CHANNEL 11 NEWS WPXI October 13, 2011 @6:30AM
On October 13, I recorded the local news on channel 11. The call letters of the station is WPXI and they are an affiliate of NBC which is national.
What you are reading is actually the second blog that I created for this assignment. When I wrote the first, I pretty much did a minute by minute accounting of what I saw and gave my opinions of such. I paused the recording to log my observations. In all it took me well over an hour to document information about a 30 minute broadcast. The blog was thorough and included info on commercials, who killed whom, what roads not to use and that the weather is fall –like, (imagine that, fall-like weather in October). You get the gist of it. After reading it I realized how UTTERLY BORING IT WAS. So I scrapped it.
I then restarted the recording and watched it real time. I didn’t do what I usually do which is to channel surf during the commercials. I actually - probably the first time in my life - sat down and watched the newscast in its entirety.
In that whole thirty minute broadcast, a little over 16 minutes was dedicated to the actual news broadcast. The remainder of the time was commercials. I understand that they have bills to pay, but come on!
Of the 16 minutes about 6 minutes was dedicated to the weather and the traffic. The remainder of the broadcast included acts of violence and lechery that occurred in the city overnight. There were 4 or 5 events. The coverage of all but 1 of the events lasted for about 2 minutes, total. The other 8 minutes was spent covering the fatal shooting of a police officer in Greensburg. This was indeed an important story to cover. This family man with a wife and 2 young sons lost his life trying to keep his community safe. However, the way in which WPXI sensationalized this horrible event was disgusting.
The first mention of the shooting came one minute into the broadcast. There was a mobile reporter at the scene of the shooting and another at the police precinct. Both reporting conversation with witnesses and grieving friends and family of the officer. This went on at approximately 8 minute intervals during the broadcast; usually right after the weather and traffic. I think that this time was chosen because news and weather are, in my opinion, the main reason why people watch the news at such an early hour. We sure don’t watch for entertainment. This was the most noteworthy event of the morning. Each time I watched the coverage of the shooting, I was careful to see if they were reporting something that they had not the time before. Nothing had changed. The reporters were standing in the same spot, saying the same things. They showed the same video of the fallen officer and his dog. They made the same mention of the family man and the sad fact that this man’s children are now fatherless. And if the repetition on the screen was not enough, the anchor man advised 4 different times that we could also go to WPXI.com to get more information on the shooting. Through this entire reporting, nothing changed from the first reporting of the incident at 6:31 until the last reporting of the incident at 6:59. All while the ticker at the bottom of the screen showed ads for Get Go products and services.
Some of the questions we were asked to ponder were:
What does the news do for me? Nothing good. It makes me afraid to walk out of my front door. If a police officer can be shot down at a local shop, what hope is there for me? The weathercast does not prepare me for the day. Looking out of the window does.
Is there something that you learned from the progression of the show? Yes, there is no progression. We could record the first 6 minutes of the show and then rerun it 5 times. Game over.
Consider the commercials. Why would they advertise during the local news? Most of the ads that I saw were from local car dealerships and local businesses advertising services. It makes a lot of sense for the local business to advertise locally rather than to a national audience.
This was a good experiment to complete. One very good thing came out of it. I now know that I should be watching the commercials and fast forwarding through the newscast.
Oh yeah one more thing... WPXI must have a reporter on every corner of every street in the tri state area. During this newscast, they said 9 times that they were the first to report one thing or another. Their entire newscast was an advertisement for their newscast!
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