The Death Of News

Reporters and anchors love to try to save us from ourselves and they love to tell us what to do. But that's not their job. You'd think it IS their job based on the examples they give us in this edition of The Death Of News.

Radio and TV anchors don't need to tell us what they've learned. And it's never necessary to say the same thing twice back-to-back.

KTLA gets the details of the October 1st government shutdown wrong; Fox 11 uses cliches and reports on stuff that didn't happen.

Reporters need to pay attention to what they write after they do an interview; it wouldn't hurt anchors to cut back on the cliches; and everybody needs get the words right.

Uh oh. One LA TV news anchor breaches a basic rule of journalism and convicts Charlie Kirk's alleged killer. Using only percentages to tell crime stat stories can be misleading. Two tents of an inch of rain ain't nothin' for the LA River. And, the rain stops...redundantly.

Looking at the use of adjectives, natural sound and wrong words. Included are examples from Arizona's Family (Channels 2 & 5), Fox 12 in Portland, KCAL in Los Angeles and more!

In this episode, I hammer an iHeart 24/7 NewsSource anchor over misinformation and bad form; WBZ Radio in Boston gets a thumbs up; and Los Angeles TV weather people get a thumbs down.

Sloppy writing leads to wrong adjective use, horses being labeled as wildlife, an anchor dropping an important W in the 5 W's of journalism, and more! Also included: A birthday shout-out to newswriting guru Mervin Block.

Journalists often don't think it through when they write or are handed a script to read. This leads to a lot of fodder for critics who catch this stuff. I caught a word that made me exclaim, "Duh!" And that lead me to search out some classic cases of parroting and cliche abuse.

Knowing what you're talking about and eliminating extraneous words are underutilized skills.

About the only place on Earth that you will hear a verbless sentence is on the news. In this episode, ABC World News Tonight getting clobbered. (That's a verebless sentence)

For nearly thirty years, many reporters have been using the wrong terminology for non-firearm weapons used for crowd control. Forever, many reporters have been using inflammatory words. There's no need for either.

Is A a word or a letter? And why is and used as a number?

Why do journalists keep saying Diddy? Seems a little too cute. Also, what's with anchors throwing in extra words and thanking reporters for reporting?

Nobody knows what someone thinks or how they feel. But many journalists seem to think they know. Why is that?

Why do so many journalists love to turn nouns into adjectives while putting people behind bars? It's not the way normal people talk.

The Problem: TV reporter interviews a witness who didn't witness anything, except a helicopter flying over the scene of a fatal accident in which a San Bernardino County, CA Sheriff's Deputy was killed.The Fix: We explain how to avoid that and what to do instead.

It's best to avoid adding syllables to words, and mispronouncing the names of cities and people.

By tomorrow at 6 AM in the morning, you'll know how to help stamp out time redundancies.

A journalist's job does not include telling us what to do. Here are some examples of how it should and should not be done.

Elementary school kids make this mistake but adults they shouldn't. (Hint: This sentence is grammatically incorrect)

You don't say, "quote" / "unquote" in everyday polite conversation. Journalists shouldn't, either.

When the California Highway Patrol chased an SUV through the terminal at LAX, sparks flew and so did a TV helicopter. The airborne crew shot some great video as they followed the SUV and CHP until the guys in the SUV stopped and bailed. The cops went for the driver and took him down on camera. I saw this on a Thursday afternoon but apparently it happened the night before. Nobody said WHEN it happened. That's a problem, because the WHEN is an essential part of all news stories.