Comments on TV news

It's fun to watch a local or national news broadcast for the stock footage. You see, most news doesn't actually require a visual image. However, the medium of TV requires at least some visual images during a news broadcast, so the news teams come up with pointless stock footage to relate to the story.

For example, any time you hear a story about obesity in America, you're going to get images of headless fat guys. You know what I mean--the images of overweight people from the neck down, walking or just standing around outdoors. If you watch news regularly, you probably see headless fat people once a week.

Last night there was a story about new transfer rules for the Minnesota high school league. This led to various random high school sports highlights. I'm not picking on any network--contrary to Possible Flurries' wishes, I constantly flip between the four local networks between 10:00 and 10:30, and I saw the random high school sports highlights on at least two networks.

I've also seen a few different images of Scooter Libby walking into a building. And of course, when there's a crime, you're going to see the same recording of the crime scene over and over again.

A few other comments:

I like Mike Pomeranz. There, I said it. He's just a good news anchor.

I wonder what Leah McClean is like as a person. Is she pretentious, snobby ambitious? Or is she nice? And isn't it funny that her last name is spelled like "clean" or "lean"?

Sven fans should watch Kare 11 tonight at 10; he'll be swimming with sharks.

(this is radio, but whatever) On NPR, a weatherperson said "20 is the new 40." He was referring to temperature; according to him, people now walk around in 20 degree weather with sweatshirts or suits and no coats or hats or mittens like they used to do when it was 40. I found this fairly clever but not terribly interesting, but the Beav and Possible Flurries thought it was so funny and insisted I blog about it.

And finally, if you like Harry Potter, or you've read Equus, read this.