News In Houston Essay, Research Paper

News in Houston

The news has always been a popular to the people because as people we want to know what is going on in the world we live in. That is all the news was too, it was a tool used to keep the public informed. Now, the news is used for advertising, to exploit people, and even a forum to express opinion on certain issues. I watched three different news stations on the same night. I would flip through and compare them to each other. The are surprisingly very similar and very different at the same time.

The first news station I watched was WB39 news at 9:00 p.m. This news show is probably the least watched news station on Houston. I know this because the show seems much unorganized and the people seem nervous. The two desk reporters who were giving the nightly news both spoke very timidly and never took their eyes off the queue cards. One of them was a white male and the other was a black woman. They started out with a story about an Amtrak derailment that killed 1 and injured 96. They showed pictures of crash site and they said that the caused of the crash was unknown. I thought it was weird that they did not know how the crash happened and yet the reported it. Next, they went to report on the Anna Nicole Smith Trial. The on the scene reporter was a young white male. They did like a 15-minute story on her and the court case. I thought it was interesting that you only see old male and young females doing the news and old females and young males do on the scene reporting. I also felt that WB39 was a little biased because the majority of the program was about Houston news and the rest was domestic and foreign news. Next, they did sports. The person reported on only three sports, these were basketball, baseball and golf. Each of three sports they reported on had either a team from Texas or a player from Texas. The basketball news was about the NCAA tournament, which that day had their last Texas team eliminated. In baseball, they did commentary on the spring training of the Houston Astros, and in golf they had a houstonian who had played a round of 72 in the Buick invitational.

The second news station I watch was FOX26. They had the same stories in almost the same order that in the WB39 news. The news reporters had the same makeup as the reporters did in WB39 as well. The only thing that was different was how FOX26 had done more news and weather than anything else had. They had a big weather report that had to have been at least half of the show. One thing I also noticed about FOX26 was that they had advertising during their show. When they would be done with the commercial and ready to come on the air, they would pop up advertisements of food products and investment firms. I thought this was odd because they never report anything bad about those firms or products and they advertise their slogans instead. This station also kept with the theme of WB39 and had a young female reporter and an old male reporter. The reason for this is that men prefer younger women and women prefer older males because they trust them more to give them the news.

The last station I watched was NBC channel 2 news. This news program was the most organized out of the three stations I watched. They had both older male and female reporters, which was not the case with WB39 and FOX26. Their stories were the same but more in-depth. Like the Amtrak stories. Channel 2 news had concluded that the crash was caused by faulty tracks. Earlier WB39 had said that the cause was unknown. I guess that is the advantage about starting the news an hour earlier. The thing I found the most interesting was that they did a one-minute around the world type thing where the reported the top stories around the world in less than a minute. Then they did the same thing for the top stories around the USA. They spent most of the program on local news. This is very biased because what if the stories around the world or USA involved and effected people in Houston. They do not get the whole story, just what they said in a minute. At the end of the night, like most news stations, they will have a story that is light hearted and funny to make the people leave with a good feeling after they just heard all of the worlds death and destruction.

News these days involve more than just the news. If involves advertising, biased reporting, and stories that some of us just do not care about. I noticed that our news station have nationalism present. The stories around the world are only short glimpse of what happened. Not only that but the only way you hear more about it is if an American is involved or even yet a Texan. With that, along with our nationalism, we also demonstrate localism. The majority of the news program delt with stories around Texas and mostly Houston. I saw a how station managers would use certain people to bring the news. The are more worried about ratings that the actual news. With a world full of corruption and greed, I never would have thought it would have effected the news.