Narcissistic newscasts bug
Okay. I officially fire WCCO TV News. I am done tuning in to their channel for anything, even my beloved weather. (Oh, Brian Goddard, I’ll miss you.) But they have gone over the deep end. They spent over half the noon newscast today talking about their spankin’ new studio and newsroom, complete with poignant shots of Don Shelby staring out the window on to Nicollet Mall. Is there not any REAL news going on today? Something tells me that the Twin Cities area could have a nuclear missile headed for it, and they’d still report about their freakin’ new studio. WHO CARES?
Also, what’s up with Bill Carlson? Did he have a stroke or something? Or is he just generally “below average” on the IQ charts? He can barely string a sentence together and is TERRIBLE at ad-libbing. He also mispronounces names, even common words, a lot. If he has some medical condition that justifies all this, fine. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. But if he’s just dumb, then WHY IS HE ON TV? It is too painful to watch.
Does any other local network have news at noon? I know KSTP has news at 11:00 a.m. Maybe I’ll have to wake up an hour earlier and check them out. However, with the sad state of local TV news, I don’t hold out much hope. I’ll just have to keep reading the internet.
Related posts:
Kristi– How can we win you back? I hope you don’t take the noon news as representative our typical newscasts… and I hope we really didn’t spend half of the program talking about the set. Yuck.
Bill Carlson did have a stroke, actually.
Tune in at 5 or 6 or 10 and give us another chance! We are the only station that blogs.. that should count for something!
Heh. I wondered if you would respond to this. I knew you had a blog from your contributions to MNspeak, and I’ve read your blog occasionally, and yeah, it’s great to have a local news station’s insider point of view. So thanks for asking…
How can WCCO win me back? Hmmm…
Well, first of all, I apologize for any disparaging remarks I made about Bill Carlson. I was unaware that he had a stroke, although I suspected that must be the case. That said, however, it is still extremely painful to watch him on television…not as painful as it was to watch Dick Clark on New Year’s Eve, but…
One way you might win me back is to give Brian Goddard more time to do the weather. Now, HE is good at ad-libbing and is high-larious.
But yes, pretty much half the newscast this noon was talking about the new set. I understand it was a feature story on last night’s 10:00 news as well. Bad idea, I think. Let’s keep news programs for news, shall we? That’s all I’m sayin’.
All I have to say is, where
No worries about disparaging Bill. To be honest, I suspect his performance has nothing to do with his medical condition. But when we replaced him with a different anchor a couple years ago, our ratings tanked at noon. We put him back, the numbers went way back up.
KARE devoted its extra this week to its new anchor, so I suppose we’re all in this same boat. I’m a mere reporter, so I can’t really explain it.. other than saying that we got a ton of e-mails and phone calls over the past 5 months asking about the new set. When will it be done? What will it look like? So I suppose we were responding to that. You can watch the story by clicking this link.
And I love Brian Gotter. So naturally funny… not fake-TV funny. You might want to check out his blog. Unless you hate children. Or parents.
Well, that story was handled a little better than the one at noon today. It was actually kind of interesting with the history of the station’s location and everything. You had me until the R.T. Rybak part. That was a little canned.
And perhaps the reason the noon ratings tanked after removing Bill Carlson could be the unusually high numbers of senior citizens that watch the noon news? I’m assuming that since, generally, young people like me have regular day jobs and are working during the noon hour, they don’t watch news during the day, but for swing shifters like me, the noon news is my morning news. And for older folks, it’s probably their evening news. Heh. But they can probably appreciate more the “experience” Bill brings to the newscast.
And whoops! I thought Brian’s last name was spelled “Goddard.” Now I see that it’s Gotter. What kind of a fan am I? I will check out his blog. Thanks for the link.