(Lack of) News Judgment. I tried today to watch the evening national and world news broadcasts on ABC and NBC, as I usually do (ABC as base, NBC during ABC's commercials. I like ABC a bit better, and my first job in New York, when I was 19 in ye olden days, was as a clerk-messenger for ABC News, so I have residual loyalty to my former employer). But ABC wasn't showing national or world news tonite. No, there was a steam-pipe explosion in Midtown Manhattan, and that was the be-all and end-all of ABC News's universe today. So I turned to NBC, and was able to catch some other stories until NBC also knocked the national/world news broadcast off the air. So I turned to Univisión and Telemundo, which I do when there are commercials on the other networks. Univisión also knocked its world-news broadcast off the air late in the half hour. Telemundo was in commercials, so, gagging and wretching all the way, I turned to CBS News with Katie Couric. CBS alone went on with its national/world news broadcast.
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I cannot know if these pre-emptions were national or only local to the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area.
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New York's WABC, following the nitely news, knocked Jeopardy off the air to follow this event of no importance, updates concerning which could have been broadcast as a "crawl" across the bottom of the screen.
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So I sent the following message to ABC and NBC (whose New York stations are flagship to their respective networks, and are as well my local stations, New York being, from my point of view, a suburb of Newark.

What were you thinking, in knocking the evening news off the air tonite (at least in the New York area) to show instead a report about a broken steam pipe in a tiny part of Manhattan? Let me remind you of something you have apparently forgotten. Your station serves a Tristate Metropolitan Area of 22 million people, almost none of whom give a d*mn about a steam pipe explosion on 41st Street near Lexington Avenue, given that it was apparently an accident and has no larger significance. It was not the result of terrorism. It didn't kill lots of people. It didn't stop the subway from running, nor the trains at Grand Central. It was, in short, a matter of no importance whatsoever to anybody outside PART of Manhattan. What were you thinking?
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Americans are citizens of a superpower, who desperately need to be well informed about the entire planet, not about 41st Street and Lexington Avenue. Whereas WABC completely pre-empted its "World News" program, and WNBC bumped part of its world-news broadcast, CBS kept its 'eye' on its mission: to inform Americans about the world, not about 41st Street and Lexington Avenue.
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Surely you could have run a "crawl" across the bottom of the screen to update interested people about this story, but left other stories in the major part of the screen for the great preponderance of the population who don't care about a steam pipe explosion on 41st Street.
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Everyone who caused the pre-emption of your evening WORLD news program (in at least the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area) for a trivial local story should be bounced out of New York, the Nation's (if not the world's) news capital, pronto, and kept out for, oh, say, two years. If they are so fascinated by local news and think it the be-all and end-all of the universe, let them do local news in, say, Minot, North Dakota for a couple of years. Maybe then they will appreciate what is and is not national, much less world, news. Cheers.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:23 PM