Why do local TV stations treat their viewers like morons?
It’s the middle of November. The first snows came and melted a couple weeks ago. (Not here in the Miami of the North – Lockport, but down south of Buffalo, where it belongs)
Every 10 minutes, the TV starts beeping and a crawler comes on telling me what anyone with half a brain or a Farmer’s Almanac already knows: it’s going to snow.
But they seem to think they need to “warn” us. It’s on a par with the warning on a cup of coffee that it might be hot. Come on, it’s not a tornado. This is Western New York. We get snow in winter. November is winter. We have lakes and lake effect snow falls south of Buffalo. That’s geography. It hasn’t changed since last year. No one will be surprised by it.
And, it’s nothing new. They’ve been doing the same thing all summer with every thunderstorm. Yeah, we get that too: we get convection storms in the summer. Big deal.
But they still have to interrupt the little bit of television that is worth watching. The crawler is bad, but the annoying beep is worse. It says ‘listen to me I’m important’ then disappoints you when you find out what it is. Sometimes, they even lower the show’s audio while it beeps away.
To add insult, I, like a lot of people who refuse to be slaves to the TV, record their favorite show. How little I could care about hyping their weather forecast with the obvious news, is even more reduced when I watch it a day later.
Come on, television stations, if we want the weather, we’ll look out the window. Or switch to the weather channel – or is that what you’re afraid of? Keep the weather reports out of the entertainment and save them until the news you seem to think we need at 5am, 6am, 7am, 12 noon, 5pm, 6pm, 10pm and 11pm. Sheesh. Talk about justifying your own jobs… Most of it is 50% teasers to get us to listen to the next hour’s news program and 50% the same thing you saw earlier.
And they keep on doing it, like a kid with a new toy, a weatherman with a crawler just can’t resist.
Watching the Bills game this weekend, they just had to run a crawler across the top of the screen complete with the annoying beeps, to tell us snow was coming.
When? Imminently? That evening? No, Monday and Tuesday. We could have gotten that bit of information in the newspaper, it was so far away.
I’ve decided that these interruptions are not just over-zealous weathermen, but they are, in fact, extra commercials for the local news.