Tea Partying at Ch. 10
By Bob Dorn
For a cool $212 million, E.W.Scripps picked up Channel 10 KGTV from McGraw-Hill in October 2011. Ever since then the station’s news operations has been just another kennel for the right wing’s dogs of war.
The purchase by the Scripps chain automatically put Clear Channel Communications into management of Channel 10s news operation, because that Texas-based mega-corporation (1200 radio stations) also manages Scripps’ 10 television stations. Clear Channel, of course, is most famous for carrying the radio caca-phony of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and the master of patriotic hate, Rush Limbaugh.
Of course, a television station in mellow San Diego can’t be expected to put flamethrowers like Limbaugh, Beck and Hannity on video news, particularly not when its present and immediate past is and was decorated by the likeables Kimberly Hunt and Michael Tuck and the fools, Regis Philban! and Harold Greene!! , the latter made famous by Will Ferrell’s deadly embodiment named Ron Burgundy, in Anchorman.
But now, there’s poison behind the chuckleheadedness. The rattlesnake waits in the wings while the anchors finish selling the Girl Scout cookies.
Touted as “breaking news” on its website yesterday, was this tabloid scorcher, “Mayor Filner asked to resign.” The absence of an exclamation point at the end of the headline was apparently a sign that this was a serious story. It wasn’t.
An attorney had sent Filner a letter requesting he leave office immediately. Somehow, someway, the letter made its way into the hands of Clear Channel, or Channel 10’s news director. The station wasn’t exactly clear how the letter reached the intrepid hands of its investigators. Like, maybe, the attorney gave them a copy?
What do we do? Do we send a petition to Channel 10 asking it to leave San Diego? What if we got 10,000 signatures? What if, like the advertisers who’ve left Clear Channel’s Rush Limbaugh show, we simply boycotted them? I know, I know, that could be seen as typical liberal attacks on small business.
What outrages me into near-incoherence is that these slackers in Prada at Channel 10 call themselves investigators. Back in the day, reporters never called themselves investigators when people they cultivated dropped letters in their laps, or gave them a phone call tipping them to somebody famous appearing in court in the morning on DUI charges.
You were called an investigator when a story you wrote put a politician in jail because you found him selling favors.
But there was Team 10 yesterday, demonstrating its slacker shit, and hatred of Filner, by posting on its Facebook page this question: “Do you think he should step down?” Press the red button for yes, dear viewer, and save us the work of doing the investigation.
Then, by 3:35 pm yesterday afternoon came the news that Donna Frye and the brother of Lorena Gonzalez had written letters that fell into Team 10’s hands. They, too, were said to have asked the mayor to resign. Frye and Lorena Gonzalez’ brother were saying human beings had been sexually abused by the mayor.
Will the stories turn out to be true? Did Democrats Frye and Marco Gonzalez actually say these things, and will we learn who was sexually abused and when?
Chances are all this went national hours before you read this. But if you think the mayor should resign you’d better figure out over what. Just because Clear Channel says it doesn’t make it so.
Bob Dorn
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Uh, let me guess, you are a democrat…
Nope, I’m a socialist.
… and a democrat, like you.
I gave up on local TV news long ago. They all report pretty much the same meaningless stuff, in pretty much the same order…
Time was, you knew who was doing the best, the most in-depth, local news reporting; might shift around, from station to station, but you knew who nonetheless. The moment the so-called “consultants” got involved, years ago, ALL of that came to a screeching end.
Now the local airwaves are cluttered with “pretty people” considered more an asset for their looks than for their chops. They DON’T KNOW THE TOWN.
I grew up in the SD of the 1960s; you think the likes of the late, great Harold Keen would EVER have stood for the s#@t being shoved out as “investigative journalism” now? Don’t Think So.
My prediction is that Filner will survive all the brou ha ha just as Peter Tweeter Anthony Weiner has survived and thrived and will probably be the next Mayor of New York … unless one of the “victims” comes out with a particularly salacious account of her maligning at Filner’s hands. Simply cheating on his fiancée with a member of his staff will not be enough to deep 6 him. Then consider the renewed political ambitions of one Eliot Spitzer, the Hooker Booker, who is on his way again to becoming Comptroller of New York. Then of course the Appalachian Trail hiker, Mark Sanford, is on his way again to being a Congressman.
Filner’s peccadillos will probably blow over in time.