Innocent Bystander

A little tech, a little current affairs, and my view on whatever has my attention at the moment...

Current Terror Alert Level
Terror Alert Level

Thursday, July 07, 2005

The News of The Day....

First a public service announcement... Notice the top of the page, the terror alert level is now a mixed Bert/Ernie, it's Bert unless you're on Mass Transit in which case it's Ernie. What does that mean? Ummm... If you're riding Mass Transit, trust nobody and nothing. But, you should resume your normal level of suspicion once you depart the Mass Transit station of your choice. And now back to our regularly unscheduled blogging....


My morning routine is pretty set, wake up and turn on the news on TV before I do anything else.

I watch the local NBC affiliate, they have a smart witty anchor and an airheaded anchor, I like the NBC affiliate because the smart anchor is smart enough to compensate for the airheaded one and negate the airheaded effects.

Like probably everybody else, they were reporting on the events in London. Well kinda... They were re-broadcasting MSNBC's coverage of the events in London... Except MSNBC wasn't really covering the events in London themselves, MSNBC was re-broadcasting ITV's coverage on the events in London.

On the surface this makes sense, over the last 20 years or so US news organizations have drastically cut back on their foreign news staffs. Why not take advantage of local news sources then, especially if they speak the same language? The trouble is that for a half hour, ITV interviewing various eyewitnesses... but never recapped just what was going on.

MSNBC's own crawl and Flash News banner that they superimposed on the screen was of no help either... All it said was "Explosions in London." I was able to determine that a bus had blown up somewhere but that was it... 30 Minutes and no recap of what was going on and where... At least locally... Our local affiliate broke away for commercials, and again in time to switch to The Today Show.

So we move to The Today Show, surely they would give a full recap on what was going on... Not really, the best I could get from them after a good 15 minutes was just that there were multiple explosions in The Tube, and a bus bombing near Tavistock Square. At this point we're a good 3 hours after the first explosion.

Now looking at the timeline up on MSNBC's website http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8497343/ Scotland Yard didn't release the location of the explosions until 7:30 Eastern, 12:30 GMT. But, if you have reporters on the scene talking to eyewitnesses (like ITV was doing) won't the reporters also report on where they are?

I just don't get the 3 hour delay before we knew where the explosions had occured. Heck, even if they passed the locations as pending confirmation from Government sources. I don't know, maybe it's just me. I could be the only person who watched the coverage this morning thinking "Where in London? It's a BIG city!"

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