Continuous broadcasting the efforts of firefighters and others to rescue a worker trapped in mud that had caved in around him at a construction site in east Tampa was a terrible idea. Essentially, the same picture and the same details went over the air for more than two commercial free hours....nothing new. The rescue was finally completed successfully before 6 and it took some time to get the injured man out of the hole and onto a stretcher. Any viewer could quickly pick up that should anything happen differently, it could be joined live within ten seconds. The scene changed little for all that time. As a result, hours of TV time was eaten up, viewers were robbed of all the other news of the day, stations were robbed of many thousands of dollars in advertising revenue and viewers were no better off for watching the same thing for so long. I am not a lover of TV commercials but I am a businessman and I am aware of the importance of bringing in revenue to pay for helicopters, fuel, reporters, remote trucks, etc. I will say that I do often enjoy live coverage of a police chase during which there are wrecks, when surprises can happen at any turn and ultimately the bad guy is caught...usually in less than a half hour. While that, too is a waste, there is some viewer appeal. At this writing, it is now 6:20p.m., the man has long been rescued, and channel 8 is finally taking a break. The coverage was OK, as good as any amateur given two hours to describe the same scene could have done. That the anchors were able to jumble it up and make it sound a little different every five minutes should also be credited. This kind of thing will undoubtedly happen again in the Tampa market but next time I wont get sucked in. Ill switch the channel to something more informative and less redundant and switch back to the scheduled 6p.m. news report to see a digest of the happenings. I consider myself no better for having watched so much of this and am slightly ashamed and embarrassed that I may have been entertained watching just to see if something terrible would happen to this trapped man. Television is still in the dark ages, they just have better equipment and technology to be there with. People will never understand that its the media that sets the agenda of what we will obsess with. Today, we obsessed with the misfortune of a stuck worker and, in the end, most of us have absolutely no idea why.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 22:31:44 +0000