Just saw a local news segment that claimed a 500% increase in 'neighborhood disputes' over trash cans.

They ran it for three days straight, but the source was a single tweet from a guy in a town 200 miles away. It's amazing how a random social media post can become a week-long 'crisis' story. Has anyone else noticed their local news doing this kind of thing lately?

4 comments

4 Comments

evan_harris621d ago

Yeah, it's lazy reporting. They need to fill airtime and generate clicks, so they turn a tweet into a trend. My local channel does this constantly with "viral" neighborhood app complaints. It creates a fake problem that everyone then gets mad about. The whole system is broken.

maxl9321d ago

What's worked for me, @evan_harris6, is just turning that junk off completely.

wren23021d ago

Used to think local news was just harmless background noise. Then my station ran a story for a week about porch pirate gangs, using one blurry doorbell video from a different county. Suddenly my whole block was buying fancy locks and cameras, all scared of a problem that never even happened here. It really showed me how they can turn nothing into something everyone worries about.

wood.uma21d ago

Totally. It's not just the news, it's everywhere now. My feed is full of people scared to travel or try new foods because of one viral story. Restaurants get ruined over a single bad review that blows up. We're all living in this bubble of worst case scenarios that someone else made up for clicks.