OK, I was never a fan of spectator sports - partly because it's not my family's culture, partly because I always thought it was better to be the one out there doing awesome things rather than to be the audience, and partly because various ballgames kept preempting my favorite TV shows - and it always bothered me that sporting events took up about a third of the evening news (back when I used to watch the evening news). Sports 'news' made about as much sense to me as if the newsreader were to announce: "Last night on The Walking Dead, Sleeveless Guy got et by a zombie and killed everybody else! Stay tuned at 11!" It's just entertainment! It doesn't matter that much! And we Americans keep getting tut-tutted by Europeans about how little we know about what's going on outside out borders, and our evening news goes on and on about contracts and scores and other piddly worthless stuff.
No, but Americans seem to be picked on even more for being ignorant about the goings-on in the rest of the world.
Many stations have drastically reduced the amount of time given to sports. In some cases they've dropped it altogether. The thinking is that most people get their sports news from ESPN and the like. While that's true of things like the NFL and NBA, lots of people tune in to see scores and highlights from local high school sports. If all stations dropped the sports segment, they'd just fill the time with more superficial doom and gloom stories or "entertainment news" which qualifies less as "news" than sports does.
During football season, the 10 p.m. Friday newscasts around here are almost exclusively high school football. It's typically a 60-second segment on a fire, followed by another 60-second segment on a stabbing or shooting, and then wall-to-wall football for the rest of the half hour. There's one station that picks one school each week and devotes probably 8-10 minutes to nothing but footage of its band at halftime.
That's very odd and definitely not a common practice, especially these days. I used to work at a local station that has a thirty minute high school football show that followed the late news on Friday nights. They still do that show every year and there are lots of other stations that do the same thing. It's not only a good way to feature local kids, but it doesn't take up actual news time and it's another source of revenue (sponsorships, all local advertising during the breaks, etc).
1-0 over Costa Rica (how about that snow?!?!) puts the USMNT in second in the Hex. On to Estadio Azteca to face El Tri on Tuesday. If we can pull off a win there we're pretty much golden to qualify. Still gonna be in the Brougham End come June 11 for the Panama match. edit:
The one with the wall-to-wall band footage is the lowest-rated station in town (distant fourth, and about one tenth as many viewers as each of the two stations that always battle it out for first). I'm guessing they're either looking for a unique feature to distinguish themselves with, or they're doing it because they can't afford to send a crew to more than one game.
Distant ratings losers will often try to be "different" from the stations that are beating them instead of just trying to do the same things the other guys are doing, but doing it better than the competition.
And devoting half your newscast to footage of teenagers mangling "Louie Louie" on brass instruments is certainly a way to be different.
I'd rather hear "Local HS football team wins homecoming game" rather than "Five children died today, three of them under 9 years of age, when their mother threw them over a cliff. Now on to weather. Looks like the Easter Bunny will have to wear snowshoes, right Bob?! LOLOLOLOL!"
Generally speaking, because it draws viewers. Sports fans want to know who won, who lost, and what happened. You're right insofar as sporting events aren't life or death affairs yet that's true of most news. Here's the typical template for our local news broadcasts - Sensational story Reasons we should be afraid of some everyday nothing Weather Sports Inane filler
Why is Lindsay Lohan news? Or some nobodies locked in a house with 24/7 camera coverage? Supply and demand
