If your local station frequently sends reporters out on the street to report on nothing... Or has reporters standing in front of the police station because the cops are investigating a robbery across town...
Then send them this! (WARNING!!! NSFW)
This nicely sums up my opinion of idiotic "live remotes."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaX4s3RyVak
When I lived in The City, I used to amuse my out-of-town guests by reciting the traffic reports before they were verbalized. We'd be stuck in traffic, listening to the traffic reports on one of the news stations, and I'd basically recite them from memory from the umpteen times I'd heard it before. They didn't change that much on "ordinary" days, and you could usually tell if it was an "ordinary" day by the traffic flow (or lack of same).
"Hutchinson Parkway slow from the Cross-Country Parkway to Mamaroneck Road."
"Major Deegan Expressway backed up from Van Cortlandt Park to the I-95 interchange."
"Henry Hudson Parkway is slow from 72nd Street to the George Washington Bridge."
"Garden State Parkway is heavy to the Raritan toll plaza."
"Lots of traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway in both directions around JFK Airport."
"Cross Bronx Expressway is very heavy southbound to the Bronx River Parkway."
I usually was able to avoid the worst of it. I learned to drive in New York City when I was 16 and had been driving there for most of my adult life. Unless you're an idiot, when you drive around the same place for that many years, you eventually learn the workarounds. But the workarounds mainly just reduce the pain from something resembling the tenth circle of hell -- the one so unspeakably terrifying that even Dante couldn't bring himself to write about it -- to merely miserable. On ordinary days, anyway.
And yet on those occasions when I visit what pass for "cities" in Upstate New York, I kind of appreciate
The City. Up here, the dinky, wannabe "cities" seem to want to emulate big cities by deliberately screwing up traffic. New York City, at least, tried to keep traffic moving: And considering the sheer number of vehicles on New York City's roads, it's actually pretty amazing that it moves as well as it does -- on "ordinary" days.
-Rich
Here in the Wichita area, one of our local news stations (KAKE-TV) likes to send reporters to City Hall whenever something is going on with the city government...even if aforementioned situation is not/did not take place at city hall. What is shown is the reporter standing in front of city hall (a large black high rise building) describing the situation...lol