I went looking on the cable program grid Saturday for evening network news, but none of the local stations elected to take earlier feeds of WNT, NNN or CBS EN.
There were network sports events at 7, 730 & 8 in the East, presumably with the usual network news in normal time slots.
Here, KOMO did Sinclair's 'Full Measure' at 330 and local news at 4.
KIRO ran paid at 330 and local news at 4.
KING ran paid at 330. And after Golf, it ran five straight paid shows. First local news aired at 10 on KONG, 11 on K5 after Dateline.
This happens a lot during college football Saturdays, but was surprised today that there were no opportunities.
I still think the news business became the entertainment business the day they repealed the fairness doctrine
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like 3:30pm would have been the time for KIRO and KING to take their respective network newscasts. Paid programming might bring in more money, but as network affiliates, they should be obligated to air the network newscasts. It makes me wonder if that obligation only applies on weekdays and not on weekends.
ReplyDeleteAs for KOMO, I guess they could have aired World News Tonight at 4pm or 4:30pm in lieu of part of their local newscast.
What was worse was that Saturday was the anniversary of D-Day. Forgotten.
DeleteThat should have been acknowledged. Such important moments in history should never be ignored.
DeleteThe East and Central time zones likely saw their usual evening feed, but nothing acknowledged in the West. Not sure about MT.
DeleteGood point about the Eastern and Central time zones. So perhaps the networks did acknowledge the occasion and we just didn't get to see it.
DeleteChecked the NY TV listings with this exactly in mind on Saturday and they did in fact get the national news. So this seems like a case of the Seattle stations not being able to clear the broadcasts at the early hour they were running them. @IDC's point above about when the stations locally could have run them I fully agree with. I'd be interested to know if other West Coast markets also had this same issue with their stations
DeleteIn general, if sports is pre-empting west coast news, they make it available to stations out here for early broadcast. KOMO has done that numerous times because I recorded Muir for later viewing. Local news and paid may be a better overall revenue play and the stations here, not being O&Os, could have carriage waivers in the affil contracts.
DeleteI don't watch monitor the news much anymore. Most of it is not what I wanted to hear and I realize that there is nothing that I can do to effect outcomes.
ReplyDeleteRegarding D Day. I highly recommend the new. Movie titled Pressure. It’s a story about the meteorologists who correctly predicted the weather, convincing Eisenhower to postpone the invasion by 24 hours.
ReplyDeleteYes, looks good.
DeleteSounds intriguing.
DeleteThe newscasts from the big three are so poorly done that they've made themselves nearly irrelevant. PBS and NPR are the shining exceptions, but PBS can't even fund a weekend show. CBS is dead to me until Bari and her bosses are gone.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much news to cover these days that the big three can barely scratch the surface with the 30 minute timeslots they have (closer to 18-20 minutes once advertisements are accounted for). I agree that they aren't particularly well done, and that their relevance is diminishing, especially CBS. PBS and NPR do a much better job with their offerings, but their resources are limited.
DeleteDitto Dead!
ReplyDelete