News you can’t use

I do not understand what the Media Mutt was getting at with his 30-minutes-a-day experiment of getting the news he needs to know from local TV stations [“The Week of Living Ignorantly,” January 2013]. I mean, there’s two ways to look at it. Do you want national news stories covered by the local stations? Obviously, for most people, that really is not needed. National news stories are over-covered, to the point of not being journalism anymore, on many 24-hour cable news outlets. I would venture to think that the reason local stations cover any national news stories at all is for the benefit of those who do not partake of the media saturation epidemic, whether it is by choice, habit, or economic reasons (no cable or Internet). But for those people, there is the old-school network news right after the local news.

Certainly, in a perfect world (I’m being sarcastic), everyone would be watching an hour-long local newscast every night that didn’t touch on national news unless it pertained to Maine. But would local news stations lose viewers if they didn’t lead with Newtown that horrible day? Would they lose advertising revenue if they adopted such a strategy?

Just like the national media, local news is a business. I didn’t see any curfew on advertising during the Newtown coverage, national or local. Meet the Press, the first Sunday after Newtown, was brought to you by, among others, Mercedes Benz, who had a Santa driving around those little bags with candles in them (looked like a vigil, kind of), and Boeing, makers of fun things like drone aircraft. The registers kept ringing, ching-ching! What was that great line in The Hunger Games? “If we stop watching, they’ll stop playing the game.”

Anyway, if you want to find out what some bloviating committee was discussing in Augusta, or what a credit default swap on a synthetic derivative on a mortgage-backed security is, or why “W” is still, on paper, the Solar Power President, well, you’re just going to have to find that info on your own time, because, just like most of the “news you need” (sarcastic), it will not be delivered to you for economic reasons (and I don’t mean just advertising revenue, either). But if you’re doing fine as is, just forget about it (for real).

Bob Larsen
Harrison