While I hardly ever watch TV news, tonight I was watching WDSU. It’s not the highest-brow news source to begin with, but tonight was terrible. They started with 3 separate reports on the same 5 minute speech by Vitter and his wife. While they could have just played the speech, they decided that they needed 3 different reports to try to introduce the ‘different’ parts of the speech. So, 6 minutes into the newscast, they stop everything and say “If you’re just joining us…” and proceed to summarize the entire newscast. Does that mean that most people shouldn’t switch on their newscast until 6 minutes into it? Did they notice that a lot of people suddenly started watching? Did they think that this material was difficult to understand?

Later in the show (yes, I kept watching while doing work) Dan Milham, the weather guy, was advertising the weather hotline. Almost condescendingly, he decided to explain after giving the number for the “Weather Hotline”, that you call the phone number to hear weather reports. Surprisingly, he didn’t offer any help on actually using a rotary telephone.

I don’t know what this means exactly. Maybe the station feels that the average intelligence level of our city is slowly falling. Perhaps that means that our city is growing again…