Must have been a slow news day ...

We were getting ready for bed and had Fox 23 News on tonight. The newscasters were very excited about three stories. First was the terrifying story of a boy who nearly died after some snow collapsed on top of him. One of the newscasters described it as a story every parent should see.

Well, we did see the story. Apparently the poor lad had been playing in the snow -- yes, that's right, he was actually playing in the snow -- and was digging a tunnel in the snow with a friend. Well, the tunneling didn't go so well, and the snow above the tunnel fell in and collapsed on the victim. His friend dashed inside to get help, and the victim's father rushed to his side rescuing him from almost certain death.

At this point I'm figuring the kid is recovering in intensive care, but no, the drama needed to be retold by the victim himself. He apparently had a miraculous recovery as he really didn't seem to be injured in any way, telling the story quite well without assistance, oxygen, or anything else that might suggest he had actually been hurt. I'm not saying his storytelling was so good that he'd make it as a national newscaster, but he'd really be about as good as the folks at Fox 23.

I'm not sure what parents were supposed to take away from this story. Don't let your kids play in the snow? Move south? Sadly I couldn't find the story on the Fox23 website.

But wait, there's more.

In another shocking story, a woman won $6200 on a machine at the Racino (a pseudo casino in Saratoga at a race track), only to be told by Racino staff that the machine had malfunctioned and she would not be getting her prize.
http://www.fox23news.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=189541a9-61bb-40ba-bc3e-acf846f2b01c
Well this was just tragic. The woman described how the experience was so humiliating and truly disruptive to her life. I felt so bad for her, realizing how this loss had crushed her dream of retiring to a rented single-wide in the northern Adirondacks.

Don't get me wrong - the Racino position is totally laughable. Hey, if your machine malfunctions, that's your problem. Pay the woman. I can see their side of it though. You see, the people are supposed to lose. If they win, that means we have to pay money out, and that's not good for the whole profit thing, so obviously if a machine indicates a win, it must be a malfunction. How about you pay the woman and sue the companies that manufacture and maintain your machine, and make them pay you back?

The last one is a sad story, but the spin on the story is also nonsense. An Albany firefighter died today at the scene of a fire. At the start of the story you'd think he died while fighting the fire. http://www.fox23news.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=d3434170-bfd4-4421-917e-dac8094831bd
After you hear the whole story you find out that the fire had already been put out, and the firemen were looking around the building for victims. The gentleman died of an apparent heart attack. I suppose it's possible that his death was caused by the fire, but it sounds more like he happened to die of a heart attack after the fire was over. I'm not saying he shouldn't get some kind of workers compensation for it - he was working at the time. And I'm not saying the guy's not a hero. He was a hero long before today in my eyes. All of the firefighters are heroes. But it would be nice if the news wouldn't overdramatize the story.

Presidential campaigns suck

Ugh. I turned on the Today Show briefly this morning and they were discussing the 2008 presidential campaign. The first primary/caucus is more than a year away, and it's already starting to dominate the news. Ross Perot's giant sucking sound now reflects the media getting sucked into following around Hillary, Barack, Al, Rudy, a couple of Johns, and a few others. The media sucks up to the early favorites, while the dark horses suck up to the media.

All of this sucking takes away time from the media actually covering real news. I'm not saying Hillary's announcement shouldn't get any press at all, but showing the talking heads blab about all the picayune details (is picayune the right word?) involved in forming an exploratory committee and what that all means, and who has the inside edge in Iowa or South Carolina or wherever is just a phenomenal waste of time.

This is personal for me. I started running for Congress (NY's 21st district) in May of 2003. I deliberately limited my campaigning to one smaller area (Fulton County) to get an early sense of how it was going to go.

The local paper there, the Leader Herald, refused to cover the fact that I was campaigning there. I do understand it's not my paper, but they'd have two or three front-page articles a week about the Democratic hopefuls and their misadventures in Iowa and New Hampshire. Dennis Kucinich got substantial coverage for his efforts 1000 miles away. I was campaigned in Fulton County for three solid months. I went to events, ran ads (both on radio and 5x/week in the Leader Herald itself) and so on. There I was, running a real campaign, right there. But nothing I did got the slightest coverage. Not a single word.

So maybe that sucking sound I'm hearing is just the media itself. This is one of the reasons I watch almost no TV news. I mostly read the Wall Street Journal and the Economist. Plus the Metroland. We get the Sunday Times Union, but I often don't get to it and occasionally read a few sections. There's so much more meat in the Journal. Yes, they do mention the presidential campaign once in a while, but they seem to know that it's mostly not news yet.