national news. Katrina is probably the only major news story recently, sometimes tornado's or hurricanes do deserve some recognition but not a leading story or more than a minute. I don't care if there is a foot of snow in New York, Kansas or Colorado. Hell if I don't have to shovel my driveway I really don't care at all. Local news is the place for the weather.
2. Unproven Research; at least once a week they do a piece about some research that shows promising signs that some medicine is going to cure cancer or some other disease. If you watch these shows you would think that cancer has been cured by now. They show these studies and don't release any of the other information involved and make people think something is happening soon, but really if the research pans out results are still far off.
About once a year they release some poll that shows that people are more familiar with X (the last one I see was the seven dwarfs) than the supreme court justices (or there congressmen, governor...). I think this poll is a direct result of shoddy news coverage. If I ran one of these shows every night we would tell you what happened in the Supreme Court, on the Congress/Senate floors and what the President did that day. It doesn't need to be deep coverage just a mention of what was going on. If they were on vacation, had a holiday or where just in meetings we would say that. It probably wouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. At least it would be much more informative than it snowed a 1,000 miles away from where I live or a drug that might (and I stress might) cure some disease thirty years from now.
posted by Jon at 12:06 PM
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