Monday, April 13, 2009

Currently, there are no laws

I don't watch the local news. Yes, I do care about what's happening in my community, and yes I do have a feed on my home page for local newspaper articles, but I don't watch the evening news. Sometimes though I accidentally catch some of it, and after my initial feelings of bewilderment pass, I'm reminded of exactly why I very intentionally avoid it.

Recently there was an accident here in the area involving a texting motorist and a police car on the shoulder of an interstate. Clearly a potentially very serious situation that thankfully didn't involve much more than what I imagine was a good scare for everyone. Last night, as my TV flips to the most recent channel I was watching after I'd deleted my recording of a syndicated Scrubs episode, I happen to catch the end of this story on the evening news. "Okay, that's probably a legit news story", I tell myself, "Nothing there to warrant me being annoyed enough to write a blog post regarding my annoyance, that no one will ever read." Then, to what I guess should have been my anticipated bewilderment, they follow the story up with a series of video pieces in which they asked random residents how they "felt" about texting while driving.

There are just so many things wrong with this. The idea is wrong, the use of resources is wrong, the content is wrong, the delivery is wrong. This isn't a debatable subject. No sane person thinks texting while in control of a two thousand pound missile made of glass and steel is a good idea. But, if it were a debatable subject, don't stick a camera in the face of random people on the street and ask them a question for which they have no time to prepare an answer. Even with time and no camera the average person probably isn't going to have anything meaningful to say on the majority of topics, so there's almost zero chance of getting something worthwhile in this manner. If however the local news is going to choose to ask a question that has only one sane answer, and then to do that via ambush on the good people of the community, it would be ever so nice if they would save this activity for their interns and use their resources to air some meaningful content.

In the article linked above it mentions that there is currently no law against texting while driving. I won't get started on the implications of needing to create such a law, but should we decide to do that, I think we should also include one to protect citizens from "Pulse of the People"-type segments by local news teams.

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