Michael Jackson, global warming & Cincy TV news

I found myself watching, watching, watching and listening to television anchorbabble awaiting the Michael Jackson verdict to come in. So, now we know he's criminally not guilty but just very, very weird -- as were the parents who let their children go to the home of an adult man for a sleepover. But we all knew that and watched anyway.

Far more significant was the cover story of today's USA Today, describing the growing consensus that global warming is real. The newest converts are some of America's biggest corporations, such as General Electric. This has the best chance of getting the Bush administration's attention. Perhaps that sounds partisan and cynical, but it is reality. Will media outlets find clever ways to help readers/viewers take this kind of news more seriously?

Speaking of TV news ... I am doing an RSS feed to my "My Yahoo" account that includes Kentucky news from WLWT, a local affiliate here. Every single feed that the computer picks up has something to do with murder, violence and mayhem. Television news in the Cincinnati market is among my biggest disappointments after a year in this area. Words that come to mind: Shallow, trivial, sensation-seeking all-too often. And the infatuation with weather, while reflective of the market in some sense, is embarrassing. A few potential snowflakes routinely lead news reports and weather forecasters tease and tease and tease in shrill efforts to get you to keep watching for a forecast that rarely is very ominous. The stations are increasingly in "I-Team" wars in which they do low-level consumer investigative reports for the most part.

OK, I know. Glass houses and all that. Print side folks can do a lot better, too. I just think the newspaper people have a healthier fear of the future right now than the local television folks so maybe we're further down the road to meaningful change. The newscasts here are clones of what TV news directors were being told was "hot" at their conventions in the 1970s. The only difference, really, is the computer graphics are glitzier. As their audiences keep fragmenting, they'll either get better or even more shrill to be heard over the din. If anything, local affiliates will eventually face even more profit pressure than newspapers do today. Any bets on which way local television news will go?