Local News Confirms Their Weather Delusion to Gail Pennington

A lot of you wrote in to us with the same sentiment: “Do we really need around the clock local news coverage about the ‘storm of the century’”? Apparently the general St. Louis audience, or at least our readers, thought that if they had to be stuck at home, then they could at least watch some TV. Ha! Nice try St. Louis, but local news won’t let that happen. Not on their watch. You have to watch the same 2 hours of weather radar loop over and over again while weather people point and zoom in on stuff between cuts to Mike Busch confirming that they aren’t going overboard and you will in fact die…Busch’s hair still won’t move, but you will totally die.

“A historic storm deserves historic coverage,” [Mike Shipley, news director of KSDK] said.

So what does a little worst that regular winter storm deserve?

Audrey Prywitch, news director of KTVI and KPLR (Channel 11), said she hadn’t necessarily planned to go live with storm coverage all day, but “as the situation was developing, we got into a good rhythm. You know when a story like this runs out of steam, and you shut it down. But we were getting so much good stuff, we kept going.”

Apparently we disagree on the definition of “good stuff”. One of your reporters in a Fox2 jacket standing by a plow falls in our list of “good stuff” way down at the bottom just above anal fissures and right below nodding along to the rants of “I’m in a hurry!” guy at the bank.

Viewership Tuesday “will be high — very high,” Shipley said. “Look at the pictures we’re getting. Nobody’s on the streets. You have to think they’re home watching a lot of television.”

That’s the spirit! Wining the “ratings” war by scaring your audience to be locked in their homes with jugs of water and enough flashlights to be spotted from space. We bet if you tell everyone that you put a bomb in their house and won’t tell them the dearming code until after sports and the weather you’d end up with some pretty decent ratings too. Unless they have cable. Dog the Bounty Hunter is worth a little explodin’.

via STLToday