Amber alert annoyance

Ha! Can you tell I'm not in market today? The station that aired the Chiefs game was, of course, KCTV-5. I'll forward this email (privately!) to management there.

But if WDAF could please to unblock the Gmail, I'm sure more than I would appreciate it.

[Original blog post follows:]

Seems that WDAF servers are currently rejecting all incoming email from my domain. My domain is Gmail.com. A small, insignificant little domain. I think it's a dating service.

Anyway, here's the letter that I tried to forward to its news director, Bryan McGruder. Hopefully he will see it and reply! (And CC his infotech department.)

Aaron,

I’ve written you before, back when FOX was the last hold out on the HDTV bandwagon, and again when one of the local stations were highly compressing their broadcast feed.

Now, I have something that I just don’t understand.

Today, during the Chiefs vs. Falcons game, there were multiple interruptions to the game to display the amber alert for the four Riggs children.

Now to be clear, I have NO issue with the amber alert. At all. I even understand why the station drops back to SDTV because they don’t have the necessary HDTV overlay equipment.

BUT, what I don’t understand, is if the alert is so important, why do they not show it through commercials? There were multiple instances where the game was getting ready to go to commercial, and the amber alert had just started and the alert was discontinued until the game came back on.

Regardless of what hot air excuses the station gives, it comes across as they don’t want to interfere with the commercials they sold during the chiefs game. Period. “We’ll help, as long as it doesn’t cost us money”.

Am I just over thinking this, or does their commitment to the dollar cheapen the effort they put into the amber alert program?

• Rodney T.

Comments

[Kenton]

Right on.

I'm not in the Kansas City area, but every year I write an angry letter to the Minneapolis CBS affiliate to complain about very similar stuff:

1. They do the test of the Emergency Broadcast System once a month during Letterman's monologue. Hey, they didn't even use the Emergency Broadcast System on 9/11, so do we really need it anymore? And during the monologue? And every month?

2. They run the "flood watch" and "heavy storm warning for Ponoka County" (or some other place where no one lives) during their shows, and during the ads - no warnings. The flood is only dangerous during regularly scheduled TV shows?

3. They break in with the most trivial weather warnings: "there's light rain in the Minneapolis area, let's go to the Doeppler radar...", etc, etc. And there's never an apology for the interruption. It's like they think viewers are watching their shows in keen anticipation of the next interruption - don't people on TV watch TV?

TV stations remind me of movie theatres: in an age when both are slowly dying, every move they make seems to make their product less valuable.

Revenue down? Put a big, loud air hockey game outside Cinema One. Oh, sorry, that might just be a Canadian thing...

[thorswitch]

It reminds me of how things worked when I was in radio many years ago. I had to help schedule the ads, and a lot of our advertisers were *very* picky about the context their ads were featured in and wanted to be sure that none of their ads would be broadcast too close to ads for their competitors.

One example of a big no-no: If we were reporting on a plane crash, we had to pull all of the ads being run by airliners until the story had died down a bit, and then we'd have to make good on those commercials that were skipped once it was "safe" to broadcast them again.

I've noticed before that the weather alert map/radar thingies that are displayed during programs when we're under a severe weather watch (but its not bad enough to require wall-to-wall Katie) are always removed from advertising.

I think what's likely happening is that advertisers don't want to risk having their product associated with something as negative as missing children or potentially deadly weather. So, the crawls and maps go away during the ad break and come back when the show is once again underway.

From a public safety viewpoint, I think its awful. They really *should* keep those messages up even during ads. I mean, if someone's channel surfing and they land momentarily on your channel, even if your broadcasting ads, they should be able to see the request for help or the warning to take cover, and the crawls/maps will usually catch someone's eye.

From a marketing standpoint, though, I understand why the advertisers don't want their products to be associated with negative things, like missing kids and bad weather. I don't necessarily agree with them, but if I had to guess, that's what I think is at the root of the matter.

[kmb]

The bottom line is (drumroll, please).... the bottom line!

Surprised?

[Chris Kamler]

I seem to remember several instances this past spring where the weather map and scrolls ran over standard HD programming. I agree with all above, I have no problem with the crawl airing multiple times, but couldn't they use the weather crawling system instead of the Amber Alert crawling system? I'd be happy to retype the text from one system to the other system if that's the problem. The cuts to HD and SD were awful and the associated screen was 1/2 the size of my TV.

(In all, it was probably best because the Chiefs were SO awful yesterday) but still.