Thursday, February 10, 2011

WDIV: We Think You Need A Heart, But We Have No Brain Edition

Ah, the miserable folks (maybe that should just kinda sound like folks) at WDIV have once again decided to pre-empt Community in favor of their worthless local programming. "All 4 Valentines Day". Community's on at 2:05 AM instead, after theyve shown a half hour if infomercials after Fallon.
I hope their lovers leave them Monday.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

WJBK: Because You Can't Completely Manufacture Quotes On Video Edition

So Fox 2 has foisted a print reporter (he has claimed he's not a journalist, because journalists don't keep it real) on to Detroit's airwaves. On paper, this sounds like a good idea; tv news is not very newsy, the reporter has won a Pulitzer, and has worked for the NYT and the Detroit News.

But paper and practice aren't the same thing. The reporter is Charlie LeDuff, who comes across as a noir caricature of a hard hitting reporter, from his spectral junkie look to his dime novel narrative style to a completely non-news feature story beat where he appears to be trying to create the appearance of sincerity and to be "of the people" which comes across as smarmy at best and always strikes me as simply a function of the role he's trying to play (and I mean that in the sense that it's melodramatic acting).

His big local story? Homeless guy frozen in ice. But there is controversy about how the situation was presented by him.

That Pulitizer? It was given to a series of articles on race in the NYT that LeDuff contributed to. Which doesn't mean it's a false claim, but it's not quite so rosy as it sounds.

And after that Pulitzer? Questions were raised about issues of plagiarism and fabricated quotes in Charlie LeDuff's stories, similar to the NYT's Jayson Blair fiasco. Then even more issues were publicly pointed outafter the NYT era issues were raised from a January 1995 article he wrote for the East Bay Monthly called The Last American Hobo, wherein passages were lifted from Ted Conover's 1984 book Rolling Nowhere.

None of which would matter too much if his work was solid on channel 2. But there he is, appearing like an annoying parody of something I'm not sure ever existed in a real form. It's like a "problem solver" with a different mask. I'm not sure it's any less annoying.