Watching local news during the protests

[Kevin M.]

I hadn’t planned on watching the local news in LA, because I know they are all shite. I also know they slashed their operating budgets, they hired unqualified teenagers with bleached hair and tanned skin, and they focus on flash over substance, but it turned out my fiancée’s house was encircled by stores and businesses being looted, a curfew had been imposed, and I needed to know actual information pertinent to what was occurring literally on the doorstep. So I tuned in. Ugh.

A note about the internet and social media and newspapers online: Nobody handled (or is handling, as this is ongoing) this crisis well. All are as guilty of the same crimes of ignorance and uninformed opinion as local TV news. One of the biggest struggles of this crisis is there is literally nobody to turn to for unbiased, factual, relevant, timely information. I’m not employing hyperbole here. There is nobody in Southern California with any sense of journalism who has either the intellect, the expertise, or the financial means to report on this story. Pointing a camera at something and saying “Hey! Look at that!” is not journalism. As much as the main focus of these protests are police failures, the failures of the press are certainly being brought front and center, as well.

I’m going to single out one “reporter” (those are sarcastic air-quotes) named Brittney Hopper, but don’t assume she is the worst of the bunch. She is sadly typical of the crap I watched yesterday, and her specific form of crap is merely memorable in how truly bad she is at her job. I’m not saying she deserved to have rocks thrown at her in her newsvan last night in the CVS parking lot, but I’m not not saying that, either. 

Hopper was assigned to cover the protests in Long Beach. I’m not saying she was the wrong choice for the job, but if I was an assignment editor and I wanted someone who could gain the trust of the largely African American group of protestors, an eight pound blonde would not have been my first, second, or twenty-third choice. But one assumes the pickings are slim over at CBS2/KCAL9. A note for those not living in the LA area: Two rival TV stations share the same news team for budget reasons, and of course because we all know that fewer choices for news is always better (?!). So away Hopper went to Long Beach.

Things started to get beyond her ability long before the looting started. Whether it was the guy on the street she chose to interview live without either she or a producer talking with him ahead of time, who said “I am a Marine Corps veteran, f*ck the police! F*ck the police! F*ck f*ck f*ck the f*cking police!” or the kid on the skateboard (guessing he was 12 or 13) who kept skating behind her with both middle fingers pointed in her direction, Hopper was out of her depth. She could not control a crowd of drunk lemmings, let alone deal with a protest filled with angry people. 

Then the looting started.

Hopper was at The Pike, an outdoor shopping center not far from the Queen Mary. Now, I don’t mean to belittle the damage and loss of property suffered by property owners, because it is real and heartbreaking, but frankly every police chief and sheriff In Southern California has talked about little else in their largely unchallenged press conferences and interviews, so I’m going to assume that as a given and move on. Throughout the day and into the night, Hopper kept injecting herself into the story. She was experiencing this... it was all happening to her... it wasn’t about the protesters or the police or the citizens of the city, and it certainly wasn’t about George Floyd... it was about Brittney Hopper. At no point was this more evident than when she said on-air that what she was seeing was “like a war zone” or “like a third world country.” Maybe she has experience in war zones and developing nations, and kudos to her if she has, but The Pike in Long Beach has a Hooters and a Sunglasses Hut, so although there were some broken windows and other damage to property, the comparison seems at best insensitive to both the residents and the protesters. 

And so as the evening dragged on, and KCAL and KCBS cut from one bit of looting to another, no context, no substance, no coverage of the largely peaceful groups of protesters, Hopper ended up at a CVS pharmacy, where she was shocked, shocked she’ll tell you, to find no police presence. And as she was speculating about what might be going on inside the CVS, pointing out that there was no way she was going to venture inside because guessing about it live on-air was the more professional way to go, someone threw a rock at her windshield, an event so monumental to the life of Brittney Hopper that she posted it on her social media. 

If it seems as if I’m being unduly harsh towards Hopper, I probably am. As I said, everyone covering the story was as inept as she was. Over on ABC7, they got 45 seconds of footage of people running out of a store that they loved so much they showed it non stop for nearly two solid hours. And on NBC4, after having been shamed by Lebron James for not showing any of the peaceful protests, Robert Kovacik held up an iPad and showed seven seconds of a peaceful protest in Colorado. It was the protest where everyone stayed still and chanted “I can’t breathe” the entire length of time George Floyd was crushed to death by a police officer... very moving if you haven’t seen it. NBC4 couldn’t be bothered to upload the video; they just had a guy hold up his tablet for a few seconds to prove they weren’t just focused on the destruction... then they immediately returned to focusing on the destruction. 

