LCN brings in the big guns - Pierre Bruneau - to anchor a crash special.
This morning, the TVA helicopter crash-landed near the Bonaventure expressway downtown for reasons still unknown. The pilot, Antoine Léger, and journalist Réjean Léveillé are injured but their lives are not in danger. (Which is good news, because the last thing we need is another news helicopter-related fatality.)
UPDATE: More from La Presse.
Helicopter crashes are right up LCN’s alley, but since this was their helicopter (which ironically meant they couldn’t send a helicopter out to film it), this story took on a whole new importance. Pierre Bruneau hosted a one-hour special at 9am – pre-empting Claude Poirier – whose only news story was this crash-landing. It’s also leading every newscast with helicopter stories (as of 3pm, 10 minutes at the top of the hour and 5 minutes at the half-hour mark).
It’s a fact of life that the media love reporting on themselves. Whether it’s a meaningless award they’ve won, a news anchor’s retirement, or a labour disruption at a competing news outlet, these stories get more attention than they would if they related to non-media. A few hundred jobs are lost at a factory and it’s a business brief. A few dozen at a newspaper or TV station and it’s a big story.
I’m just as guilty there – this blog is all about local media.
So is LCN going overboard here just because it’s a TVA helicopter? Or is this just an understandable outpouring of support from a network that put family above the news?
Yes, very overboard. Just like this summers other copter crash involving a CFCF crewman.
Bon rétablissement réjean et ton pilote je suis contents que vous êtes envie
Well, everybody laughed when Canal 10 got their chopper, but now, no one is laughing. They are lucky to not have gone down in the drink, at this time of year, they would not have got out alive; from what I understand, they were over the river when they started to have trouble.
At least they did not die like the CTV chopper last summer…
Hope they get well soon.
second R-22 to go down this year…what’s up with those choppers? Glad the guys survived this one…get well fast.
…so, the media loves reporting on itself? Quite the revelation there.
Is this similar to how the media is always agitating for greater “transparency” in the government and corporate sectors, but shouts down any such calls for transparency of its own internal workings by screaming ‘freedom of the press!’
I caught the 6 pm CFCF broadcast which led off with TWO reports covering the story right up to almost clinical details. There’s probably a combination at play here – media glad-handing itself; December tending to be a slower news month; week 4 of the desperate attempts by the usual suspects to try and care about ACTUAL “local TV”.
Unfortunately, I think there’s also a perversion element in that reporters and cameras were able to get extremely close to the scene of the crash and while the rescue efforts were taking place. And an extra special one at CFCF since they went through the same kind of story, with far more fatal consequences, last year.
A helicopter Fell Out Of The Sky. We’re entirely justified in reporting the hell out of it, no matter who’s inside.
Sure, absolutely. But would it be reported as much as it was? I don’t know.