Canadian TV, Computing and Home Theatre Forums banner

CTV London Gets Worse

180K views 691 replies 54 participants last post by  audiofool 
#1 ·
Southwestern Ontario's News Leader keeps lowering the standards that should be applied to local newscasts.......some of the worst anchors in the business, using old rehashed stories, taking US medical clips and using as if they were Canadian. The only positive for CTV London is the weather reporter. Interestingly enough one of the sports reporters is now doing general news......or is he just filling in. Time to rethink and have only one CTV station with appropriate staffing and current technology (HD) in place. Guess nobody complained when the morning news programing disappeared some time ago. I suppose if no one is watching then no one will complain.
 
#282 ·
Now I think I've seen it all. At the end of tonight's six o'clock CTV Kitchener newscast, they obviously miscalculated the total show runtime, because they had to glaringly repeat the same closing credit sequence three times in a row, in order to fill a gap. 🤦‍♂️
Almost as bad as what I witnessed sometime in the last week or so, during one of the "Your Morning" local news updates: technical difficulties would have been an understatement. Instead of giving the usual rundown of top stories, the notoriously troublesome Tegan Versolatto must have been instructed to talk about the weather for the whole two minutes, because she painstakingly dragged out smalltalking about the forecast for the entire newsbreak. Mmmhmm.
 
#284 ·
Sasha Long strikes again!
11pm news tonight, during a story on COVID one of the schools mentioned was Ekcoe Central Public School in Glencoe.

Sasha proceeded to pronounce it as E. K. Coe.

It’s either her ignorance of local institutions, or whoever is writing the teleprompter, had their head up their backside.
 
#285 ·
CTV should create a new slogan for itself: always worse, everyday.

On today's CTV Kitchener news at noon, newbie from away Tyler Kelaher mispronounced "The Aud" as "The Ohh" even though this is the largest, oldest sports/entertainment/multipurpose facility in all of Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge, so anybody with any bit of knowledge of local geography and culture would know it's pronounced like "Odd" because it's short for "The Kitchener Memorial Auditorium"!

Sigh... :rolleyes:
 
#287 ·
Apparently CTV isn't the only news outlet whose constant budget-cutting is resulting in laughable mistakes with template graphics. Here's a page from Waterloo Region Record newspaper where they've captioned a columnist with "First name Last name"!

🤦‍♂️
Maybe they should just quit publishing a print newspaper because they're obviously incapable of getting anything right the first time, relying solely on being able to "update" incorrect content, without acknowledgement, on the nonstatic web version.
 
#298 ·
Misery loves company. Anchoring today's noon newscast on CTV Kitchener, Alexandra Pinto, who usually avoids gaffes, blatantly referred to the local airport as "YFK" instead of "YKF" -- 🤦‍♂️

Worse, on Sunday's webcast, the opening credit for the awkward-segue-king, Ricardo Veneza, displayed his Twitter handle as '0' -- hmm, how appropriate!

 
#299 ·
CTV London's worsening reputation seems to "infect" other CTV stations, when something newsworthy actually happens in London.

Here's what happened on today's CTV Kitchener noon newscast, when London's Sean Irvine provided a live report:

Yep, "pedestriam" 🤦‍♂️

Even worse, the locator graphic for the lead story at the top of the newscast twice said the reporter was standing in Cambridge, when very clearly, she was standing in front of an elementary school in Kitchener. Can they get anything right?
 
#300 ·
Windsor's Jim Crichton just retired, then Mazotti was named the successor. Sijia Liu does the Night version, it seems.

Don't know why people have their panties in a bunch over a low budget newscast, go watch CBC if you want. It's slightly better produced.

I catch the Windsor News every once and a while. It seems to tell me who got killed in a car crash and other useless tidbits I don't need.
 
#301 ·
Unfortunately I cannot control myself any longer and must make another comment about CTV London. No direct comment on the news readers.....but the content. Numerous Network stories with no local connection other than to fill time etc etc More stories from CTV Kitchener. All the usual previous comments. The Christmas period has been the worst yet...something has to be happening other than revolving news readers. Why do I even watch the channel...guess many years of interest in the community. A habit hard to break. The station only exists as a means to burn off programs bought by CTV that they do not have room for on the main network and to carry NFL football. So sad, considering the history of CFPL-TV, and its contribution to Canadian broadcasting. Soon even those memories will disappear as we "old folk" depart. .........................
 
#302 ·
You do realize the state of Canadian TV production is terrible, right? When you put on CTV 2 it has Corner Gas, Mad About You or some other reject from outer space.

NFL Football is one of the only watchable things on the network, besides the local Windsor news. It's actually pretty good, don't know why the complainers are on here all the time. It's not like the USA, we don't have school shootings and murders every day. Not much to put on the news besides Covid.

But most on here are the typical Canadian, complaining about things that don't matter but seemingly crickets about Trillion dollar debts and the loss of freedoms.
 
#304 ·
What we’re seeing here is ‘Contractual Obligation Broadcasting’.
They likely have to provide a certain number of hours of news casting, regardless of the quality or location of the stories.
And it shows.
They’re just lazy and and indifferent.
They’re too cheap to have the local reporters on call should something big go down, and rely on other outlets to share their footage.

Sadly, this station will tank. BELL’s streamlining and cost cutting have guaranteed this.
It’s just a matter of time.
 
#308 · (Edited)
What we’re seeing here is ‘Contractual Obligation Broadcasting’.
They likely have to provide a certain number of hours of news casting, regardless of the quality or location of the stories.
And it shows.
They’re just lazy and and indifferent.
They’re too cheap to have the local reporters on call should something big go down, and rely on other outlets to share their footage.

Sadly, this station will tank. BELL’s streamlining and cost cutting have guaranteed this.
It’s just a matter of time.
It's Christmas for Pete's sake. The local reporters are likely on vacation and every station in North America uses any filler reports that they can get their hands on as real news is kind of scarce. Now this thread is about supposed to be about CTV London. Half the problems people have raised talk about network programming over which CTV London has no control. Let's make that distinction shall we and stay on topic?
 
#306 ·
Anything and everything to do with CTV is going down the drain.

I think it was on Boxing Day that I happened to watch some of the inevitable sole-source CTV Toronto newscast being aired on CTV2 Barrie. Sometime around the final ten minute mark, the signal abruptly switched to some NBC network feed, but the "CTV News Toronto" bug stayed in the bottom right corner. This lasted until a rough cut to the final commercial break, and it never returned to CTV News. Umm, rhetorically speaking, how's that happen?

Then, a family member noticed that the first repeat episode of "The Social" aired on Monday was, thoughtlessly, one with a recently-deceased guest host. Not a tribute, just Murphy's Law, and status quo at Bell Media. Yep, great choice, CTV. One wonders if they're already experimenting with AI automation for production and master controls, with all these FUBAR mistakes.

The revolving door at CTV Kitchener is spinning faster everyday, too. Rosie Del Campo announced she's not returning after her maternity leave; gee, I wonder why. Tony Grace is doing stints at CTV News Channel. Jessica Smith is moonlighting with CTV Toronto, just as her predecessor did.

People are regularly complaining on CTV's social media pages that CTV must now stand for "COVID Television" because every single newscast is packed with alarmist hyperbole and unnecessary minutia.

And CTV's "Your Morning" is spiraling into a complete joke. Everyday they have a segment where the hosts exaggerate their reactions to dumb videos they find on TikTok: a truly riveting broadcast! It's almost as dumb as the propensity of CTV News to just read tweets and think that qualifies as journalism. :rolleyes:

In 2022, CTV should resolve to do better, but we all know Bell will almost certainly stay the course.
 
Top