I could lament that at a time when I needed to know what was going on, no news agency existed to inform me, but instead — and unlike Brittney Hopper — I choose to not make it about me. The changes that need to occur for everyone in our country need to begin with a substantive conversation. That means people skilled at asking questions and holding subjects accountable need to put people with opposing viewpoints in a room and get them talking, and the public needs to hear and react to those conversations, and from that public debate, new ideas and even new leaders can emerge. That’s how the change is going to happen. And that is exactly what we didn’t see on the news, and what we didn’t see online, either. 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[Jim Ellwanger]

> On Jun 1, 2020, at 4:51 PM, Kevin M. <drunkba...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But one assumes the pickings are slim over at CBS2/KCAL9. A note for those not living in the LA area: Two rival TV stations share the same news team for budget reasons...

They aren't rivals per se -- they're both owned by CBS.

[Kevin M.]

They still compete for ratings and advertising dollars 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[David Risner]

I couldn't agree more with you Kevin. My 70+ year old mother-in-law who lives with us is a news junkie, flipping between channels throughout the day. She thinks this gives her a balanced view.

I keep explaining to her that it sensationalizes everything and tries to make you scared and anxious so you'll keep watching. She thinks it keeps her informed. Hearing her talk about what's going on with the protests is aggravating because it's all just the line from the police. She's so scared she didn't want to go outside the house yesterday afternoon just to feed the neighborhood cats. And there weren't any protests, or riots, within a five mile radius of us.

Her favorite line when I tell her that she's not getting the full or correct picture is that "she saw it with her own eyes on TV." The power behind TV news with its visual images is something that should be handled far more responsibly. It shouldn't be used to scare people and make them anxious. It shouldn't just repeat what the government and big corporations say. It should have actual reporting.

I know this isn't the profitable way to do things, so maybe it needs to be taken out of the realm of capitalism in some way so profit isn't the only motive behind how the news operates (this last part, of course, could be said about all forms of news media nowadays).

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David Risner

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[Joe Hass]

For whatever it's worth: I also have not watched a second of local TV news. In fact, the only broadcast news I've watched *this year* just happened: turning on CNN to watch cops tear gas peaceful protesters so President Asshole could have a photo op in front of a church without the diocese's permission.

What I did do Saturday night was create a quick Twitter list with the six broadcast news channels, the two radio news stations, and the two primary newspapers. And I've found that to be quite helpful in keeping track of things.

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[Joe Hass]

One other thing to jump back to Kevin's original point: on Sunday morning, Mayor Lightfoot tried announcing a secured area in Chicago. As the local media started publishing it, every outlet did two things: they used the phrase "the Loop" to describe the area in question, and simply published the text description of the boundaries of the area. It took me about three minutes to use Google Maps to whip up what's attached here. As a point of reference: the blue box is the physical boundary of the Loop. The red area is what the actual secure area was.

This is what I'd score as an "epic fail".

On Mon, Jun 1, 2020, 18:51 Kevin M. <drunkba...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Kevin M.]

On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 6:39 PM Joe Hass <hassg...@gmail.com> wrote:

One other thing to jump back to Kevin's original point: on Sunday morning, Mayor Lightfoot tried announcing a secured area in Chicago. As the local media started publishing it, every outlet did two things: they used the phrase "the Loop" to describe the area in question, and simply published the text description of the boundaries of the area. It took me about three minutes to use Google Maps to whip up what's attached here. As a point of reference: the blue box is the physical boundary of the Loop. The red area is what the actual secure area was.

This is what I'd score as an "epic fail".

The disinformation seemed to me to be more out of ignorance than intentional, at least out here. If you aren’t versed in local government or local geography, you aren’t going to be able to address simple questions like which announced curfews affect which regions, or why one area is going to get national guard troops when another doesn’t. Basic questions of jurisdiction amongst law enforcement agencies were frequently asked on air but never answered. Those sorts of distinctions are only possible for reporters who know their beats and possess a working knowledge of the people, places, and things they are reporting about. The reporters I watched yesterday barely knew the name of the cities they were in. 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[Doug Eastick]

while my content of the US sh*tshow is largely coming from CNN and MSNBC..... It is treasure posts like this from Kevin that make me continue to appreciate TVorNotTV.

