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The authors of the FCC’s public-interest standards didn’t have in mind footage of running gun battles on LA’s freeways. They were thinking along the lines of PBS’s ”NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” What they got, instead, was ”Cops,” narrated by better-looking people.
Photo caption: On May 11 Angel Galvan led Los Angeles-area police on a 40-minute car chase that ended with him being shot to death – on live television. (Boston Globe)
From PRWatch: “So counterproductive is local broadcast news,” UCLA law professor Jerry Kang argued in the Harvard Law Review, “that it is time the FCC stopped using the number of hours a station devotes to local news as evidence of the station’s contribution to the ‘public interest’, which has traditionally been a requirement for a broadcast license.”
More below with, of course, a poll!
PRWatch further states:
For a fuller discourse on Kang’s controversial proposals, see the Boston Globe‘s “Crime scenes.”