Warning: My local news spent 5 minutes on 'controversy' over a new park bench color

They framed it as a huge neighborhood divide, but when I called the city parks department, the guy said they'd gotten maybe two emails total about it. It was just a slow news day filler piece. How do you even begin to push back on this kind of manufactured drama?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_mia7d ago

But come on, local news has to fill time somehow, right? They can't just report on city council meetings all day. A story about a bench color gets people talking, it's lighthearted. Maybe those two emails were really angry emails. And sometimes these small things are a sign of bigger tensions in a town that the reporter is picking up on. If nobody watches the boring stuff, the station shuts down, then we have no news at all. Is that better?

logan_wood7d ago

Ugh, I saw this happen with a "dangerous pothole" story. I looked up the public works request log online, it had been reported once. I emailed the reporter a link to that public record and asked why they didn't check it. They never replied, but the story quietly died. Sometimes just pointing out the public info they ignored is enough.

abbyp617d ago

Yeah but like, how dangerous was it really though? Most potholes get reported and just sit there for months while the city drags its feet. A single report in a log doesn't mean it wasn't a legit problem, just that someone else already called it in. The story dying feels more like the reporter got lazy and gave up, not that the pothole magically fixed itself.