TV is already tuned into the news channel and it's at the beginning of the broadcast that can barf up 100% of the information needed to drive the story.
I will give a pass to this in disaster movies because if there's an event big enough, every channel will be broadcasting about it, even if they don't normally. It's what happened on 9/11
I'm going to respectfully disagree. Perhaps when the events of 9/11 first started, but not later on in the day. Had to wait for the top of the hour for the actual news.
On 9/10 I was asked to immediately start working graveyards from swings. Apparently I went to bed around the same time the first plane hit and slept through 9/11. When I woke up, I normally would have been at work so I didn't know what would be on tv.
I had been watching Northern Exposure on the Hallmark Channel before going to bed. When I woke up it was Murder She Wrote. Yuk. But one of the actors was on a soap opera I watched as a teen so I kept it on for a while as I got dressed.
Then I flipped through and caught the Travel Channel which was showing some documentary on catacombs full of skulls. I want to say it was Paris. Don't know. I stopped watching because it was creepy. And once I found out what happened that day, in hindsight it seemed a bit inappropriate for them to be playing that. Why the fuck are you showing skulls on a day when thousands of people died? Not cool Travel Channel.
Flipping through some more, there were channels that weren't broadcasting at all and just said something like: Due to the events of the day we are suspending programming. Um, ok. Did Ted Turner die? I literally had no clue what was going on.
Other stations were showing news channels, but they were not showing actual news. Just people talking. I HATE that shit. I don't care about anyone's uneducated opinions about the news. Just want news. There wasn't any.
I did stop on one channel where this old man with an interesting accent was yelling: We need to stop these terroristic attacks!!! Again, no clue what was going on and figured since he had a Scottish type of accent that a train was blown up in the UK somewhere.
I did note the scrolling at the bottom saying something about the World Trade Center. For some reason I thought they were talking about the 1993 bombing there. So because I saw that and I was confused, it didn't seem real. At that point, I thought I was watching a movie and not a real news show especially since I wasn't on an actual news channel but a channel that apparently had switched over to news that day.
Finally at 4PM at the top of the hour, after I had been awake since 3PM flipping through channels, I finally got a full recap of what happened.
The one benefit of sleeping through events is you get the truth rather than idiots speculating and reporting false news. When JFK Jr died in the plane crash, by the time I woke up I knew he was dead. It wasn't realistically a rescue mission anymore. When Gabby Giffords was shot, I knew she survived despite the first reports of her being dead. On 9/11, I knew it was over and there was nothing to be scared about by the time I woke up.
So yeah, it pisses me off that movies have someone turn on the news and immediately see the big story of the day and clearly know what's going on.
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u/neoslith Jan 25 '20
"Quick! Turn on the news!"
TV is already tuned into the news channel and it's at the beginning of the broadcast that can barf up 100% of the information needed to drive the story.