News 12 Long Island Continues To Decline, Airing Wrong Footage, and Ignoring Local News

[Pinevision 3]

This was a glaring mistake, barely covering a deadly stabbing in Deer Park, then airing old footage from a crime in Wyandanch

1 Killed, 1 Seriously Injured in Deer Park stabbing

 

They seem focused mainly on the pandemic, economic, and political news and seem to gear to white collar (mainly finance professionals) now. They have ignored a lot of crime stories that would and should be considered major news. And when they do cover it, they only spend 20-30 seconds and read from a teleprompter with no reporter sent. And now instead of a one hour newscast at 5pm it has been cut back to 30 minutes and runs in a 30 min loop like on weekends. Altice has really ruined what was once a respected source for local news. Now we have nothing on Long Island as Fios1 went defunct years ago, WLNY no longer has a Long Island news, and the NYC Broadcast networks are focused on NYC and miss a lot of Long Island Stories. I wish one of the networks would step in. WLNY really should be a Long Island station as their City Of License is here. But CBS has basically turned it into an alternative station to channel 2. 

[mrschimpf 2063]

How is this a mistake, seriously? The local cable news channels like Spectrum News and News 12 operate on a model that all the other stations, newspapers, and hyperlocals and those weird 'crime chaser' Facebook pages cover minor 'bleeds it leads' stories like this, so they can cover stories people actually care about.

 

You can't get a lot of detail these days as the police have encrypted scanner feeds, so they control the narrative and push out a press release unless someone pays the thousands of dollars to get their own scanner. Crime was long over, the suspect was in custody, and there was no further threat to the community. Why bother to rush anyone out for what was a domestic dispute, or to end up with the always non-informative 'nobody answered the door/phone when we knocked/called for comment'? The only people affected directly were the surrounding homes, some people who tried to get through and had to find an alternate route, and a few gapers long after the fact.

 

And who cares what footage they used? It's police doing police stuff. Having footage from the scene where cops just mill around? There is more file footage of that type in the world than is actually needed. and frankly they should've just read and moved on, but whatever consultant said 'have some b-roll on-hand' just is seared in their head and they just did so. And it looks like there was correct footage at the end (comparing to WCBS's story), so it was likely just a mis-cue.

 

Reading this AP rundown...it literally starts 'according to police'. There's nothing else that's going to come out of this outside that, and wasting news operation resources to 'find out the real story' would be stupid...because again, very obvious domestic dispute.

 

Yes, news has been cut severely in most markets...but it definitely doesn't seem like Long Island is 'undernewsed' by any means. And just because News 12 has decided there are much more important things on Long Island to worry about than small crimes and accidents that don't affect a lot of people doesn't mean they're 'ignoring local news', but choosing not to focus on lurid stories because you can get that from the City stations, Newsday, the Citizen app, and 'Dix Hills Dave's Privacy-Violating Crime Response Blog' already.

[Pinevision 3]

People do care about crime, most viewers are absolutely sick of the pandemic coverage, so much so that places that normally display News12 on their TV's have the channel changed to something else. I'm not alone in feeling alienated by News12. It's obvious the people & areas they gear to are more upper class and don't care about crime because they're not the ones dealing with it, we are. Also lastly, what is the excuse for cutting the newscast in half from  60 minutes down to 30. They used to be live from 5pm to 6:30pm every weekday, now it's only 30 minutes at 5pm then it repeats in a loop every 30 minutes. That right there is proof of the serious cutbacks Altice is making.