Enough with the Smoking Chimp Already

Unable to keep the hilarity to herself any longer, KETV's Elictia "Omarosa" Hammond on Monday morning just HAD to show weathergirl Andrea Bredow the video Andrea missed last week when she was off. Of course, it was the video of the chimpanzee at a South African zoo who smokes cigarettes thrown to him by idiotic zoo visitors. Elictia and Andrea just laughed and laughed. It was THAT funny.Note to

KM3 Delivers Its Spin on May Ratings

KMTV issued a press release on Wednesday highlighting what it sees as bright spots in the recently issued May sweeps ratings.Entitled "KMTV Viewership Continues to Grow," the 121-word statement boasts that the station ranked first in total viewers, Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., mainly on the strength of its network and syndicated programming, including Regis & Kelly, The Price is

Future

Holy smokes, get a load of this story, which reports on a Washington, D.C. station that plans to have its anchors operate their own teleprompters—with their feet—as they read the news.Our favorite line: Some at the station worry that such a roll-your-own system could increase the potential for on-camera blunders, as anchors fumble for the right spot in their scripts.This should be a real treat

Beyond Lazy

Latest sign that they're not even trying any more at Channel 6: Closing Wednesday morning's 7:55 Today Show local cut-in, loud-talking know-it-all Jimmy Thiedlecki asked viewers "with stories or personal connections" to newly-dead President Gerald Ford to give the station a call.Um, doesn't the station have reporters to dig this kind of thing up?Oh, wait. This is Sux News, where reporters like

A Few Random Observations

• Has anyone caught the Omaha Public Schools' latest offering on The Knowledge Network (Cox Channel 17)? It's hosted by district spokescrone LuAnn Nelson, who peppers some apparently over-coached youngsters with canned questions to set up their canned answers. It's reminiscent of old propaganda films cranked out by the Soviets during the Cold War. Is this the best OPS can come up with? How is it

Leadership

An oft-run promo on WOWT gushes that the station is the first in the area offering full HD.


After Wednesday's day-long debacle—"technical difficulties" that shut down the "Daybreak" program and severely handicapped newscasts for the remainder of the day—the SuxNews braintrust might want to craft a new message celebrating the "Heartland's" first full HD meltdown.


This seems to be a case of

What Does This Say About Their Readers?

If you thought you were depressed about local news quality, you'll be even more so when you see who The Reader's readers chose for the paper's "Best of the Big O" awards:Best Weatherperson: Jim Flowers (WOWT)Best Television Reporter: Mike McKnight (WOWT)Best Sportscaster: Dave Webber (WOWT)Best News Anchor Team: WOWTBest Anchorperson: John Knicely (WOWT)On the bright side, however, at least

Pasture

Ending half a decade of speculation, WOWT's Dave Webber announced on Thursday's 10 p.m. newscast that he will be stepping down as sports director. No timeline was given on exactly when Webber will exit; he plans to continue with the station on a part-time basis.Ross Jernstrom, who has waited in the wings for over 20 years, will take Webber's place. It'll be interesting to see how the audience

Palestinians Take Over WOWT Control Room?

Scrolling headline during WOWT's Sunday morning newscast: "DOCTORS: ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER ARIEL SHARON IS 'NO IMMEDIATE DANGER' FOLLOWING EMERGENCY SURGERY."Speaking of the Big Six's weekend morning...• Anchor Andrea McMaster, whose symptoms of idiocy seemed to be in remission during her first two weeks back from maternity leave, appears to be backsliding. For one thing, she's returned to

Mix

Kudos to KMTV's Devon Patton for scoring a bizarre interview Wednesday with former Husker/accused murderer Thunder Collins. The interview appeared to be conducted in a parking lot and Patton repeatedly described Collins as seeming "amused" by his situation.A slap up side the head to the station, however, for the story that followed: an interview with an unidentified woman claiming to have seen

UPN+WB=CW: A Local Marriage from Hell?

Tuesday's announcement that the UPN and WB networks would merge struck us as interesting at first. We were thinking that maybe these two fractional networks might come together to create something closer to one complete outfit. And then it occurred to us that the local implications could be rather ominous. Might Omaha's UPN affiliate—carried on Cox Cable and operated by WOWT's owner, Gray

McMaster Delivers

Capping a pregnancy that seemed to last forever, WOWT anchor/reporter Andrea McMaster delivered a baby girl this past Saturday. Mother and baby are said to be home and doing fine.

Knicely Begins Cotton Bowl Renovation

Following up a story by reporter Maniko Barthalemy on Tuesday, borderline retarded anchor John Knicely told viewers that the Cotton Bowl in Dallas holds 68,000. Perhaps his information came from another of the station's pleas for viewer phone-ins, but the Cotton Bowl website suggests that folks in Dallas think the stadium holds over 71,000. Then again, maybe big numbers, like big words, just

Meuret Leaving KETV

It's November and turnover is in the air. First, Doug Walker decides to leave WOWT to go help OPS Superintendent John Mackiel play TV. Now comes word that KETV reporter Trisha Meuret plans to leave KETV in a week or so to work for Pete Ricketts' Senate campaign.Such departures always create a situation that we love here at OMA News: the opportunity for a station to introduce a fresh face into the

Lost and Found

An alert reader recently wrote that one of the benefits of OMAnews is that it keeps readers in the loop regarding changes in personnel. So, rather than having it take a period of months to realize that Joe Schmutz has disappeared from Channel 56, a regular reader of OMAnews may know about it before said reporter or anchor is even out the door.Given the relative newness of OMAnews, we've fielded

Assorted Qs & As

Some of the more frequent questions we’ve fielded since we began this little experiment a month or two ago…Q: Why do you pick on Channel 6 so much?A: For a couple of reasons. First, Channel 6 has led the ratings for a long time now, although they’ve faced stiffer competition of late. Not only that, but it seems pretty clear that they’ve traditionally had a bigger budget to work with. With those