San Diego Radio and TV News Are Just In It For The Money, Not Public Interest (Mar 18, 2002)

Anyway, this past week, the big highlights for us were celebrity TV boxing where Danny Bonaduce made Barry Williams cry "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!", David Letterman resigns with CBS, the debut of Eight is Enough quietly had its 25th anniversary marked at least on davesfunstuff.com (the eie domain was down for a week!).

What were the big highlights for the San Diego Outland? The Aztecs losing in the first round of the March Madness (go Duke), a memorial for Danielle Van Dam, and the San Diego stations pre-empting the fictious courtroom soap scenes and basketball court games for the David Westerfield courtroom hearing. I guess there are just some things that have gotten far more attention than they deserve while others got less than they deserve.

The rest of the San Diego Outlanders just don't know any better, thanks to our sorry lineup of TV and radio stations.

The San Diego news media have it backwards all along! They're putting far too much importance on a courtroom case that could easily be summarized in five minutes during their 5 o'clock news when people expect to hear the news than what is actually necessary. We already got News Channel 15 and KOGO to cover the hearing; we'll, in the case of daytime television's dismal lineup of talk shows, soaps, and courtroom dramas, the coverage is actually an improvement. Why don't KUSI or Fox do a daytime news block from 9am to 3pm where they air news programming and financial updates during the day, and we can expect them to cut in to the Westerfield case when public interest warrants.

The question is: is the San Diego media giving the San Diego Outlanders far more coverage of Westerfield and the Van Damms than they really care to have? Are they giving the folks who tape the soaps during the day and watch the tapes at night redundant news coverage they already heard or read about six hours ago? What use is it for the viewer who tapes All My Children at noon when it's pre-empted unknowlingly by the viewer and is surprised to get a courtroom hearing instead. They should sue KGTV for unwanted electricity expenses and VCR wear-and-tear.

If there were a News Olwimpics event, it should cover how bad the media overcovered the Westerfield/Van Damme case that was very much a media hog for the past week or two.

The chihuahua dung award goes to Clear Channel San Diego's stations for turing the sacred vigil of Danielle Van Damme into a platform for promoting their radio station cluster; this is like putting the wolf in charge of the chickens, you just can't trust the wolf either.

The bull dung award goes to KFMB-TV for having the balls to pre-empt something we can't watch on an unavailable CBS feed for something we can already see on Fox and KUSI. KFMB-8 screwed up big time in pre-empting the first two games of the NCAA March Madness elimination rounds in favor of the Westerfield hearing. Unless you could get KCBS-2 out of Los Angeles, or rigged up your satellite dish provider to get the other CBS stations you aren't supposed to get in San Diego, you just couldn't see the games, period.

Finally, the elephant dung award goes to KGTV-10 for not only bumping off many of the daytime shows to the wee hours where nobody can catch them if they can't program a VCR, but they also pre-empted several popular shows we watch in prime time such as Whose Line, Drew Carey, and The Job in favor of yet more needless Van Damme/Westerfield news coverage and a Z-rated movie. Also a double doggie dung bonus award goes to KGTV 10 for pre-empting Spin City, which we watched on KABC 7 out of Los Angeles at our friend's house in Oceanside, in favor of basically meaningless election coverage during the first two hours when the numbers are just rolling in. We don't care about the early results from just 1 or 2 percent of the precincts coming in; we care if there's 75 percent of the precincts reporting and the races are more or less already decided in many cases.

So for KGTV 10, KFMB 8, and Clear Channel San Diego? This bud's for you...

STUPIIIID! YOU'RE SO STU-PIIIIIID!

Think you stupid morons! THINK! We just don't care for the sensationization of tragic events while you're ruining our lives by putting your reporting priorties on reporting mass quantities of stories we don't need to know absolutely, positively, everything about the Van Damme and Westerfield lives and courtroom case. We don't want our pursuit of American culture such as basketball and comedy supplanted by your pursuit of imposing all this news coverage upon us not for the public interest, but for the almighty advertising dollar.

