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L.A. wildfire coverage shows why local TV news matters in a crisis

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L.A. wildfire coverage shows why local TV news matters in a crisis

As the devastating wildfires began to sweep across Los Angeles on Jan. 7, frightened residents were not turning to Netflix.

Local TV news broadcasts were the video go-to for residents seeking immediate information on the crisis that engulfed the region. Anchors and correspondents have spent hours in the field and on the air providing life-saving details about evacuations and damage, along with a generous helping of emotional comfort.

“The performance of local stations has been phenomenal,” said Jonathan Wald, a veteran TV news producer who has worked for NBC News and CNN. “In the face of incredible tragedy, they are knowledgeable and keep their heads as they cover what’s happening in their neighborhoods.”

Traditional TV viewing has been in steady decline during the streaming era, now accounting for just half of all video consumption, according to recent Nielsen data. But even with diminished ratings and profits, TV stations have added hours of news coverage to their lineups and streaming platforms. The trend prepared Los Angeles outlets for a catastrophe that required a sustained flow of up-to-date information.

The availability of local TV news on digital platforms provided horrific yet compelling images of destruction to a global audience well beyond Los Angeles. Wald called the wildfires “the white Bronco chase of natural disasters,” referring to the police pursuit of O.J. Simpson that transfixed a nation of viewers in 1994.

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Stations saw viewership double and triple for their news programming during the first week of wildfire coverage, according to Nielsen data, with more than 1 million watching in prime time on Jan. 7. Hundreds of millions of minutes have been streamed across the station’s digital platforms.

Some journalism purists look down their noses at local TV news, which was once defined by stunts, gimmicks, and breezy “happy talk” in the studio.

But in an era when mainstream media have been under attack for perceived bias, viewers still mostly trust local TV news. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism issued a report last year showing that local TV news was trusted by 62% of Americans surveyed, well ahead of any network, cable or digital source.

Long-tenured local TV reporters and anchors develop roots in the area. Their personal stakes were laid bare as the inferno that swept across the region threatened their own families and friends.

“One of the things that makes local news powerful is that the people reporting are experiencing the story themselves,” said Andrew Heyward, a former CBS News president who currently consults local TV stations. “And viewers feel like they know them.”

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Elex Michaelson, a veteran anchor at Fox’s KTTV, said years of covering stories and emceeing community events helps journalists build connections with the audience. It gives them credibility when they provide information and comfort in a crisis.

That’s not always easy while covering a disaster in your backyard. Michaelson struggled to stay composed when he learned that Agoura Hills, his childhood neighborhood, was being evacuated.

“That’s when I started to tear up,” Michaelson said in an interview. “When their evacuation orders went out and my sister’s house was a part of it, I thought of her grabbing their new baby and leaving, not knowing if the house was going to be there when they got back.”

For days, Jasmine Viel of CBS station KCAL and her husband Marc Cota-Robles, an Orange County native who reports for Disney-owned KABC, were out on 12- to 14-hour shifts while her mother watched their children in Pasadena. They stared at each other in disbelief in the brief moments they crossed paths at home during the first week of the disaster.

“We couldn’t even talk about it, because we didn’t even know what was going to happen next,” Viel told The Times.

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Every local TV reporter covering the wildfires has a story to tell about stepping out of their journalistic role to help residents. Viel found a distraught Pasadena woman who saw flames approaching a coop that housed pet chickens and ducks behind her home on Altadena Drive. Viel’s camera operator John Schreiber, whose wife grew up on a farm, handled the birds as they were removed and rescued.

KTTV’s Gigi Graciette, a Hollywood native who has covered numerous wildfires, makes a point of resetting her live shot every 25 minutes and telling viewers the number of the block she‘s on so they can determine whether they will be affected.

“There is nothing more frustrating than to hear on the news that something is happening in your neighborhood, but you don’t know what street it’s on,” she said.

National cable and broadcast networks have their own reporting teams on the ground covering the wildfires. But many of the images those outlets use come from local stations. CNN took live shots from KABC, KCAL and Spectrum News Los Angeles. NewsNation, the cable network owned by Nexstar Media Group, utilized the parent company’s KTLA for hours of live coverage.

Broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC have also relied on their locally owned stations for network coverage of the fire on TV and their streaming news channels.

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Providing sustained live coverage online is essential in the age of video on-demand. TV station streams of news programming are widely available for free on such platforms as Amazon’s Prime Video, Tubi, Pluto TV and Roku.

“People don’t want to wait,” said Frank Cicha, executive vice president for Fox Television Stations. “Local television was famous for, ‘We’ll be back later with what you want to see,’ and they were able to get away with it.” Not anymore.

Fox Television Stations’ streaming platform, LiveNOW, provides video from its 29 outlets across the country. KTTV’s fire coverage ran continuously on LiveNow for days, driving a 65% increase in traffic, according to Emily Stone, vice president of digital content for Fox.

“It gave people a chance to watch local, live up-to-the-minute coverage of a story happening in a huge U.S. city that everybody cares about,” Stone said.

