Television Critique

Blakely Peppinger
February 7, 2008
Television Critique


For this critique, I watched the Local news 8 sports cast on the night of February 6th. This sportscast was really frustrating for me to watch. I am from Salt Lake City and am used to a different style of a broadcast. This was the first time I have watched a local news station here in Idaho because since I’ve moved here, I’ve had cable and I wasn’t interested, and now I don’t have television. I wasn’t completely surprised at the major differences of the local channel here compared to Salt Lake but it was a lot different.
One thing that really bothered me was the coverage from one of the biggest rivalry’s in this town. The game was between Century and Highland and there were only a few video clips from the second half. The clips mostly featured good plays made by Century and I was surprised to see that the game was won by highland. I feel the comments were also favored on Century’s side, which again I didn’t understand because of the fact that Highland came out on top. If you had just listened to the comments and the video clips without hearing the final score, you would have thought without a doubt that Century had dominated Highland. I am not a fan for either school but if I had been it would have seemed like the station favored the one school over the other.
As I was watching, they showed a clip from a different game than what they were talking about in the segment. Also, at the end as they were going to commercial, they showed an irrelevant sports clip again. I’ve seen this happen before but not several times as it did on this particular night. I know it is live television, but the clips seemed to be really disorganized and sporadic.
One other thing that bothered me was that they were talking about the ISU football team and how it was national signing day yesterday. The anchor was talking about the certain players that signed with ISU and they showed the same ISU football clip three times. It was of the football team running out onto the field before the game. It was shown at the beginning of the story, in the middle and then at the end of announcing all the incoming players.
I think they covered some other games really well and some national games also. I learned a lot about how to cover local sports news and the aspects of the game that are reported. It was interesting to see what statistics are reported on a local station rather than the local newspaper or in what order. A lot less is written for each game but visuals from clips cover a lot of the missing stuff that the newspaper articles would usually write on.
If I was doing the broadcast, I would report good plays and players from both teams. I would have also covered more from the rivalry game because I think most of the town would be interested in it. I would also cover more NBA games instead of just the Utah Jazz. They are the closest team to Pocatello, but I would want to cover some other major teams as well. I would have also reported some of the local players that signed yesterday for football in out of state schools. Overall, for the resources available it was a very informative sports cast.