That's what it's gotten down to, readers. The San Diego news media are in it just for commercial interests, not yours. Geez, where did these stations dig up these bozo news editors from? Why so much emphasis on crime? Why so many courtroom stories? Why so many law and disorder stories and tabloid factoids? When are you guys going to take the lead in determining what stories get considered for coverage? When are you guys going to put your priorities on the public interest in giving the readers and viewers a wide assortment of news stories that affect their lives in the real world; stories for the working and voting citizen in reasonable doses summarized but detailed with minimum fact redundancy?

Where are all the stories on what what the local, state, and federal governments are voting for? We want to know what bills are going through the government houses that can affect us one way or another. How about stories on what the police are doing to combat crime and how we can keep repeat crimes from happening to us? How about stories on how the changing Internet is affecting us such as the threat of the royalty police invading on the operations of the radio stations streaming on the Internet. What about stories on what some of the local people are doing to make the Outland a better place to live in? How about stories on where we can find the lowest gasoline prices?

How about stories on courtroom cases in reasonable doses, no more than five minutes on the biggest case of the day; write up a good story in five minutes and we can read more about it on the Internet if we wish to know more about it such as the TV station website, where they can publish far more details about the stories than what they can air during their newscasts. Give the readers a reason to come to your website by putting content that's not aired on your pages.

As for weather, keep the damn temperatures up for a minute instead of three seconds so we can find our community to see what temperatures we had. We can't read that fast!

San Diego Sports Teams Are Out Of Touch With Reality

And frankly, San Diego doesn't deserve a Super Bowl if they cannot support a football team, no matter how immature the San Diego Chargers are or how bad they suck, or how much of a tightwad the Outlanders are towards the team by having the city taxpayers pick up the tab to support an asnine ticket guarantee also partly to ensure local coverage of the games on TV. What good does a Super Bowl do to San Diego's Outlanders if it comes here just once every 5-6 years? Not much. It doesn't mean San Diego is a sport team magnet. Where are the fans every week? What are they doing? Surfing? Going to museums? Watching operas on KPBS? Face it, Alex Spanos, you suck out loud and you do nothing for San Diego. You are in it just for milking the San Diego Outlanders for all they are worth whule you give $15 million of the taxpayers money you got on your freaking ticket guarantee on some stupid hospital in SacraDeMento or whereever the heck you're socking the dollars to!

And the local radio stations are paying far too much in rights to bring the listeners broadcasts of the Charger games that are nothing more than for commercial purposes to promote themselves and make the NFL far bigger than they really are. The NFL should be paying the radio stations to cover them in buying of time and the NFL sells the ad spots instead of the current model. If I was head of KFMB and the Chargers wanted more than $500,000 a year for broadcast rights, I turn them down flat; I would make far more money using the four hours for 20 weeks selling infomercials and brokerage talk shows than I would under their current $1,000,000 a year contract for five years, payable in one lump sum down payment! I use the time to run Kim Komando's computer show instead of this ridiculous showcase of mediocrity the Chargers are presenting to the public.

And the Chargers want a bigger stadium? Listen you fat-ass Spanos man. You got your millions. You use it to build your own stadium and you can dictate all of your own demands by yourself with no taxpayer support. You want an expansion? Pay for it yourself!

As for the Padres? You got your new stadium. How about shelling out some of the MLB bucks on the project yourselves, like 100 percent, as well as giving the displaced employers in the Frowntown area the equivalent of what business income they lost for the rest of their lives, as well as free lifetime passes to the games?

And if the San Diego Outland really wants to be any kind of cultural magnet, they should begin by buying out every friggin' ticket to every game in mass quantities until the stadium's brim is overflowing with fans! Why can't the San Diego Outlanders be more like Green Bay where the Packers earn their name by filling out their stadiums and having a 30-year backlog on season tickets? Green Bay people sure know how to appreciate the sports culture there. The Padres are doing OK when it comes to meeting the fans, but the fans themselves should understand that the players have so much time to spend and not to expect too much from their brief encounter. The Chargers need a lot of PR correction themselves, especially from the idiot hothead Spanoses who get mad when they get negative coverage they actually deserved in the first place.

Time for the local sports organizations to make themselves mesh more into the Outland community instead of just thinking about the bottom line and a new stadium the angry Outlanders refuse to want to pay for.

San Diego Outlanders Need a Life