Headshot

If there's one thing you can count on from local television news, it's making mountains out of molehills. Sacramento seems really good at this, but I'm sure that it must happen everywhere, right? Please say I'm right.

The latest molehill is this video made by some local teens in Rocklin. It didn't make me laugh out loud, but I did find it amusing.



It is of course a spoof of “Call of Duty: Black Ops”, but what they are making a mountain out of it for is that it was recorded at their high school. Here's the story from News 10, a station that I watch because they usually don't go for this sort of crap:




What was that that Liz said? Yup, that's right, the “C” word; Columbine! And look, this story aired a week before the anniversary of said tragedy, although I'm sure that's just a coincidence. Lets see if they find some way of running something about this again tomorrow.

Anyway, thank you Liz for being the stereotypical out-of-touch adult. To be fair, I'm sure the reporter did not give you the context of the video they showed you (and I doubt they showed you all seven minutes of it), because they certainly misrepresented it in the story. I got the feeling like they were trying to represent this as something more than a funny video produced by creative teens who actually put down the controllers for a few hours and went and did something else... even if that something else was still video game related.

Of course it doesn't help me think that Channel 10 was not trying to deceive me as to what the video is about by repeatedly showing the headshot clips from 3:40 and 5:20 during the promos and intro to the story. I don't expect intellectual honesty from the media anymore, but I do... well, did, hold Channel 10 at a higher standard than the other local stations (Fox 40 and CBS 13, I'm looking at you here). Why was I still able to be disillusioned by News 10? Well, unlike some other stations they don't generally do news-free newscasts (I watched in amazement one time as another local station managed to do twenty minutes of broadcast without actually covering any news), and while they may get silly sometimes, and they may obsess, like every other station, about the fragging Kings, they seemed like they treated the news with a little respect.

I guess this explains why they stopped running the ads saying that they don't do sensationalism.

Come on, News 10, you're better than this. A Youtube video of students making a parody of a video game is never news, and asking the school if they new about it while it was being filmed is just stupid. If you notice in the vid, even the little slivers of it shown in the news story, they are not holding any weapons; their hands are empty, and all of the sound and visual effects are added later on computer. If you saw a kid in a sombrero running around while being video taped, would you automatically think “OMG, they're making a school shooting video!”? I certainly hope not.

Ugh, okay, that's enough for now. Until you hear from me again, don't trust the darkness.

I think I like that one.