Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Social Media Is Not The "News"!

Have you noticed lately how little news you really get on TV these days? We usually flip between channels when the weather comes on to get a broad spectrum of forecasts. Three stations in Spokane and you'd swear more often than not they reside on different planets. The weather, however, is the most complete example of reporting you get.

The evening broadcasts have been deteriorating for some time now. I often wonder how people get their news if they aren't armed to the teeth with computers and all the variations thereof. I don't have any of those fancy gadgets, just my computer and I do have to rely on it for a lot of what I need to write a post. That's because the papers, all two of them, are lacking.

Everything from headline news, breaking stories to sports tells you to go to the station's web site to read more. That's what's coming. The anchors are pretty much interchangeable except for the attractiveness scale. Most of the women have voices that make me think of nails on a chalk board. Irritating. So why not just have a robot? Certainly we have the technology to program one with headlines and the referral to the website. The voice could be programmed to be soothing or edgy or whatever the headline may require. Think of the money the channels would save on high priced anchors. There's the morning crew, the noon crew, the dinner time crews. Sometimes they differ from five to six. And the late night crew! Even if the people double up on some of the shifts, a robot would still save money! You'd only need one! If you like the male/female mix ~ program the voice to switch with each story!

Besides, the anchors are getting lazy. The current fad is reading a headline then going to Facebook to read the comments from their page. Hello out there! Reading comments from Facebook IS NOT NEWS! I'd wager even a robot could figure that out!

3 comments:

Margie's Musings said...

I always watch PBS. They still seem to have a lot of news.

Anonymous said...

Dogwalk guy - your comments on the anchors jumped into my head and matched every thought that I had stored there regarding the sorry state of the news people in Spokane, Lewiston and on CBS, ABC and NBC. (Well, maybe not Lewiston - they do have more news - just that its rather amateurish).

Mari Meehan said...

I'm always happy when people agree with me. The Dogwalk "guy", however, is a gal!