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Is Local TV News Too Depressing?

J

Joseph_Gallant

While my longtime girlfriend watches a lot of national broadcast and cable news programs, she seldom watches local TV news programs (and only if there's a major storm).

She claims that local TV news programs are too depressing!

I have never thought that local television news was too depressing, but it got me to thinking as to whether other people thought that way.
 
It can be. A quick search on the subject turned up a lot of stories over the past 15 years on the subject.

www.verywellmind.com

Is Watching the News Bad for Mental Health?

Watching the news can help you stay informed. But too much of it can also lead to feelings of worry, anxiety, and depression.
www.verywellmind.com www.verywellmind.com

On the news side, the consultants tell us that bad news motivates viewers more than good news. If it bleeds, it leads. So stories about robberies, murders, and crashes get more passion than stories about cats, flowers, and sunshine.
 
Joseph_Gallant said:
I have never thought that local television news was too depressing, but it got me to thinking as to whether other people thought that way.
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Really? I find that hard to believe, especially given that you have post here for years, so you obviously pay a bit of attention.

The stories are almost entirely downers. Here's the first few stories from the 6:30pm news on WSB-TV/Atlanta:
* Suburban school system to stop serving students after 3 days' lunch debt
* Atlanta-based rapper pleads guilty to racketeering
* Flu season update; CDC says 47 children killed nationally
* New Hampshire voting update

I don't find any of those stories particularly encouraging.
 
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KC news has traditionally been very violent for the years I have lived here, but depends on the outlet (KMBC has traditionally leaned into those stories.) Still way better than national, though. There are definitely bad parts and good parts of town. One bar I went into after a volunteer event near Westport had a neon sign saying "don't do coke in the bathroom."
 
tall_guy1 said:
KC news has traditionally been very violent for the years I have lived here, but depends on the outlet (KMBC has traditionally leaned into those stories.) Still way better than national, though. There are definitely bad parts and good parts of town. One bar I went into after a volunteer event near Westport had a neon sign saying "don't do coke in the bathroom."
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What do you consider “bad and good parts of town”?
 
The last few times I visited my parents who live in the northeast in a smaller market, I had to switch off their local news after about 15 minutes. I visited around the holidays and their local station ran a bunch of sensationalized crap like "Could your Christmas tree and decorations be making you sick???" They interviewed a bunch of healthcare "experts" who explained that some homes with mold or other issues in their attics or basements where they store their decor could result in spores and vermin being spread into the living areas and the air in the house once the decor is erected, thereby making the occupants ill. What crap! How often does that really happen - yet they aired the story as if it was a serious risk affecting many. Then it was stories about fraud and identity theft, again making mountains out of molehills with sensationalized lead-ins. Then a story about people starting their cars to warm them up in the cold weather, and dying from carbon monoxide gas in the process, along with statistics showing how surprisingly often this happens. Since it's a small market, after Christmas and they didn't have a lot of local ads, they had a lot of the national commercials featured pictures of animals freezing, suffering and captions above the heads of abandoned animals saying things like "What did I do wrong". "Why did my family leave me"? Then it was commercials sponsored by the highway patrol about the worst that can happen if you don't fasten your seat belt and how much an accident could cost you. At that point I was fully depressed after seeing about 10 - 15 minutes of non-stop doom and gloom and had to switch it off. That's not the the first time it's happened. Once I went there in the summer and the same station was running stories about why one should never water ski or participate in water sports because of the amount of bacteria in lakes and rivers and how many people get injured or die while skiing each summer. Horrible.
 
In a smaller market (Knoxville TN), there is bad news, including accidents, murders, fires, etc but they only take up a few minutes, typically unless it's an especially brutal murder or something like that. Otherwise, the long newscasts have fluff and paid content. If something happens involving Tennessee Volunteers sports, that takes up the whole newcast.
 
Don CT said:
Bad news equals ratings.
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If it bleeds, it leads.

