As a lifelong NH resident, it’s not that I had moved from say New York City and came to New Hampshire and said “what’s this crappy media outlets?” I think part of it was I was blessed to had traveled to many markets in the U.S. and had always had some realization since middle school that the Boston and Manchester market was radically different. But I maybe I didn’t travel to enough markets to get a grasp.
Regardless our media outlets are mostly north of the Mass. state line are:
- WMUR-TV Manchester, one the VHF Channel 9 with studios near Downtown Manchester and it’s stick up on the mountain in Goffstown. It’s often just branded by locals as “WMUR”, the station brands themselves in the Station ID as “WMUR New Hampshire” which the state according to the Federal Communications Commission as non-compliant as a U.S. state cannot qualify as a “Station of License”. I’ll leave boring details for another day. At the Minfig Newsguy’s global Headquarters, we refer to the station to what it’s filed in the FCC records, it’s WMUR-TV Manchester; just like Channel 2 in NYC is legally filed as WCBS-TV New York, being statically consistent in the name of fairness.
- WZID Radio (according to their station ID it serves Manchester, Nashua and Concord), they once had a solid news operation, the ND used to be the morning drive news host, and traffic was split by Ed Brouder and Metro Networks in Boston for the Massachusetts commuters, as 95.7 FM can be heard as far south as Boston. I say Metro, because after the merger, there was one or two voices that identified with the Shadow brand, as many were signing off as Metro Traffic reporters.
- Since I am multi media, the Union Leader, the “statewide newspaper” as they bill themselves is in modern history a flash and trash and often sounding more broadcast-y in a print medium.
I left out WENH-TV , the NHPBS network of UHF signals as they had a hard time over the years competing against the mighty WGBH-TV, and as a result had agreed to block WGBH’s signal on Comcast cable subscribers in New Hampshire audiences, likewise NHPBS was blocked on Comcast headends in Massachusetts to protect the WGBH ratings share. In recent years the station has developed more local programming, than before, that’s because they surrendered master control ops to co-op with WGBH and many other regional PBS stations like commercial media has done for years.
The TV station is the worst of the three major media outlets, because WZID has gotten out of doing news, and they are never in Concord for the latest stories coming out from our elected officials. They do have an apparent shared services with the TV station.
Why is our media so bad?
Because I got out of the bubble, I can tell you the secrets that I think plague everyone!
- Propaganda artists. WMUR-TV has given license to anyone with power, and ensure the one’s who can’t to remain silent. The station glamorizes women in power, but often will trash a man’s status. Every man the station airs is a street crime, and he has done something bad.
- Fear-mongering. Not only is 9 trashing presumably guilty people, the station executes a Fox News-style of fear mongering. Case in point in personal antidotes, on WMUR-TV’s air in early October, they scared the audience of potential Fentyal candies; the following day my maternal great uncle was scared of getting that medication while being in a Massachusetts hospital because of perhaps what he had seen the night before? I know he watches 9, so I am assuming that would be a possibility.
- Scaring people near COL about something far away Another scare-tactic was on their midday newscast in mid October where the anchor was small-talking to the meteorologist of “it’s been pouring all morning in Portsmouth”, my grandmother looked out of her window and was wondering what the anchor meant. I said “they said it was pouring all morning in Portsmouth nearly 40 miles of the City of License, that is Manchester, and me and my family live two towns south of City of License. Just because you think you can cover your entire state, it doesn’t register to everyone. God KCNC, that stands for Colorado’s News Channel really covers nearly half of the actual state that surrounds Denver, the market of the CBS O&O. Just because you have a state in your brand doesn’t mean you can literally cover the entire state
- More propaganda, and no knowledge of investigative reporting. Jeff Rosen, known from WABC-TV and WNBC fame is NOT a WMUR-TV staff, but just another Hearst guy in New York acting as the “National Investigative Correspondent”. It’s ironic that the Hearst station is really a feminine news outlet because of the association with Cosmo and alike, so they’ll talk about consumer crap, and the enterprise corruption in the local and municipal governments… because it’s News 9’s world-view that The State of New Hampshire can do no wrong, the guys in power that we don’t elect must be doing a decent job, and hell if we at 9 have Chris Sununu’s personal cell number in their rolodex or Senator Maggie Hassan’s direct number, so everything must be okie-dokie right? While I cannot confirm this personally because I never been the empty News 9 Newsroom, I go on a high suspicion. In the markets I’ve done work, that are Minfiig cities and towns, stations owned by networks O&Os or chains, we would never do this dare I say shit, the corporate managers would fire these people immediately. At Hearst, you just get promoted to work at another shallow market or just go up the WMUR chain. It’s that sad.
- Benevolent Sexism. It extends to the 7:00 show, outside the news department, that borrowed brand from WCVB, but the format is ripped from the old Evening Magazine that is New Hampshire Chronicle. They’ll run a piece of a former on air staffer’s daughter writing a blog to empower women in this state (again women have had it really easy in theory) and giving more ENG mics to people like a craft store lady at one of the area malls whose known in the craft community to be a words I won’t use for this platform. Women are great = men who don’t have power in this state of Great Stone Face, and WMUR-TV can get away with more unethical crap than WHDH has been since Sunbeam took over from the late David Mugar.
So yeah, I tend to be an outsider by choice in New Hampshire. This is the stuff people in Boston would laugh over. It’s not new, and it’s been going on for years. And decades. My paternal cousin whose not even 22 is an audience (albeit on social media.) My maternal grandmother whose 82 is an audience. Does this station understand the FCC license (for better or for worse) understands there’s a responsibility for the content that is aired even if it’s news or a Evening Mag rip off?
It’s being complacent. And there’s no place. There’s further reasons why I do not like sexist media outlets, and I hadn’t touched WZID or why you see video from Copenhagen’s 6 in many real life places. It’s because of the power of these outlets and how the authorities are in the toilet, resulting the First Amendment to only apply to wo/men in power. That will be a post for another day
🙂