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Doug Eastick <eas...@mcd.on.ca>

[Mark Jeffries]

I feel compelled to point that it seems that for at least part of the weekend competing NPR stations in LA KPCC and KCRW were simulcasting.  I had it on at 10 p.m. LA time Saturday night and KPCC's Larry Mantle was doing call-ins and trying to be the calming influence in this tragedy, although I expect that the non-white audience was more pissed that KCRW's Saturday night dance music shows weren't on.

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[Steve Timko]

Just a couple of observations here about Kevin's commentary.

Kevin calls her the worst he saw. And he also noted stations have been hurt by budget cuts.

Brittney Hopper is a freelancer who works for the station. She's not listed on the station's roster of anchors and reporters.

https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/station/cbs-kcal/ 

If you take a look at her Instagram page, it looks like she is basically a red carpet interviewer. They hire her to be the 9-pound blonde to shove a microphone in the faces of Brad and Leo and the Jennifers.

https://www.instagram.com/brittneyhoppertv 

Now, I'm not trying to pick a fight, but Kevin, how many local news sources do you subscribe to? Because this is the result of free news on the internet.  News outlets are struggling to survive. And they're doing it with fewer resources. 

You can't "subscribe" to a TV station, but since the beginning of television, they have used print publications to develop their stories. As newspapers wither, television news coverage suffers as well.

 

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[Joe Hass]

I'll let Kevin defend Kevin, but I'll say this: the moment you push a TV news department to be self-sustaining from ad revenue from broadcasts, you've lost the war. Those numbers and that revenue are never quite enough.

There was an item that my friend Charlie Meyerson linked to tonight from WMAQ's news site related to a Lori Lightfoot presser in the late afternoon. This was one of the sentences:

"More than 300 trucks from the Department of Streets and Sanitation, Department of Transportation and the Department of Water Management will be positioned across streets to assist with traffic control."

As I wrote in response:

"You want to know why I absolutely abhor journalism right now, despite the fact that I spend roughly $150/month on it? Euphamistic shit like this. What 'assist with traffic control' actually means is 'use these big ass trucks to block access to areas'. ... I'm guessing that no one that resembled an actual journalist was allowed within 50 feet of Lightfoot when she made that statement to actually question what she said."

And this wasn't even what I'd consider journalism by any actual definition.

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[Kevin M.]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 8:35 PM Steve Timko <steve...@gmail.com> wrote:

Just a couple of observations here about Kevin's commentary.

Kevin calls her the worst he saw. And he also noted stations have been hurt by budget cuts.

Brittney Hopper is a freelancer who works for the station. She's not listed on the station's roster of anchors and reporters.

https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/station/cbs-kcal/ 

If you take a look at her Instagram page, it looks like she is basically a red carpet interviewer. They hire her to be the 9-pound blonde to shove a microphone in the faces of Brad and Leo and the Jennifers.

https://www.instagram.com/brittneyhoppertv 

Now, I'm not trying to pick a fight, but Kevin, how many local news sources do you subscribe to? Because this is the result of free news on the internet.  News outlets are struggling to survive. And they're doing it with fewer resources. 

You can't "subscribe" to a TV station, but since the beginning of television, they have used print publications to develop their stories. As newspapers wither, television news coverage suffers as well.

 

I believe I said Brittney was typical of what I saw, not that she was the worst, but that what I saw as a whole (including her) was some of the worst reporting I’ve ever seen. 

The only local news outlet I subscribe to is KPCC/LAist, but the sort of reporting they do isn’t what was called for in this instance. Although they have done some interesting segments about the protests, what I specifically needed last weekend were reporters with immediate on-site knowledge of the region, how local government works, the laws regarding protesting, and which law enforcement agencies had jurisdiction. I didn’t need man-on-the-street fluff-pieces or panel discussions with various minorities... I’m not saying those sorts of stories aren’t beneficial, but what I needed to know was “Is it safe to leave my fiancée and drive home?” To answer that question, a news outlet needed a working knowledge of cities and counties, who oversaw each law enforcement agency, how to obtain reliable information on the ground and from official sources, and some connection to the African-American community at the heart of the protests. And that’s just not KPCC.

When it comes to the local papers, the LA Times and OC Register have financial backers... money isn’t their problem, allocating resources is. Both focus on what sells papers and drives traffic to their websites, not on actually informing the public. And the less said about the Inland Empire’s Press Enterprise, the better. 

