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Originally Posted by mixedmedia
...and also, don't you ever get the feeling that the news media are always trying to recapture those "glory days" after 9/11?
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Uh. No. We're not. We don't EVER want to have to cover something like that again. We don't EVER want to cover a shooting again. Do you have any idea what it means to the news crew when even one person gets murdered? They actually make us go up to the family that just found out their loved one was killed, and we have to talk to them. We hate it. Every single journalist out there absolutely HATES talking to victims relatives. We'd much rather cover politics or even some feature story.
The only glory part of that tragedy was that journalists, for once, were allowed to do what we're here to do - inform the public of the issues no matter what the cost, and without having to report bullshit like Anna Nichole. Of course that glory part was tarnished quite a bit for those of us that realized that 9/11 happened BECAUSE the media failed to inform the public of the growing danger from bin Laden and BECAUSE during the Clinton administration the media focused on a blowjob instead of the real issues.
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...doesn't that make you kind of sick?
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Yeah, pretty sickening that people think that we cheer at a mass tragedy.
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And I'm not trying to be mean and suggest that people in the media weren't devastated by 9/11...just that that "ching, ching" sound is a nice background noise to have during times of tragedy.
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Too bad none of us heard that. We lost money, BIGtime on 9/11. I'm not just talking about the transmitters that all of NYC broadcasters lost - although that's a few mil right there. But whenever you see us go wall to wall coverage - CNN did it for more than 24 hours, as did MSNBC, and even many locals went wall to wall for most of the day - we're losing shitloads of money. Wall to wall coverage = no ads, and no ads = no money coming in. Add to that the fact that we had to spend a crapload of money just logistically covering the story, and it all winds up being a big financial hit for us. But we did it anyway because the people needed to know what was going on. Heck CBS even produced a 2 hour 9/11 special a few weeks after the towers fell, and ran it with no ads. I was surprised and impressed by that - they didn't make any money doing that, yet they did it anyway.
Some of you guys don't seem to understand how much it costs to do even the crappy job that modern journalism does. Any time you see footage from a helicopter, it cost $1,000 just to start the engine on the bird, not to mention the fact that the helicopter itself was a million plus. Any time you see video of something that happened outside of the area the broadcast is happening, it was a few hundred for satellite time - and half a million minimum for the truck. Even local liveshots are done out of a $250,000 van.
Then with that wall to wall coverage there was massive amounts of overtime being paid out.
The average midmarket station easily goes through 1-2 THOUSAND dollars a week just in gas.
In short, if the ads aren't playing, we're taking huge financial losses, so if you think 9/11 was awesome for us on a monetary basis, think again.