What drove you from local news?

I don’t watch the local news on tele­vi­sion. I don’t know many peo­ple who do. If I hap­pen to flip to local news, I might watch if the weather is on, but I will never go find it. Why is that? Because one day in win­ter I saw a news story so dumb, so asi­nine, that it for­ever turned me off of local news.

It began with pro­mos appear­ing dur­ing com­mer­cial breaks in a show I was watch­ing. (This was before TiVo.) “Hid­den dan­ger on the roads!” it said. “Break­ing news you need to know first before you drive!” they cried. After sev­eral drub­bings of this I actu­ally thought maybe I’d stick around and watch, to see if I had any­thing to be con­cerned about. Maybe it was seri­ous, a toxic tanker had spilled its load. Maybe it was tan­gen­tial, invad­ing Japan­ese weeds were chok­ing out native plants along the high­way. Maybe it was top­i­cal, mas­sive pot­holes along the route to work.

So I stayed.

And the news started. And they built it up, and up, and up, and they went to their man on the street, and he turned to a typ­i­cal car, just like one that could be owned by you or me, and he crouched down and the cam­era zoomed in and he showed us… the dan­ger that road­way salt could pose to our cars. Rust! he exclaimed! Rust could eat away at your car! Beware!

Oh, and be sure to wash your car reg­u­larly in the win­ter. With that under­car­riage setting.

I was so dumb­founded I think I actu­ally watched the rest of the news broad­cast. My last local news broadcast.

So. What drove you from local news?