During last night’s The West Wing, NBC decided to shrink the screen down to make room for a banner directing us to change the channel to MSNBC to follow a breaking story. Keep in mind that advertisers spend lots of money supporting prime time television, so a network would never direct its viewers to stop watching its programming unless the story were very important. A big story warranting banner treatment usually falls into one of two categories:
- Local weather-related disaster, or
- National/international tragedy.
Alas, I had forgotten about the third type:
*Celebrity spectacle.
Yes, Michael Jackson’s indictment was deemed so important by the NBC/MSNBC network heads that they directed us to immediatly change the channel and start watching their anchors babble with little information over pictures of Michael entering or leaving the courhouse.
They can only hope that it goes to trial just after the Friends finale.