The New London Day/WTNH U.S. Senate debate ended exactly on time – and that was the problem. The station on which the debate aired — WTNH”s sister station WCTX – switched to “Law and Order” at the top of the hour, in the middle of McMahon’s closing statement. Lots of booing and cheering, mostly by McMahon supporters, extended the length of the program and it was to their candidate’s detriment.
Likely explanation for the snafu by a friend of The Laurel:
It’s likely the debate was cut off because of Channel 8/59’s master control. It is run from Springfield, MA along with a bunch of other LIN stations. It is staffed thinly and mainly run in an automated fashion. No person is watching for the cue to roll the break – it’s a machine.
WTNH apologized via Twitter:
News 8 apologizes for cutting out early on tonight’s debate. The full debate will be available on http://WTNH.com later this evening.
WTNH News 8 @WTNH Otherwise….solid questions by WTNH’s Mark Davis and The Day’s Paul Choiniere.
I heard lots of booing & cheering from the Murphy people too.
Whatever may have been missed wasn’t worth hearing in any case. No one takes McMahon seriously. Some fiction we missed won’t help sell the fiction of McMahon’s competence.
The candidates know full well TV venues are an auto-switch out. Candidates are always rehearsed and get time cues to the out. If the McMahon handlers claim otherwise it only proves disinterest in the media where McMahon made her millions. Hardly an endorsement for an office what requires interest and appreciation for far more complex issues than commercial breaks.
McMahon is a fiction; a fiction not different from her violence and misogynistic children’s shows. Except her TV shows led to injury as children mimicked the violence they saw and performers sometimes died. But not enough to care about; the show must go on to make the kind of money McMahon has.
For someone who has never held any office, lied to Governor Rell on her phony State Board of Ed application, (later withdrawn when her lies were exposed), and pretends interest in the ordinary citizen, we can only hope a good riddance to her and her dangerous fictions; mostly the one where she pretends to be competent for the office of Senator.
She failed the first audition. That should have been enough for everyone, but not for someone who can’t get enough of themselves.
I’ll be civil, I agree McMahon’s force should have known the cut-off would happen .. she had lost by then.
Chris is a great legislator a fact before he went for state office he would stand on the Southington Green collecting for charitable causes then be available for personal discussions – Chris as you become our Senator never lose your routes we are routing for you all the way.
Chris tonight you looked the part as Biden did last week.
J. West
Southington
Let’s leave the politics out of this. I’m no McMahon fan, but let’s put the blame where it belongs… on the station. I gave up watching WTNH a long time ago. The constant camera goof ups, the mixed-up video footage, the messed up mics, and on and on made the station’s news reports look like a skit on SNL or worse public access programming submitted by the local high school A.V. club. Maybe if their master control wasn’t in another state, they wouldn’t have these problems.
P.S. Why do they insist on branding WCTX-59 (once WB-59, UPN-59, and “the X”) as MyTV9? Our local channel 9 (since the days of the roof-top antenna) has always been and will always be WWOR channel 9. That’s the real My9. Again, WTNH goes the cheap route and tries to capitalize off the heritage and recognition of an already existing station. The best WTNH could do is sell off the channel 59 spectrum and put the it out of it’s misery. It’s all garbage programming with recycled news from WTNH … and “debates” with no closing statement.
“Let’s leave the politics out of this.” . . . ?
WTNH jumped the shark when their phony “reporter” “hid” unmarked cases on the Metro North while secret recordings “proved” we were all vulnerable to terrorist attacks on our commutes.
WTNH hyped the segment for a month with the usual scary graphics and detuned video. A month!
Like it or not, WTNH isn’t the story. McMahon is in this game to bring more of that kind of false threat as a shield for her real objectives, which she refuses to share with bona fide newspapers and the public.
Scare and sell is one of the oldest advertising techniques and both McMahon and WTNH are masters of the craft.
Mr. Higgins needs to go.