Saturday, October 18, 2008

Too much news.


I really can't stand local newscasts anymore. Well, really it's just Channel 7 news that I can't stand. They have obnoxious graphics, dumbed down reporters, too much fluffery, and a really morbid delight in reporting shootings and murders. And what the HELL has happened to Francis Rivera over the years. Poor thing with that face that keeps getting tighter and higher.

Yipes.

So I put together a very rough idea of how much news (local & national) each local broadcast station puts out in a day and threw it into an Excel chart. This is totally unofficial - I literally scanned through the daily T.V. listings and totted up the hours mostly in my head.

But I would say it's about right. Except for the 9 hours on Monday with NBC - I think that strictly speaking it's 7.5 hours of news. I have to double check that.

And I would probably just add up Channel 56 and Channel 7 together, since basically it's the same newscast. Which works out to about 50-ish hours of local fluffery over two channels in a seven day period.

In total, over a one week period, it worked out to about 180 hours of news. Uh, if you can call it news.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quantity. Definitely not quality.

Anonymous said...

Your chart has a mistake in it. Channel 4 is CBS and Channel 5 is ABC.

Annabelle B. said...

Susan - I agree.

Margalit - Ah thanks! I can never get them straight. I did pull the information by channel number so the bars don't change, just the labels. Nice catch!