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My local news kept reporting the same weird power outage for a solid hour
Last Tuesday, every station in my city cut to a live shot of a single substation. The anchor said crews were on site, but the camera showed empty streets and no work trucks. I checked the power company's own outage map and it listed zero customers affected in that area. They kept running the same script about 'public safety' while showing nothing. Has anyone seen a news story that just felt like filler for no clear reason?
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the_logan6mo ago
Sounds like the news director found a really boring screensaver and decided to call it journalism. They probably had a time slot to fill after their segment on suspiciously dry potholes got canceled. Classic move, just point a camera at some infrastructure and call it a developing story.
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ellis.hayden5mo ago
Ugh, been there. My old station did that with a stalled train once. Paige427 is right, it just kills trust. Best trick is to have a few human interest backups ready to go.
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paige4276mo ago
That 24 hour news cycle is a real problem. They have so much time to fill they end up making stories out of nothing. I saw a segment last week that was just a live shot of a closed road for ten minutes. It's lazy and it makes people trust the news even less. They're treating viewers like we have the attention span of a goldfish.
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