Sat. May 21, 2005

Saturday night brought us another pant-load of quasi-news compliments of KPTV.

Lead story? The same attempted rape/murder they've been hawking for the past several days. We did get a little new information for once. As I noted yesterday, KPTV hadn't mentioned the perp's name. Turns out, this is because the cops asked them to sit on that for two days (at least that's what they said on tonight's "news" show).

Oh, this was amusing: We finally got an actual photo of the creep and it looked nothing like the sketch they've been showing for days now. It wouldn't be fair to blame that on KPTV, though.

Then we got a fast-fire potpourri of mayhem and chaos. Between the top of the show and the first commercial break at 10:11, there were at least 12 stories (I think I missed one while trying to writing everything down so the actual number may have been 13).

Even if any of those stories were about anything you needed to know, at an average of about 40 seconds each, you wouldn't have gotten much information from KPTV's speed freak presentation. I did manage to glean the factoid that the show which paid mucho dinero for exclusive rights to pictures of the Mary Kay Letourneau/Oversexed Adolescent wedding is Entertainment Tonight.

Oh, we also got tonight's first "You don't expect that in this neighborhood" quote in connection with a story about an explosion at a house that might have been a meth lab location.

Back from the first commercials, it was time for America Tonight. You know, it's fascinating to find out that in a 3000-mile wide country of 280 million people, there are no more important "news" stories than:

*A fire breaking out in Cleveland
*4 people dying in a plane crash at Coney Island
*A school bus driver hitting a child in Florida
*The wall of a school collapsing in Oklahoma
*A small boy crawling into and getting stuck in a novelty claw machine in Indiana
*Allegations of sex abuse and Satan worship at a church in Louisiana
*A cop's badge stopping a bullet in California
*A crazy old lady finding Jesus' picture on a piece of toast in Minnesota
*Some guy selling a car formerly owned by the Pope

On the other hand, the most important "news" in the rest of the world is:

*Doctors are trying to separate conjoined twins in Singapore
*South Korean scientists are making breakthroughs in stem cell research

Gee, that last one resembles ACTUAL news. Someone screwed up, KPTV!!

Next on the KPTV nightly Cavalcade of Crap was the Fight For Iraq segment. Gee, did the new Iraqi government do something that affected the people of their country? Would the segment be about the American general who said recently that "we could still lose this thing," referring to the war in Iraq? Yeah, right! Get real. Nope. The "Fight For Iraq" "news" was more hooey about the British tabloid The Sun running new embarassing pictures of Saddam Hussein. Oh, and there was a second fast-breaking story about young Iraqi men RACING THEIR CARS!!!!

Apparantly, somehow, this is an indication that things are getting better in Iraq. And here I thought that large parts of that country still not having reliable electrical or water service and suffering from almost daily bombings MIGHT be indications of continued instability. If they've got street drags though, well, things ARE looking up!

The short piece of tape of Iraqi car racing, by the way, looked to me to be identical to a piece Fox News Channel ran months ago about the same subject. I can't absolutely swear it was the identical piece of tape, since I'm doing this from memory, but even if it wasn't, the premise of the story was the same as FNC's from last year. It's never too late to distract your audience from the unpleasant truth with propaganda, I guess.

After the next commercial break, we came back to a story titled "Cougars vs. dogs" about hunters using dogs to chase down wild cats. This one ended with the anchor intoning, "That was KPTV's Dan Springer reporting." KPTV plays a little fast and loose with the notion of possession. A lot of the stories on their 10 o'clock "news" show are actually produced by reporters at TV stations in other markets. As near as I can determine, these "foreign" reporters are NOT employees of KPTV, bringing into question their use of "KPTV's so-and-so." Just because you use a piece featuring a particular person, I wouldn't say that entitles you to call them "yours." In the past, I've even caught them referring to a CNN reporter as "KPTV's Jeannie Moos." They had to chop off the end of the audio on the piece (where she referred to CNN) to pull that off, but they did it anyway. This little subterfuge, I believe, is intended to make the audience think that KPTV has reporters all over the country. I doubt this is illegal, but it's pretty sleazy.

