Thursday, November 14, 2013

David Camm fan club (a.k.a local news stations)

   During the 10 weeks that we followed the news, there was a trial going on of a man named David Camm. And we heard every possible piece of information they could possibly scrounge up on it. Why? Who knows. Was the story newsworthy? Not to the extent that they covered it.
   I can understand them updating us on the trial when the verdict was reached, but did we really need daily updates on the subject? This clearly violates the principle of make the important interesting, because this isn't really important to anyone's life besides the families of those directly involved.
   This also violates the yardstick of newsworthiness, because as I said before, it doesn't affect anyone really, and especially not for any significant amount of time.
   As for my news station, they were the worst about it, even setting up an entire twitter account dedicated to updates on the trial. David Camm was our lead story three out of ten times (which means that it was our lead story 30% of the time, which is ridiculous).
   I think local news has a lot to work on when it comes to newsworthiness and making the important interesting, and this is just one example of it. Is the David Camm trial really that important? No, but TV news made it out to be the trial to end all others.
   Also, it wasn't just WAVE. The other stations covered David Camm just as much, or at least close to as much as WAVE did.

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