August 18, 2004
SOB of the week
FOX 5 News for blatant whoring of the American Idol tryouts. If you want to treat it like a real news story and pretend like there's any seperation between local news and entertainment, don't use the Idol font for the "Live" graphic on the upper-left corner of the screen.
Any high-school newspaper writer can tell that this is a manufactured news story, of no news value or consequence to anyone but Rupert Murdoch. Somehow, Fox can cover the tryouts but doesn't have the newsroom capacity to evaluate the claims of campaign surrogates, so they just show tit-for-tat attacks sans context. Can the cheery correspondent interviewing the no-talent fools in sleeping bags at the MCI Center use Lexis-Nexis? I thought so. Get her doing some real news work instead of shilling product like the housewife on Ron Popiel infomercials who is just so surprised how handy this amazing new rotisserie is.
UPDATE: Bad journalism breeds more bad journalism. WaPo gets into the action, parroting Fox's crowd numbers verbatim in a way they never would for a political rally. Oh no, Fox would never twist numbers to hype a show if they knew they could get away with it because Libby Copeland has the investigative curiosity of a pet rock.
UPDATE II: More WaPo bashing. If they were any more subservient, I'd ask them to clean my bathroom.
Posted by rj3 at August 18, 2004 11:44 AM
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Comments
I once was chatting with a very, very drunk producer at a bar in Georgetown who said she was excited to move to the D.C. Fox affiliate because their format allows her "to shatter windows" in her segments. Fox was more "cutting edge" and "better tuned to scandal" she explained, while making hand motions symbolizing "shattering windows."
"If I don't shatter a window [imagine drunk producer making hand motions] in the first 10 seconds, I'm not reaching my viewers." I quickly ran to my jacket to get my notebook so I could jot that all down. Gotta love the local news folks.
Posted by: Oculus at August 18, 2004 12:53 PM