Viewers/listeners/readers always complain that there's too much bad news in the mass media, but the fact is that most of what happens in a typical coverage area each day is neither good nor bad but normal. Kids go to school in the morning, attend their classes, eat lunch, and go home in the afternoon. Nobody gets shot, overdoses in the boys' room, pulls a knife on a teacher, sexually assaults a classmate. Businesses conduct their mundane business. Various boards and commissions meet to discuss and act on noncontroversial proposals. Traffic zips along the nearby Interstate with no serious accidents. Not much there to fill up a newscast or a front page.

Feel-good stories exist, but you need to dig to find them, and truth be told, they have little to no immediacy to them and are placed at the end of newscasts or the bottom of page 1 for just that reason. Use too many of them in a single newscast or edition and you have a product that your viewers or readers feel they can skip without the fear of missing something important.

Fires, fatal accidents, violent crime, protests ... those are the things that grab people's attention, no matter how much they may complain afterward about the absence of "good news." And people paying attention are what commercial media need, for they're the ones who will see the advertisers' messages every night.
 
I'm an hour north of the Dallas/Ft. Worth metro. I choose the Sherman/Denison, TX/Ardmore, OK station. Start of newscast typically is who died in car accident, latest robberies, any 'if it bleeds' with a short intro on weather. The second segment is more national and State news with lots of network actualities. Third segment is weather and 4th is Sports with emphasis on local. There is always a human interest and/or an educational story slipped in in one of the first two segments. We're talking a market of 200,000, so not so much 'big city' attitude They actually do some fairly decent investigative reporting as in good enough that if I was in D/FW I'd have my eye on a couple of reporters for openings. But yes, it's the bad in society you hear about on local news. I don't find it depressing but rather am so accustomed to it seems the norm. However I think the fear of your fellow human being is pretty much rooted in how effectively media has made you fearful of someone you don't know. There's some bad ones out there but most people seem to be good.
 
Don CT said:
Bad news equals ratings.
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Yep. Screw up morning drive commuting for hours, people are going to want to know about how the medics are after being hit by a wrong-way driver on the local Interstate.

Hasn't it been like this for decades?
 
Mikey Radio said:
The last few times I visited my parents who live in the northeast in a smaller market, I had to switch off their local news after about 15 minutes. I visited around the holidays and their local station ran a bunch of sensationalized crap like "Could your Christmas tree and decorations be making you sick???" They interviewed a bunch of healthcare "experts" who explained that some homes with mold or other issues in their attics or basements where they store their decor could result in spores and vermin being spread into the living areas and the air in the house once the decor is erected, thereby making the occupants ill. What crap! How often does that really happen - yet they aired the story as if it was a serious risk affecting many. Then it was stories about fraud and identity theft, again making mountains out of molehills with sensationalized lead-ins. Then a story about people starting their cars to warm them up in the cold weather, and dying from carbon monoxide gas in the process, along with statistics showing how surprisingly often this happens. Since it's a small market, after Christmas and they didn't have a lot of local ads, they had a lot of the national commercials featured pictures of animals freezing, suffering and captions above the heads of abandoned animals saying things like "What did I do wrong". "Why did my family leave me"? Then it was commercials sponsored by the highway patrol about the worst that can happen if you don't fasten your seat belt and how much an accident could cost you. At that point I was fully depressed after seeing about 10 - 15 minutes of non-stop doom and gloom and had to switch it off. That's not the the first time it's happened. Once I went there in the summer and the same station was running stories about why one should never water ski or participate in water sports because of the amount of bacteria in lakes and rivers and how many people get injured or die while skiing each summer. Horrible.
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I totally agree with you and additionally think that most local news, at least in my neck of the woods (Phoenix) is news magazine type stuff and not the hard news variety. Pretty useless. Plus, there are way too many hours of "news" and way too much duplication of both source and national stories.
 
Mark Roberts said:
They really needed to put reverb under the anchor's audio.
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I like how, in the news open, the punctuator in between the anchor names ("Fitz." "Sanchez.") is pretty clearly gunfire in an indoor range. Let's just scare everyone BEFORE the first story.

And that's just how they rolled back then:

 
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