Entertainment

MASTERING THE ART OF THE OBVIOUS

New York’s TV newscasts continue to cater to the audience least likely to watch the news: morons.

Every local station is doing its fair share, too – whatever it takes to disenfranchise the intelligent in favor of dolts, those most disinclined to watch any news of any kind.

Ch. 7’s “Eyewitness News” has been working off a particularly interesting plan. It’s now in the habit of having its anchors explain to us, through excessive emoting, whether a story is good news or bad news, as if viewers need assistance.

Last Wednesday’s Ch. 7 News at 6 p.m. led with the story about a nine-year-old boy, in the care of a day care establishment in Woodbridge, NJ, accused of beating to death an 11-month old who also was also left in the operation’s care.

This story was prefaced by a bad-news-is-coming tsk, tsk delivery by anchor Diana Williams. And when the on-the-scene report ended, Williams further explained that this was not a happy story. “Simply horrible!” she exclaimed. Good grief.

But this is what Ch. 7 News has become, every newscast, an idiot’s delight, as if viewers might think of a hit-and-run fatality as a joyous happenstance and a drop in crime rates as a tragedy.

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It might’ve taken 20 years too long for Congress to finally ask hard questions about the obvious – excessively muscled pro wrestlers regularly dropping dead – but it’s happening.

And WWE boss Vince McMahon, who has long dictated pro wrestling’s terms and was himself an admitted (and obvious) steroid user, is doing some major damage control. Last week, he suddenly suspended 10 wrestlers for failure to comply with his whatever-suits-his-needs drug policy.

While McMahon used to insist that his organization had no drug problem, here’s hoping that Congress asks some important questions of some of McMahon’s longtime, top-shelf business confederates and pals, sophisticates such as NBC Sports boss Dick Ebersol and know-it-all Donald Trump.

How, after all, do they continue to lend their names and businesses to McMahon while his fabulously conditioned performers keep turning up dead? Did they ask no questions? Or did they already know the answers?

How, Congress should ask, do such powerful, in-the-know men serve as McMahon’s enablers?

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Letters, we get letters: Bill Maroney, ex-Staten Islander now living in Colorado, wonders if we’ve noticed that Just For Men TV ads – ads for hair dye – encourage graying men to, “Let the real you come through.”

Well, Bill, that reminds us of Howard Cosell, who championed himself as the fellow who “Tells it like it is,” yet his real name was Cohen, he wore a toupee and he was in the habit of lifting others’ thoughts and work and presenting them to national audiences as his own.

And Pam Mason, of Lawrenceville, NJ, in response to last week’s column about newscasts’ silly characterizations of crimes – “stray bullets,” “drug deals gone bad,” et. al. – suggests that we missed a big one: “Senseless murders.”

She’s right; senseless murders are among the worst kind.

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WTKR-TV, a CBS affiliate serving Norfolk, Va., last week announced that it’s dropping the regular sports segment from its nightly newscasts.

“Whether it’s medical or education or crime or government or Michael Vick, all news has to earn its way into the newscast,” news director Michael Moreland, told the Newport Daily Press.

“There’s no longer going to be a segment where you just give someone three minutes. Time is too valuable to give it to somebody and say, ‘Whatever you can come up with, put it in there.'”

Okay, we get it; it has to be news to be news.

That means that the weather must be newsworthy to make the cut. And, no doubt, Moreland will now tell CBS to take a hike rather than sacrifice legitimate WTKR news time to promote that night’s episode of “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race.”

And perhaps had WTKR spent its time and energy to make its sports reports newsworthy, they would have been newsworthy.