One of the local TV stations lost one of their news viewers last night and it’s all because of their damned helicopter.
CTV has the only news copter in the market and makes much ado about that. It’s in the air throughout the supper hour newscast, changing cheapening the way the TV station does journalism.
Last night, the helicopter hovered above a local street where a med-evac helicopter sat waiting for an ambulance carrying two children who apparently had been injured in a house fire and explosion. There was no footage from the fire scene, at least in the few minutes I watched before turning the TV off in disgust. While the helicopter tracked the ambulance through the streets, and then hovered above the exchange point, the on-board reporter wasn’t just content to report what was happening, he repeatedly speculated about what might be happening, or what may have occurred, and what it could possibly all mean. Sorry, that isn’t journalism by any stretch of its definition.
This was off the top of the newscast. While the station stayed with the live shot, I’m sure some harried news director was busy throwing out other carefully chosen items from the newscast that there would no longer be time for.
I can accept that in cases of major news or major human interest. But the presence of the helicopter meant that what was a fairly minor news story (not to those involved, of course, but in the larger scheme of things) became not just the lead item but one that soaked up an amount of time all out of proportion to the seriousness of the event.
Chopper 9, as the station has dubbed its flying camera-and-reporter platform, has always bugged me as primarily gimmicky. While it has proved a valuable tool in covering some major events, the use of it is often gratuitous.
Last night, it seemed to me that journalistic sense flew away on the rotors of Chopper 9. Time to change channels.
(RELATED: Charles Demers piece from last October at Seven Oaks.)
TAGS: JOURNALISM, TV
Busted. Now, where did I put my pipe?
Okay, that was a little glib. I totally agree that the chopper is just a tool and a potentially valuable one. My argument isn’t with the whirlybird; it’s with the uses to which it is put and how it has, in my view, skewed the news judgment of the station.
I completely disagree. A news chopper is simply another tool to help gather the news, especially when it’s difficult to get a reporter to a scene quickly.
If CTV had a microwave truck in the area when the explosion happened, do you not think they would have gone live with footage of the air ambulance landing?
And do you not think the reporter would be doing the same kind of speculating about the events unfolding live until fire/police officials could say more?
The reality is that even a minor story can turn into a more major piece when stations capture the action live and believe they’re the only ones with it. It doesn’t take a helicopter to do that.
While there will always be some gimicky uses of choppers, for the most part, they give the viewer a perspective on the news they wouldn’t otherwise see. Just think about flooding and other storm damage from tsunamis, huricanes, and tornados, or even last year’s mud slide in North Vancouver – how different would our perspective on those events be without news choppers?
Perhaps it’s time for Mark Hamilton to get ride of the photo of him glad in a photo vest and post one him in his tweed jacket with elbow patches because he’s clearly more of a academic than a journalist these days.