The local news proves their intelligence
Welcome back!
I’ve posted here before about some of the gross missuses of the English language which occur nightly on our local TV news, but the other night somebody flipped the “stupid button” into turbo mode.
For the last several months, KAIT has been going on about “The Big Switch” in February, when the government requires all television broadcasters to say “F. You” to anyone who doesn’t have a digital television or at least a converter. Recently, as a public service, KAIT decided that during the 6PM news they would shut off their analog signal for a few minutes. The way they hyped it, they kept saying stuff like, “If you can still see our broadcast when that happens, you’re ready for The Big Switch. If you can’t, we’ll tell you what you need to do to get ready”.
That’s all well and good, right? A real community service they’re providing, huh? Only one problem: they did EXACTLY what they said they were going to do. While the analog signal was still turned off, they informed everyone who couldn’t see them what they needed to do to be able to see them.
Let me say that again.
They turned off the analog signal and then said, essentially, “if you can’t hear me, here’s how to fix it”.
HELLO?! Maybe you guys should have turned the analog signal back on before trying to get a message through to your analog-only viewers?
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Wow. That is pretty dumb. How long did they leave the signal off? Couldn’t they have just said they were going to turn it off for 5 minutes and then they would be back? I wonder how many people are still out there without cable, satellite or a phone company service. How many people are still using an antenna or rabbit ears?
Oh, they only had it off for about 3 minutes, but THOSE were the three minutes when they chose to explain what the analog viewers needed to do. The subject was NOT covered again after they turned the analog signal back on and the people who needed the information were able to receive it.