As a journalist, I get kind of annoyed at people who leave comments on news articles posted to social media like: “I have a police scanner and you wouldn’t believe all the things that the news doesn’t report.”
1.) We can’t just report whatever we hear on the police scanners. It’s still happening in real-time and not all the details you hear are accurate. There’s a reason that we wait to get information from the officials.
2.) Not everything on the scanners is something we’d write an article about or broadcast on the evening news. Did someone die? Was someone seriously injured? Someone getting arrested for shoplifting at Walmart probably isn’t news. Several people getting arrested with large quantities of illegal drugs is.
All that being said, I love listening to police scanners and hearing what’s going on in Southeast Texas.
But just because the local media isn’t reporting something you heard on the police scanner doesn’t mean we’re trying to hide something from the community.
It probably just wasn’t newsworthy.
Most journalists are pretty busy meeting deadlines and gathering the information that seems most important. We don’t really have time to create a conspiracy.
Eleanor Skelton 