I will have to give a H/T to Hudson for coining the phrase.
I was so mad last night I could barely type, so I figured I would sleep on it, and see if my words would become less barbed this morning. Still mad. As you know, there was a major power outage yesterday downtown, affecting some major businesses in downtown Sioux Falls.
Is this news? Certainly, I cannot argue with that. But some TV stations decided to go overboard and make it sound like DT was a total blackout and the entire area was blocked off to traffic due to the ‘Great Power outage of 2013’. I suppose it had to do with the fact that there wasn’t a blizzard or John Thune press release going on, so they had to create a disaster.
Was the outage bad? Sure. But claiming that all of DT came to a halting stop couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, several DT bars and restaurants were open. I work at one of them. The reports all but killed a normal busy Friday night. In fact at one point in the evening, our establishment was completely empty, 8 PM on a Friday night. Now, I can speculate that January usually isn’t a hopping month for us, but I can also speculate that the local TV media, once again, has blown shit way out of proportion.
I think what bothers me more is that when something like a power outage occurs, it is the TOP STORY, but when other important things happen in our community, the TV stations are in hiding, probably busy flying their drones or playing with their latest snowstorm buttplug thingy.
Did you know last week a small group of citizens addressed the Minnehaha County Commission and got them to back off in restricting petitioners? Well you would not have heard about it on TV.
Our local TV stations seem to be more concerned about scaring old people and precipitation then they are about real news (hate to piss off the city fathers in our town, they might pull their advertising). This ‘creation’ of news has got to stop. Good, solid news stories are all around you, heck, some get handed to you on a silver platter. Where a DT restaurant is going to cold storage there bagged gravy is not a news story.