Conan O’Brien Breaks Some Actual News
A fascinating, and somewhat disturbing, story from the Washington Post yesterday, that Conan O’Brien, of all people, broke on his show a while back. Local TV news stations are buying pre-packaged “instant” news stories, with accompanying script and film footage, and simply reading them on the air as “new” news produced by the local station itself.
It’s akin to syndicating a column in local papers, but instead of each newspaper around the country carrying Maureen Dowd’s weekly column with her byline, they would hypothetically print the same column but each paper would sign it with a different local journalist in order to make it look original to that specific local paper. It would be like bloggers Chris in Paris, Markos Moulitsas, and Marcy Wheeler all actually being the same person: a retired cafeteria worker in Pensacola, Florida.
Here’s Conan’s compilation of numerous stations reporting on the same story, “Is it time for dogs to have a social network of their own?”:
7 comments:
Thanks for finally exposing this. The fact is WBOC makes a ton of money and they do it by screwing the viewers on Delmarva. The whole DelmarvaLife show is nothing but a money grab. It is notbing but one big advertisement. And a mixture of syndicated stories. And all of their newscasts are like that too. I quite frankly don't know why anyone would watch it.
I never watch any local newscasts unless I am looking for specific local weather information and I am trying to confirm what I'm seeing on the weather channel. It's all puff pieces and thinly disguised advertising.
I DONT WATCH IT. TOO DULL AND BORING.
You are right it is only puff pieces. WBOC has been like this ever since John Dearing took over in like 2003. Simply horrible. No wonder Steve Summers stormed off the set one day and never came back!
Steve Summers is a good guy and I really enjoyed watching him.
Anybody else notice how all the good reporters are all gone from WBOC? All that's left are the best of the worst.
Steve Summers? You don’t know Steve Summers. Look in the dictionary under asshole and you can find his picture there. Just one example… he came in the station telling me about how he was just involved in a little road-rage with someone as he was driving down from Delaware to work. He proceeded to tell me how he pulled out a pistol from under his seat and waved it at the other driver. Also, why do you think Andrea Duckworth, who married him, also got him out of her life.
Yeah Steve Summers was the best to ever work there I think. I used to like Steve Hammond too but it seems like he is just going along for the ride too. That being said, I don't blame him. I know deep down he probably hates what WBOC has become, but he makes way too much money to leave.
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