It's a small town, but we like it

The phone rings.  I usually don't pick up outside calls on weekends, but I know it must be one of my readers ready to vent about the local TV stations. They've gone wall to wall this afternoon with their coverage of severe weather in the Kansas City area. And even though three of them are duopolies, they're blowing out the coverage on their main channels, ostensibly in the name of public service, more likely because they're playing a game of Weathercaster Chicken with each other.

That meant the Emmys were joined "already in progress" ... but only missing a few opening minutes, enough to deprive Kansas Citians of the pretaped brilliance of Conan O'Brien (which has probably been uploaded to YouTube by now). Compared to what happened on the CBS affiliate, that's nothing.  KCTV-5 had its version of the "Heidi Bowl," as it cut away from network coverage of golf, with Tiger Woods leading by a stroke going into the final hole ... only to blow it and play four playoff holes while KCTV viewers watched endless Doppler radar maps.

"I like Kansas City, I do," says my caller, Betty Dawson. "But really, something like this is so rinky-dink."

And this in from an emailer:

Mind you I was watching from an area of KC directly under the red part of weather radar-so its not like I didn't have a vested interest in the information they were passing along.

But:

1. They could have conveyed the same information in a 3 minute live weather forecast then resumed programming and run a weather ribbon across the bottom of the screen with updates. Maybe even the little county map that shows in read the severe weather warnings. 2. They could have done a split screen presentation so we could have watched the golf on the other screen.  3. They could have picked up the programming where they left off and moved all programming back so everything was seen in its entirety.