WEWS "NewsChannel 5", It's Your Turn

News flash: OMW doesn't just have WOIO/19 in its sights.

A lack of sleep this morning, and curiosity about Hurricane Katrina, has us up at this early hour, and our TiVo landed on WEWS/5. (One of our regular rotating recordings is of ABC's "World News Now".)

Like almost all stations these days, "NewsChannel 5" has that ever, um, helpful news headline crawl...the TV invention borne out of the need to feed us extra information after the 9/11 attacks. Unlike WOIO, which uses the crawl on all of its newscasts, WEWS seems to limit it to "Good Morning Cleveland", which we never see because we're not usually awake at this hour.

It's not the news headlines which bother us. It's not the helpful 5 day forecast. No, it's the self-promotion.

On this morning's crawl, verbatim (thank you, TiVo!):

"YOU'RE WATCHING NEWSCHANNEL 5, HOME OF THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW. ON TODAY'S SHOW...GET YOUNGER AND HEALTHIER! TURN BACK THE CLOCK ON AGING WITH THE LATEST, MOST CRITICAL INFORMATION. AND, WHAT ARE THE THREE THINGS YOU NEED TO DO IN THE BATHROOM? WE'RE GOING THERE. THAT'S TODAY AT FOUR ON OPRAH, FOLLOWED BY LIVE ON FIVE."

No, as Dave Barry might say if he were still doing his syndicated humor column, "we're not making this up". We get the feeling that if Hurricane Katrina were to somehow make it up here as a full-fledged 150 MPH-plus storm, the "NewsChannel 5" crawl would contain both crucial information and a plug for today's Oprah, complete with a lengthy list of topics. Frankly, we don't really need to know what "three things you need to do in the bathroom"...