Media Watch June 20, 2007

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

By PJH Staff

I’d ‘Rather’ not network news
Former longtime CBS Evening News anchorman Dan “No Fat Chicks” Rather got himself into a bit of hot water the other day when he remarked CBS brass made a mistake with his old newscast by aiming to “dumb it down, tart it up in hopes of attracting a larger audience” with a fresher, revamped format under anchorperson Katie Couric.

This, of course, painted onto Rather’s still-powdered forehead (he continues, unbeknownst to most, to broadcast on HDnet) a bullseye of neo-feminist reaction (Oh, those gals!) and pitted some divide between old-guard news people – who are mainly gone – and the new generation of anchor people – many of whom act more as personalities or pundits than objective journalists (though, remember Rather was fired himself for airing falsified anti-Bush documents).

Anyhow, the point is, with increasingly so many other good sources of news online and elsewhere, who needs big-network coverage these days anyway? The CBS Evening News, like its counterparts, has become something like “Wheel of Fortune”: a comfortable, familiar old thing that don’t matter that much to me anyway.

— Ben Cannon

New look for SLC Weekly
Readers of the Salt Lake City Weekly, might not have recognized the alt-weekly when it arrived last week. The independent paper issued its first edition after a redesign of its cover. Gone, apparently, are the artsy, edgy, sometimes camp and occasionally incomprehensible posterized covers.

The new look features a smaller cover image and a lot more teasers, including those little boxes across the top that mainstream daily papers tend to like. What’s it all mean? Probably nothing But it’s only the first week. What will come next? No “Tom Tomorrow”?

— Jared Schneeble

Regional deer on national radio
The nationally syndicated radio program “Earth & Sky” aired a piece on the Green River Valley mule deer herd recently. The country’s largest herd of mule  deer – some 30,000 – co-exists with over a thousand gas and oil wells in the Wyoming Range and Pinedale Anticline.

Using GPS collars, biologist Hall Sawyer has tracked the movements of the deer herd. His five-year research shows that most of the herd migrates more than 50 miles between winter and summer ranges, and that drought and severe winters have claimed an estimated 20 percent of the herd. But where gas development is happening, it’s a different story.

“Where gas development is occurring, we’ve actually seen a 45 percent reduction in deer numbers in that same five-year period,” Hall told the radio series hosts, Deborah Block and Joel Bird. “So, this suggests that deer within this herd that winter in areas where there’s oil and gas development may not be performing as well as deer that winter in undisturbed areas.”

— Jake Nichols
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Media Watch June 20, 2007 | Planet JH News Article: Media Watch

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