Watching the News

For this week, I participated in something that I don't do very often, and that is to watch the local news. I get basically all of my news from listening to the radio, specifically MPR. I listen to the news on the radio when I wake up and when I drive to and from work- probably totaling about an hour a day. I feel like I am fairly well informed because they have in depth coverage on local, national and international topics. Everyday I usually also glance briefly at the Star Tribune which is delivered to my desk at school every morning. This is often very very brief- front page headline and maybe flipping through each section to see if anything catches my attention (at which point I might stop to skim an article, but probably not). I do not listen to any radio station other than MPR and an occasional field trip to The Current. In fact, I only have two buttons programed on my car stereo (#1= MPR, #2=Current). I don't really take the time to watch television in general, but I also sometimes turn on CNN as background/unwind noise. Basically, I am not a very typical media user (in my perception).

But back to the local news from this morning...

I watched the WCCO morning news.
I was surprised at the amount of diversity I noticed, in the anchors and the stories. The anchors were an African American woman and a white man. Right away in the first story was about a man that was rescued from a burning car (as Rick mentioned, very visual: shots of the car and the guy in the hospital). I tried to notice the discourse of the reporting on a black man being rescued by two white state patrolmen, and I didn't notice any "othering." The reporters just said, "A man was pulled from his burning SUV," and then in the interview, the officer simply refered to the man and his friend as, "Two gentlemen." It seemed that they just gave a few brief facts about injury status and whatnot and that was it. This, and everything in the broadcast was very quick and I found myself struggling to keep up with everything. They then went on to report a killing in a small town and to talk about the Foot Hood "shooting rampage." In this story, they did refer to the shooter and his strange behavior and made sure to mention, "His Muslim faith," but then stressed that, "Authorities insist that he is not a terriorist." So, even though his faith didn't seem to have anything to do with the story, it was still linked to terroristm and identified (which probably wouldn't happen if he had been of the dominant Christian faith).