Opinion: More MSNBC Breaking News Goofiness….
Earlier in the week MSNBC started putting two “Breaking News” producers behind the news anchor to somewhat awkward results on the screen. Apparently that wasn’t enough. Now they’ve started showing the control room telling the news anchor that there is breaking news. This happened this morning when during the 9 am hour MSNBC jumped to a Florida courtroom…
Donna, before we go to Jay let’s go first to the hearing in Florida. We’re listening to the Judge in the Couey case…
MSNBC isn’t going to fool anyone with this. This was play acting. They already knew they were going to do this before they came back from break. At some point, and I suspect that point is going to be coming soon, someone is going to tell Dan Abrams that showing that you can cover breaking news isn’t what matters…it’s covering breaking news well that matters…
Someone over there better get a clue. This morning the two female anchors talked about President and Mrs. Bush taking Koizumi and “his wife” to Graceland and entertaining “them” at dinner last night. There is no wife!!!!There is no “them”.
Comment by cella — June 30, 2006 @ 10:07 am
This is f’ing ridiculous…why is MSNBC playing us (their viewers) for fools? As you mentioned, it seemed WAY over the top and “fake”…get a clue Abrams you moron…just cover the damn news! Spare us the idiotic people working behind the anchor, spare us the control room…give us the NEWS. PERIOD.
Comment by Anonymous — June 30, 2006 @ 11:16 am
What’s up with the live stuff, anyway? I thought they were filling Imus’ vacation with prime time repeats. They were live as early as seven am central time today.
Comment by anonymous — June 30, 2006 @ 12:51 pm
At least MSNBC has stopped using the pre recorded voice of the director and showing the control room as they go to break. They used the same audio clips over and over again.
Comment by IceMan — June 30, 2006 @ 4:45 pm
anonymous, MSNBC has been very inconsistent this week about filling Imus’s time with prime time repeats. I think they did it for about two days and that was it. The rest of the week they’ve either been rerunning First Look (in the very early hours) or going to live news, with an emphasis on the flooding story.
It seems to me that someone at MSNBC decided that they could take the flooding story and make that into a really big “Breaking News” event. I remember yesterday morning they were going on and on about their “control room” and how it was bringing them “all the latest breaking news” on the flooding from here and there and this other place, and the anchor talking with this kind of forced breathless urgency as if the waters were rising right around her desk even as she spoke and someone might soon carry her away from Secaucus by helicopter.
I thought “MSNBC, I know you want to make your news sound more ‘urgent,’ but I think you’re laying it on a bit thick.” If this is what watching their live news coverage is going to be like from now on, it’s going to remind me of why I stopped watching cable news back in 1999: because I realized that all the cable nets spent hours “covering” a big story whether there was actually new news to impart about it or not, each of them trying to “scoop” the others on some development or other, willing to take a phone call on air from just about anyone purporting to have news, thus making themselves especially vulnerable to prank calls from Howard Stern’s baba-booeying fans.
MSNBC has to find some kind of balance. Sure, make the coverage of news important, but go for the substance, not the appearance. Sell the STEAK, not the sizzle. All this does is remind me of some comedy show in the ’70s (it might have been Sonny & Cher) in which they used to parodize local news programs by showing a huge “team” of blazered news people filing onto the set, sheafs of script in hand, and then marching around in this big elaborate nonsensical pattern before finally settling down at their desks. It would take several minutes just to introduce the “news team” before any of them would actually start delivering news.
Comment by tanne — June 30, 2006 @ 7:32 pm
MSNBC was going to run specials all week but I think the weather story forced them to drop it.
Comment by Spud — July 1, 2006 @ 12:44 am
You never know what you are going to get from MSNBC. They’re really good when there’s a really, really big story, cause they have NBC News, but then they completely ignore the N. Korea story on July 4, when CNN totally owned them. They eventually went with a NBC News Special Report that was shown to all the affiliates. I watch MSNBC so that I can get the news fast and more of it, not wait for them to break into the affiliates.
Comment by Max — July 10, 2006 @ 9:51 am