Eventually we got to the certain-to-win-an-award-someday segment The Final Cut. Brooke Wilberger, the girl who was missing yesterday and every day for the past year, is still missing. We got an interview with her Mom who, you'll be surprised to find out, is still upset that her daughter is missing but who tries to keep her chin up and keep going. I'm not making fun of the Wilberger family members who must be going through absolute Hell, but is there really any NEWS VALUE in this?

Next was another KPTV "Cyber Sting." About two or three times a year, KPTV's "news" show hooks up with an organization called Perverted Justice (yes, that's their real name) whose members go online, pretending to be underage kids in an attempt to set up would-be child molesters. Using Perverted Justice in these "stings" means that KPTV's "news" weasels aren't the ones doing the actual entrapment. They get to tag along for the ride, cameras in hand, "covering the story" when the pervs show up at the doorstep of the "kids." The fact that some police departments have condemned what Perverted Justice does is no deterrent to the KPTV Tabloid Team/Morality Enforcement Squad.

After whetting our appetite for a heaping helping of Perverted Justice, including the first usage of the phrase "blow job" I have ever heard on a "news" show, it turned out that this was merely a tease for the REAL story, which will air tomorrow night. KPTV, sleazy as always.

We also got some cross-promotional nonsense about Star Wars 3, a Fox movie of course. This was immediately followed by a breathess story about how bootleg copies of SW3 are already available on the streets of New York City, as well as on the Internet. DVD bootlegging, we were informed, "costs movie studios millions of dollars a year." This, of course, is not an established fact, but the opinion of the studios themselves, who have never demonstrated that it is true.

Think about it: Who would go to the effort to download a copy of a Star Wars movie, other than a hardcore fan? How likely is it that such a fan is going to be satisfied by a copy, grainy and partly obscured by a time code (as the reporter informed us), to the degree that he will never go to see the movie in a theater in 35 or 70 mm and glorious Dolby stereo? If he does go to the theater, not a single dollar is "lost." Anyone who downloads the movie and doesn't go to the theater must not have liked the movie enough to bother to go see it "for real." Again, no actual money lost.

If a person steals your wallet in which you had put $50, you have lost a total of $50, NOT the thousand dollars you HOPE to put into it some day. The "losses" "suffered" by the studios are theoretical at best. I fully understand why copyright holders want to clutch tightly to their property, but news stories should contain FACTS, not conjecture, even conjecture supported by the movie studio your employer owns.

We finally got to a doozy of a "news" story which the show had hyped several times: Gangsta Elmo. Yes, you read that right. Seems some jokers have made a game in which Elmo from Sesame Street goes around shooting and stabbing other Muppets. Did this "news" piece feature outraged and shocked parents of young kids? Duh. We got to see a mom give the entirely predictable knee-jerk reaction that it could be "damaging" for little kids to encounter this. No one, of course, remarked on the extreme unlikelihood of a four-year-old surfing the Web unsupervised, as would be required for he or she to come across the Muppetcide. This little piece of classic outragertainment was brought to us by "KPTV's Melinda Spalding" who I've never seen before on a Channel 12 "news" cast. Why, it's almost as if she doesn't actually work for KPTV!

THINGS KPTV DIDN'T TELL YOU ABOUT TONIGHT (a small sampling):

*The promised laser warning system for planes is now up and running at National Airport in D.C.
*Despite anti-war protests, President Bush gave a commencement speech at a Christian college.
*The Washington Post is reporting that billions of dollars spent on "homeland security" since 9/11 has either been wasted on useless and obsolete equipment or is unaccounted for. Oops.
*Continuing violence in Iraq is screwing up a multi-billion dollar rebuilding effort. So much for KPTV's ongoing "things are getting better every day in Iraq" theme, huh?

Eh, it probably just slipped their mind. It's easy to forget minor stuff like air passenger safety when you have to make sure to report that Topher Grace has just signed to play a part in the next Spiderman movie.