Butrfly's Wonderings

My rant is about the media conglomerates. We had a power failure this evening, first we've had in this area in the 3 years I've been here. Lasted about two and a half hours and started during a heavy downpour and lightning storm.

Stumbled around for candles and matches so I could locate my emergency kit with the faraday flashlights and shake them for 3 minutes so I could then find my portable radio to learn what was going on. Spent a half hour surfing both the AM and FM dials (and shaking the flashlight every couple minutes to recharge it), trying to find some local news or talk show. Even some rap DJ who lives in the area, talking about the darkness that came over the eastern side of the Sacramento Valley, would have been great. Nothing, nada, zip. All 50 or so area call-lettered stations in the area run radio programs by a group of people sitting in Nebraska generating fake local program peppered with local ads so it sounds like the crap emanates from here.

Waded through the flooded parking lot to my car, drove around a two mile area to see how extensive the outage was while continuing to surf radio stations on my car radio.

Guess what?!?!? I could get local traffic and news on two stations! But, one of the stations was in Seattle and the other was in San Francisco and neither gave a flop about Sacramento. They were giving traffic and news reports for the Seattle and San Francisco areas. :::grrr:::

So, now the power is back on and I check the TV to see if there is any news. Nada. Now I've come to the internet to see what I find here. I check in with the local power utility website and find nothing. Switch over to the news websites of the three local TV stations here. Still nothing. Lots of state and national news, but hardly any local news.

So, how do we get local news these days? Do I need to call the radio stations in Seattle and Sacramento and ask them what happened here in Sacramento? 24/7 news coverage is nice, but it doesn't do a thing for us locally. I sure hope someone is around the local media outlets next time we have more than a minor earthquake in the area to let us know about any damage and dangers.