Excellence In Local Broadcasting

Some of the richest comedy in all the land comes from local news, where your hardworking local television journalists turn mundane local events into panic-inducing incidents of local reportage. ("Coming up at 11: Local teens embrace a dangerous new fad of DRINKING AND PASSING OUT IN LAWNS! Why your yard could be next!")

My favorite thing to scope are the lovingly detailed info boxes in the upper right hand corner, presumably designed for the person who finds listening to words being spoken on the television to be a really, really strenuous thing, man. They can border on subversive genius in the right hands, and by right hands we mean whoever is cranking out beauty like this sublime piece of genius over WJXT in Jacksonville, Florida:

Who knew a story about 171 football fans being kicked out of the Miami/Florida game could produce such soaring art? The Florida Gator, heavy lidded and obviously hammered, floating boozily in the upper left-hand corner; the amped up Miami Hurricanes logo, spiky and looking for a fight at the bottom; the gray, somber cans of some kind of sad, government-issue beer only available in times of war or famine; it all adds up to a stirring visual summary of how innocent recreation can be corrupted by the forces of debauchery and excess. Even the choice of font is meaningful: the lower-case white innocence of football, overshadowed by the oppressive, all-caps of the word DRUNK conveys all the reader needs to know without saying a word.

Which is good, because I was totally drunk when this story came on. What happened again?

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.