Ignorant TV reporters

S

ScoPro

1,000+ Posts
Saw one on an Austin channel last night talkin' about The University going green & cutting down on the water usage for the Austin campus. She announced that UT was spending $1,000,000 per day on it's water usage on the average, or about $350,000,000 per year. I clearly heard the clueless wench say that - even replayed it twice. At the end of her "report", she looked pleased as punch.

What a moron - I looked it up and found that The University uses about 900,000,000 gallons per year - Austin charges $3.12 per 1,000 gallons (commercial rates), which comes to a little over $2,800,000 for one year. Took me about 2 minutes.

WTF? What am I missing here?

Are we supposed to swallow this **** like two chicks & a cup?

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Ya always gotta consider the source.

TV news, first and foremost, is a show. I'm not saying it's without journalistic credibility, depending on who is delivering, but (particularly for females) it's how you look, not what you say, that gets you on the air.

If you were motivated, call the station, ask for the news director, and point out the inaccuracy. Next time, they might do the math.
 
I cringe every time they start spreading misinformation as they interrupt programming with breaking news about another airliner about to land with a landing gear problem.
 
For all their desire to imagine themselves as the traditional, hard-nosed investigative reporters, most reporters are extremely lazy, and if you don't hand everything to them on silver platter with a ribbon tied around it, you aren't going to get much from them.
 
I spent several years looking at UT-Austin's budgets. For $3,650,000,000 in a decade the Regents would pave the whole place into one big parking lot. That would be half the cash in the Permanent University Fund. Obviously, whoever gave her those numbers probably calculated $3,500,000 per year or about $10,000 a day and somehow screwed up the decimel points by two places.
 
As a former local TV reporter/anchor, it never ceased to amaze me the level of complete stupidity and narcissism in that business, matched with the whorish ratings-driven intentions of station management. It was an incredibly unhealthy environment that, in many cases, did little justice to the viewing public.

Journalism majors -- if they actually got this degree -- are NOT required to take many other electives outside of the College of Communications. I think this is one reason all this ignorant business reporting is happening, besides the whole "fear leads" bias. It's ridiculous. I'm not knocking my Journalism degree, as it opened many doors for me, but if I were to make some suggestions on how to improve curriculum, I'd be first in line.
 
Got my j-degree from UT as well. I honestly didn't see much of the broadcast people cause they were always hiding in the back of the building doing something.
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Honestly I remember the curriculum being light in the actual skill of reporting, and maybe that's because they felt like it was too much of an objective skill, and maybe they just figured we'd all pick it up working at the Texan. But it seems to me that the art of building a story, of asking relevant questions and really finding the real heart of an issue seem to be lost arts.
 
I will never forget comin back to UT for my MBA after 4 years in the Navy and seeing a dumbass err receptacle on chanle 39 reading the news.

She was, the stupidest girl I had ever shagegd, however she was hot.
 
The longer I fool with advising and trying to help students get the stuff they're required to graduate, and the more I see folks sleeping their way through strictly-mandated requirements, the more I think we should return to large amounts of true electives.

People who don't want to learn won't do it regardless of what they're taking. You might as well let everyone else take what they want to learn about, and encourage faculty to try to bring a broader pespective to the teaching material.

I've come to think of much of what I'm doing as tricking students into being interested. It's much more complex than that, of course.
 
Even worse, someone at the editing/production level certainly would have reviewed this story before it was aired.

Didn't the idea of a cool million per day on water set off any red flags in their minds?

Or is this just another example of the "Innumeracy" problem in america...........million, billion, trillion......what's the difference?
 
I graduated with a journalism degree in 1983, and the curriculum must have flipped significantly, because I only had about 30 hours of journalism and 90 hours of other stuff, including European Studies, math/sciences and a buttload of English. The thought then was that journalism did require a macro view of the world.

Frustrated with the business, I left it 7 years ago. There are way too many dummies and awful managers out there, and you hope a few responsible, with-it people remain to balance them out. But I fear it's getting worse.
 
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