Reaching viewers outside of Los Angeles has helped in fundraising efforts for those displaced by the wildfire and prompted other acts of generosity. After KCAL’s Jeff Nguyen interviewed a man whose home was destroyed, the owner of an empty residence in Laguna Beach offered it as temporary shelter.

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Graciette told the story of an 81-year-old Navy veteran in Altadena who lost his electric wheelchair in the blaze. Multiple offers came from viewers to replace it. A woman watching in England told Graciette she was inspired to make a donation to a veterans group.

Movie Reviews

Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror

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Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror

I am a sucker for all those straight-to-video slasher movies from the 90’s; there was just a certain point where you knew the acting was terrible, however, it made you fall in love. I can definitely remember scanning the video store sections for all the different horror movies I could. All those movies had laughable names and boom mics accidentally getting in the frame. Trucker seems like a child of all those old dreams, because it is.

Let’s get into the review.

Synopsis

When a group of reckless teens cause an accident swroe to never speak of it.  The father is reescued by a strange man. from the wreckage and nursed back to health by a mysterious old man. When the group agrees to visit the accident scene, they meet their match from a strange masked trucker and all his toys with revenge on his mind.

Roll on 18 Wheleer

Trucker is what you would imagine: a movie about a psychotic trucker chasing you. We have seen it many, many times. What makes the film so different is its homage to bad movies but good ideas. I don’t mean in a negative way. When you think of a slasher movie, it’s not very complicated; as a matter of fact, it takes five minutes to piece the film together. This is so simple and childlike, and I absolutely love it. Trucker gave us something a little different, not too gory, bad CGI fire, I mean, this is all we old schlock horror fans want. Trucker is the type of film that you expect from a Tubi Original, on speed. However, I would take this over any Tubi Original.

I found some parts that were definitely a shout-out to the slasher humor from all those movies. Another good point that made the film shine was the sets. I guess what I can say is the film is everything Joy Ride should have been. While most modern slashers are trying to recreate the 1980s, the film stands out with its love for those unloved 1990’s horror films. While most see Joyride, you are extremely mistaken, my friend; you will enjoy this film much more.

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In The End

In the end, I enjoyed the entire film. At first, I saw it listed as an action thriller; I was pleasantly surprised, and Trucker pulled at my heart strings, enveloping me in its comfort from a long-forgotten time in horror. It’s a nostalgic blast for me, thinking back to that time, my friends, my youth, and finding my new home. Horror fans are split down the middle: from serial-killer clowns (my side) to elevated horror, where an artist paints a forty-thousand-year-old demon that chases them around an upper-class studio apartment. I say that a lot, but it’s the best way to describe some things.

The entire movie had me cheering while all the people I hated suffered dire consequences for their actions. It’s the same old story done in a way that we rabid fans could drool over, and it worked. In all the bad in the world today, and my only hope for the future is the soon-to-end Terrifier franchise. However, the direction was a recipe to succeed with 40+ year old horror fans like me. I see the film as a hope for tomorrow, leading us into a new era.

Trucker is set to release on March 10th, 2026

 

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Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater

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Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater

The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.

Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.

Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.

Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.

The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”

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As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)

As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.

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‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel

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‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel

It’s funny how this film is marketed as the first Scream movie in IMAX, yet it’s their sloppiest work to date. Williamson accomplishes two decent kills. My praise goes to the prosthetic team and gore above anything else. The filmmaking is amateurish, lacking any of the tension build and innovation in set pieces like the Radio Silence or Craven entries. Many slasher sequences consist of terribly spliced editing and incomprehensible camera movement. There was a person at my screening asking if one of the Ghostfaces was killed. I responded, “Yeah, they were shot in the head; you just couldn’t see it because the filmmaking is so damn unintelligible.” 

Really, Spyglass? This is the best you can do to “damage control” your series that was perfectly fine?

I’m getting comments from morons right now telling me that I’m biased for speaking “politically” about this movie. Fuck you! This poorly made, bland, and franchise-worst entry is a byproduct of political cowardice.

The production company was so adamant about silencing their outspoken star, who simply stated that she’s against the killing of Palestinian people by an evil totalitarian regime, that they deliberately fired her, conflating her comments to “anti-semintism,” when, and if you read what she said exactly, it wasn’t. Only to reconstruct the buildup made in her arc and settle on a nonsensical, manufactured, nostalgia-based slop fest to appeal to fans who lack genuine film taste in big 2026. To add insult to injury, this movie actively takes potshots at those predecessors, perhaps out of pettiness that Williamson didn’t pen them or a mean-spirited middle finger to the star the studio fired. Truly, fuck you. Take the Barrera aspect out of this, which is still impossible, and Scream 7 is a lazy, sloppy, ill-conceived, no-vision, enshittification of Scream and a bloody embarrassment to the franchise. It took a real, morally upright actress to make Ghostface’s knife go from metal to plastic. 

FINAL STATEMENT

You either die a Scream or live long enough to see yourself become a Stab.

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