Delusions of Local Grandeur

Stay on a News Broadcast long enough in a given market, and you'll probably pick up this idea that you're a celebrity.

This phenomenon leads to newsreaders believing that...


 * 1) their opinions have value;
 * 2) the public is really interested in them and wants to hear them talk;
 * 3) they are Community Leaders.

In the best case, this may result only in increased chatter between newsreaders during the News. However, this can also lead to newsreaders gaining local talk shows, movie critique shows, or opinion segments. These last as long as it takes the station to discover how bad an idea that was.

Kent Brockman on The Simpsons is a quite merciless parody of this. (Also, Ron Burgundy is supposed to be a big deal; people know him.)

At its greatest extreme, this can lead to forays into local politics, which are beyond the scope of this Wiki.


 * The usual real-life example on a national scale are all the shows on Sunday mornings on American networks which consist of journalists trying to all demonstrate how smart and knowledgeable they are. Unfortunately many have lasted decades, possibly because it being Sunday morning it's not as if there's a lot of competition in the timeslots.
 * These shows run for three reasons: to give politicians a national audience to pontificate to so they can prove to their constituents that they actually matter; to satisfy stations' license requirements for a certain amount of "public service" broadcasting every week; and because they're so ridiculously cheap to produce that they're invariably profitable. Their viewers also skew towards the "very, very rich and very, very connected" demographic - so much so that some networks charge more per minute to advertise on these shows than for the Saturday morning cartoons, which have ten times the viewers. They get it, too.
 * This is not limited to "hard news"; ESPN's long running "The Sports Reporters" is the ur-example of sports' answer to those news shows.