For a couple years, HuffPo had some decent blogger-journalists covering Los Angeles who seemed to understand local government and the various communities, but that was several years ago when the site had a very different mission.

I’m aware that freely distributed information online has hurt traditional journalism, but most of that is due to traditional journalism dragging its feet into the 21st century. They spent 15 years refusing to develop an online presence; in that vacuum, their content was usurped and shared anyway. There is much to be said about aggregator sites that copy and paste content, effectively stealing it so they can benefit from the hard work of others, but frankly I just don’t see too many  “others” doing the hard work. I can count on my hands the number of journalists currently producing content worth paying for... only a couple of them are based in Southern California (and none of them are in Atlanta or DC, either). The problem of journalists’ work getting stolen is secondary to journalists being genuinely bad at being journalists. 

40-years-ago, CNN debuted. They had reporters assigned to beats; they had experts covering topics they spent their lives learning about. Not every story was considered “breaking news.” It wasn’t perfect, but I’m not asking for perfection. I’m asking for a news outlet where people know what they are talking about... or they don’t talk about it. 

This week at work I had CNN on when Minnesota announced the charges filed against the four cops responsible for killing George Floyd. They had a panel of pundits, most of them lawyers, one of them Jeffrey F*cking Toobin, who in 25 years has only gotten dumber. Tossed into the mix was a female lawyer whose name now eludes me, but she had practiced law in Minnesota, knew the distinctions between the types of 2nd degree murder charges unique to the state, and understood what the charges meant... she was the ONLY person who should have been on the air on CNN at that moment, but she had to share time with a half dozen bloviating morons like Toobin. Then, because CNN always has to make it about CNN, they stopped talking to the lawyers (including the informed one from Minnesota) so that Wolf Blitzer could interview Don Lemon about what he thought of the charges against the officers. At that moment, the last thing anybody watching the news needed to know was Don Lemon’s opinion about anything. In fact, at any moment in the past, present, or future, the last thing anybody watching the news will need to know is Don Lemon’s opinion on anything. 

I appear to have drifted a bit off topic. I’ve had kind of an odd day. 

On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 4:51 PM Kevin M. <drunkba...@gmail.com> wrote:

I hadn’t planned on watching the local news in LA, because I know they are all shite. I also know they slashed their operating budgets, they hired unqualified teenagers with bleached hair and tanned skin, and they focus on flash over substance, but it turned out my fiancée’s house was encircled by stores and businesses being looted, a curfew had been imposed, and I needed to know actual information pertinent to what was occurring literally on the doorstep. So I tuned in. Ugh.

A note about the internet and social media and newspapers online: Nobody handled (or is handling, as this is ongoing) this crisis well. All are as guilty of the same crimes of ignorance and uninformed opinion as local TV news. One of the biggest struggles of this crisis is there is literally nobody to turn to for unbiased, factual, relevant, timely information. I’m not employing hyperbole here. There is nobody in Southern California with any sense of journalism who has either the intellect, the expertise, or the financial means to report on this story. Pointing a camera at something and saying “Hey! Look at that!” is not journalism. As much as the main focus of these protests are police failures, the failures of the press are certainly being brought front and center, as well.

I’m going to single out one “reporter” (those are sarcastic air-quotes) named Brittney Hopper, but don’t assume she is the worst of the bunch. She is sadly typical of the crap I watched yesterday, and her specific form of crap is merely memorable in how truly bad she is at her job. I’m not saying she deserved to have rocks thrown at her in her newsvan last night in the CVS parking lot, but I’m not not saying that, either. 

Hopper was assigned to cover the protests in Long Beach. I’m not saying she was the wrong choice for the job, but if I was an assignment editor and I wanted someone who could gain the trust of the largely African American group of protestors, an eight pound blonde would not have been my first, second, or twenty-third choice. But one assumes the pickings are slim over at CBS2/KCAL9. A note for those not living in the LA area: Two rival TV stations share the same news team for budget reasons, and of course because we all know that fewer choices for news is always better (?!). So away Hopper went to Long Beach.

Things started to get beyond her ability long before the looting started. Whether it was the guy on the street she chose to interview live without either she or a producer talking with him ahead of time, who said “I am a Marine Corps veteran, f*ck the police! F*ck the police! F*ck f*ck f*ck the f*cking police!” or the kid on the skateboard (guessing he was 12 or 13) who kept skating behind her with both middle fingers pointed in her direction, Hopper was out of her depth. She could not control a crowd of drunk lemmings, let alone deal with a protest filled with angry people. 

