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Monday, March 29, 2010
Boomer with Attitude / News Enough with the damned weather warnings
Posted By John Grooms on Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 3:31 PM
The Charlotte area had some rough weather yesterday evening. A tornado, heavy winds, hail, thunder and lightning out the wazoo, the works. That’s bad enough — actually, that’s plenty bad enough — but local television news outfits decided they had to make things even worse. How? By going through their now-standard, the-sky-is-falling song and dance, ad infinitum. Loud siren-like warnings, info about the upcoming storm crawling across the TV screen, and then more info about the now-occurring storm crawling across the screen, and just for good measure, wrap-ups about the storm that just passed through. Enough already!
Here’s something local TV weather folks don’t seem to realize, or maybe have forgotten: If someone is watching a particular station at a particular time, it’s because they want to see the regularly scheduled program — not neverending crawls, much less interruptions of the program that supposedly give more details as a public service but are, in fact, one great big pain in the ass.
Case in point: We’re watching the Duke-Baylor NCAA basketball game on WBTV when all of a sudden someone interrupts it to tell us of severe weather headed our way. OK, we think, good to know — but wouldn’t a crawl across the screen (make that an intermittent crawl, say, every five minutes) be just as useful? It’d certainly be a whole lot less annoying. We’re watching WBTV, after all, in order to WATCH THE GAME. But even after the interruption is over, there’s still a damned crawl warning across the top of the screen — and it never goes away. During halftime, another damned cut-in, telling us what anyone who’s been trying to WATCH THE GAME already knows about; followed by, yep, more crawling warnings, these conveniently placed right over the faces of people being interviewed during halftime. Finally, the game starts again, and, of course, more crawls at the top of the screen. That does it. Jesus, could you guys possibly be more irritating to your viewers? We’re not stupid, OK? We get it: There’s a bad storm — thank you for the info, but for crying out loud, leave it at that. Go away and let people WATCH THE DAMNED GAME in peace.
Speaking of Boomer With Attitude, News
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