Tuesday, March 18, 2008

news and information

Our local 6 p.m. news broadcast ordinarily does not provide us with any news or information. In fact, despite the fact that they are based here in Kingston, they tend to focus on what's happening in Belleville and Brockville more often than not.

Of course, last night's broadcast featured a really overly long segment on St Patrick's Day. It seemed to me that the crew had spent the afternoon at one of the pubs downtown because the main thing they kept showing was a group of young ladies wearing kelly green tshirts with "St. Patrick's Day today, Hungover tomorrow" silkscreened in white letters on the back.

I'm not sure exactly why we continue to watch this particular show. Generally, we dvr it and watch the first ten minutes (in about 2 minutes) and then delete it once they start into the two-day old world news. If I'm honest, I guess we watch it because we like to criticize it and make jokes about it. Since we got our new television and started watching programs almost exclusively in HD, it's even more irritating. This particular station will probably never had a HD signal and I doubt very much that anyone who works there has ever seen it in HD or they'd be embarassed. The female news anchor looks like a dead person. Her skin is totally white and her lips look blue or purple. The male news anchor doens't look quite as horrible but everything is really fuzzy.

Anyway, I guess the reason I started off on this rant is basically the whole coverage of St. Patrick's day. Why is this necessary? Yeah, it's a holiday, yeah, folks go drink green beer and the next day, today, they are all hungover. That's not really news I don't think. Of course, if the local tv station actually did cover real news, well that would be a challenge and they would have report on things that aren't easy or fun and goodness knows that they wouldn't want to do that.

Maybe tonight I'll not bother watching it.

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