Then the looting started.

Hopper was at The Pike, an outdoor shopping center not far from the Queen Mary. Now, I don’t mean to belittle the damage and loss of property suffered by property owners, because it is real and heartbreaking, but frankly every police chief and sheriff In Southern California has talked about little else in their largely unchallenged press conferences and interviews, so I’m going to assume that as a given and move on. Throughout the day and into the night, Hopper kept injecting herself into the story. She was experiencing this... it was all happening to her... it wasn’t about the protesters or the police or the citizens of the city, and it certainly wasn’t about George Floyd... it was about Brittney Hopper. At no point was this more evident than when she said on-air that what she was seeing was “like a war zone” or “like a third world country.” Maybe she has experience in war zones and developing nations, and kudos to her if she has, but The Pike in Long Beach has a Hooters and a Sunglasses Hut, so although there were some broken windows and other damage to property, the comparison seems at best insensitive to both the residents and the protesters. 

And so as the evening dragged on, and KCAL and KCBS cut from one bit of looting to another, no context, no substance, no coverage of the largely peaceful groups of protesters, Hopper ended up at a CVS pharmacy, where she was shocked, shocked she’ll tell you, to find no police presence. And as she was speculating about what might be going on inside the CVS, pointing out that there was no way she was going to venture inside because guessing about it live on-air was the more professional way to go, someone threw a rock at her windshield, an event so monumental to the life of Brittney Hopper that she posted it on her social media. 

If it seems as if I’m being unduly harsh towards Hopper, I probably am. As I said, everyone covering the story was as inept as she was. Over on ABC7, they got 45 seconds of footage of people running out of a store that they loved so much they showed it non stop for nearly two solid hours. And on NBC4, after having been shamed by Lebron James for not showing any of the peaceful protests, Robert Kovacik held up an iPad and showed seven seconds of a peaceful protest in Colorado. It was the protest where everyone stayed still and chanted “I can’t breathe” the entire length of time George Floyd was crushed to death by a police officer... very moving if you haven’t seen it. NBC4 couldn’t be bothered to upload the video; they just had a guy hold up his tablet for a few seconds to prove they weren’t just focused on the destruction... then they immediately returned to focusing on the destruction. 

I could lament that at a time when I needed to know what was going on, no news agency existed to inform me, but instead — and unlike Brittney Hopper — I choose to not make it about me. The changes that need to occur for everyone in our country need to begin with a substantive conversation. That means people skilled at asking questions and holding subjects accountable need to put people with opposing viewpoints in a room and get them talking, and the public needs to hear and react to those conversations, and from that public debate, new ideas and even new leaders can emerge. That’s how the change is going to happen. And that is exactly what we didn’t see on the news, and what we didn’t see online, either. 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[stannc]

The fascination that I have with the coverage of all this was that a city the size of Charlotte, North Carolina managed to get SIX different stations on the air live covering the crowds. Some stations had multiple crews on different sides of town (it’s not that big). One station had multiple crews and a helicopter.

A couple of stations managed to filter background noise so there were a minimum of F words on their broadcast after the first few (this is still almost the south) and another station blurred their video any time someone behind the reporter threw up a middle finger.

[Brad Beam]

-----Original Message-----
From: tvor...@googlegroups.com [mailto:tvor...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of stannc

>The fascination that I have with the coverage of all this was that a city the size of Charlotte, North Carolina managed to get SIX different stations on the air live covering the crowds. Some stations had multiple crews on different sides of town (it’s not that big). One station had multiple crews and a helicopter.

Six? I assume you're including the local PBS station - er, state-network affiliate - because I don't see what the sixth station would be.

[Bob Jersey]

Brad Beam, to stannc, today (6/07):

Six? I assume you're including the local PBS station - er, state-network affiliate - because I don't see what the sixth station would be.

 

Does channel 14, licenced to Hickory, do local news?

B

[stannc]

They have Unifour Today, which is an old guy reading the news in front of a bookcase.

The six channels live the other night:

WBTV (CBS/Gray)
WSOC (ABC/Apollo-Cox)
WCNC (NBC/Tegna)
WJZY (Fox/Nexstar)
WCCB (CW/independent)
Spectrum News (Charter)