The News Channel 7 Challenge

Last Monday, I began my week with a mission. As much time as has been spent on the Spark criticizing local media coverage, our local television news on WSPA News Channel 7 has gotten precious little attention. At first it seemed odd to me that that would be the case, and I spent a good deal of time thinking about it. What I came up with in the end was that we here at the Spark deal in a world of words.

Those words may now more often than not be digital representations on an illuminated screen rather than ink on wood pulp but either way, they’re still words. So even though on the surface ignoring the local television news coverage may seem like some sort of glaring omission in the Spark’s coverage, from a certain point of view it makes sense that the local television news coverage would’ve largely flown under our radar up to now.

So it was with all those things in mind that I decided to watch a week of News Channel 7’s local news coverage.

I should say at the outset that I’m probably the last person who should have ever volunteered to watch a whole week of local news. I’m the sort of guy who’d much rather bury himself in a 5000 word article in the New Yorker than watch 30 minutes of local coverage on car crashes, shootings, stabbings, and sensationalized criminal trials. A lot of people know the old rule of thumb about television news: “If it bleeds, it leads”. Less popular though, is the other half of that rule: “If it thinks, it stinks”. That’s always been my problem with local news. Generally, it plays to our most voyeuristic and base instincts. Local television news often serves little purpose other than to provide us all a chance to gawk at the misfortune of others, and any useful information gleamed from watching is entirely incidental.

Needless to say, I wasn’t looking forward to the week ahead and not being content with suffering alone, on Monday I posted a challenge over on the forum to attempt to get some of the Spark’s readers to take the local news challenge with me. My results were decidedly underwhelming, and the few responses I got were from people opting out, or starting and failing. The local news challenge was such a dismal failure in fact, that if in the future anyone ever has the audacity to accuse me of being an influential member of the community here in Spartanburg, I’ll promptly point to the local news challenge thread in the Spark’s forum as evidence that I can’t even motivate people to sit down in front of their televisions for 30 minutes. I’m so stung by the experience, it surprises me when my dog still comes when I call him.

Even though the forum local news challenge was a failure, I still had a week’s worth of local news to watch. So with my netbook on my lap for taking notes, I turned on the TV Monday at 5 PM for my first installment of WSPA’s local news coverage.

For my first evening of local news, I decided to watch the entire hour and half of coverage from 5 to 6:30 PM. That plan was good; unfortunately I only managed to make it to about 5:40 or so before I fell asleep on the couch from a combination of boredom and the lack of my afternoon cup of coffee. Before I dozed off though I caught what at first seemed like an interesting lead story at 5:30 about North Carolina parolees committing crimes in South Carolina. The story only referenced two parolees, both of whom committed crimes in Cherokee County, one of whom was the now infamous Gaffney serial killer Patrick Burris, and that’s when it hit me that this supposed story was really just an excuse to bring up the serial killer story again.

The two men referenced in the story had no connection to each other, and the fact that they both were on parole in North Carolina when they happened to commit crimes in an area of South Carolina less than 30 minutes from the North Carolina state line is an obvious coincidence. This story didn’t expose some gaping hole in the North Carolina judicial system. It simply used an incidental connection to get more mileage out of the already throughly covered serial killer story.

The other thing I noticed about the 5 and 5:30 editions of the local evening news is that in addition to telling the news not quite good enough for the 6 o’clock block, they also serve as teasers for what’s coming up at 6. In fact, a disturbing amount of air time during the first hour of evening coverage is devoted to promoting the news at 6; which in turn uses a significant portion of its time to promote the news at 11. It’s almost like watching an infomercial with commercial breaks.

I’d like to be able to say that things got better as the week progressed, but they didn’t. I tried watching at 6 and at noon, but no matter what time you tune in, it’s pretty much the same thing: something sexy or bloody in the lead, a pseudo-deep investigative report about something relating to sex, children, or violent crime in the middle, and then weather and sports. Finally, we go out with some puff piece pulled down from the national network about a dog that saved a guy’s life by dialing 911 when the house was on fire or something equally heartwarming and meaningless. I didn’t need a week to figure this stuff out. I could’ve wrapped it up in an afternoon.

When it was all over, I finished out my week with pretty much the same ideas about local television news coverage that I started the week with—albeit articulated a little better. That isn’t to say that I didn’t learn a few things or develop new ideas. For example, I’m now thoroughly convinced that weather and sports are scheduled towards the end of each 30 minute block because if they were scheduled in the beginning of the block half the audience would change the channel before the half-hour was over. I’d never really bothered to give it that much thought before last week. That’s something I suppose.

The problem with our local television newscast is that it simply doesn’t report much actual news. News is something that affects people’s everyday lives. Accidents out on the interstate are tragic, but they’re not news. Criminal child neglect trials are heartbreaking, but they’re not news. A stabbing in a convenience store is frightening, but it’s not news. If you disagree with that, you should ask yourself how any of those stories will affect you, me, or society in any way. These are personal tragedies and to the people directly involved, they are very important. To the rest of us though, these so-called news stories won’t make any impact on our lives one way or the other.

I know that may come across as a little cynical. Before you dismiss me as cold and unfeeling though you should ask yourself what’s more cynical, the guy who says that these stories of personal tragedy aren’t news, or the news agency that—under the guise of being informative—exploits people’s voyeuristic impulses for its own private gain?

The biggest problem with our local television news is that there’s actually plenty of news out there, but most of it would require lifting the audience up and educating them to the things that really do matter in their lives instead of talking down to them as though they’re caged animals only interested in sex or gore. The real stories out there aren’t likely to make for the best visuals, but they would provide the public with information they really need to better their own communities, and while that’s not exactly sexy or glamorous, it is what journalism is supposed to be about.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.