Okay, this is worth writing about, even on a Mushroom Soup Monday. This morning about 10:15, there was some sort of encounter in El Sereno, an outlying area of Los Angeles and it resulted in a high-speed freeway chase. The cops were following a guy in a maroon car who was armed and deemed likely to use that weapon. The chase went on and on and by 11 AM, all the local stations were preempting regular programming and covering the chase from copters. It sounded like the news copters' biggest problem was not running into each other or the police choppers.
At this point, I would guess that the stations that have an 11 AM newscast figured it was a "hot" news story and that it was likely to be over during their newscasts so it would not interfere with regular programming. I would further the guess the other stations joined in for competitive reasons and also figured they'd only be ruining one or two soap operas for their audience.
Then the suspect bailed. With an assault rifle in hand, he fled the car and for the last few hours, he's been barricaded in a home in North Hollywood with around 78,000 police surrounding the area…and it's nearing 3 PM. The officers are apparently trying to wait the guy out and they're also refusing to discuss if they're in contact with the suspect and what they plan to do and they're asking the media not to reveal where officers have been deployed.
So you have a mob of reporters out there with nothing to report. Almost nothing has changed in three hours and I have to think that at TV stations across the area, they're asking, "Why did we start covering this?" Because what if the guy's in there for many, many hours? They could wait out there until the guy dies of old age. (They seem to have reason to believe he hasn't already just killed himself, which is what you might expect. Since I wrote the above paragraph, they seem to have announced that they are not in contact with the suspect.)
I'm watching this on Channel 2. Channel 2 is owned by the same folks who own Channel 9 and the two stations are broadcasting the exact same coverage. The last time this happened, I asked why they couldn't just go back to regular programming on Channel 2 and put up a little announcement that said that this news story was being covered over on Channel 9. That would serve the public interest better. No one would be unable to watch their reporting but those who'd prefer to watch Dr. Phil would get to do so.
Several folks in the industry wrote to explain it to me. FCC requires that broadcast stations air a certain amount of "public service" material and this kind of thing qualifies. Thus, the company that owns Channels 2 and 9 gets to fulfill those requirements for both channels without having to produce additional programming. It's silly because…
Oh! As I write this, they seem to have caught the guy…alive. The S.W.A.T. boys fired tear gas in, he came out and surrendered. All right. And now, the news reports are showing the footage of them firing the tear gas in a few moments ago. They didn't air it live in case the suspect was watching the news. Okay, it looks like this is over. I still don't understand why every channel has to cover something like this at once, especially when they don't know anything…