Saturday, February 20, 2010

Another Brief Captioning Commentary

So, this guy flies his plane into an IRS building in Texas this week. I turned on Headline News to see what's happening because didn't know about it until the afternoon. Most of the coverage was captioned even if there was the occasional glitch where he was referred to as a "pie lot" instead of a pilot. That I can live with.

What surprised me, was that the local cable news update that is 10 minutes long was not captioned. Not one bit. There was a zebra being led up the side of the highway in one segment while traffic was backed up. In another there was a car wreck with a car eerily resembling my daughter's. In yet another segment someone had been killed from a local high school. Another segment looked like there might have been a gas leak somewhere.

Silly me, I was hoping it was a glitch and it would be fixed soon. So I sat through the whole 10 minutes guessing at what the news was. A little unusual for me, I was still watching Headline News when the next local cable news update came on. The lack of captioning was not a glitch.

Does this mean that they think the local news is only important to people who can hear? Or that they just didn't think about it? Or they didn't want to pay to caption it? Or who knows? Now, who do I contact to let them know that someone does care whether or not this segment of programming is captioned...

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