During its safety report on ATM robbery this Sunday, your 12 News Safety Team suggested the following: "Watch out for suspicious-looking people waiting around an ATM — they may not really be customers. If someone offers to let you go ahead of them, decline politely and leave."
If you fail to flee before someone attempts to harm you, don't panic, you will have another opportunity. Once you've been held up, the Safety Team suggests, "take whatever cash you have toss it at them and say 'here…take it!' Then run the other way."
But nothing provides more critical information than CBS's Health Watch 5 section. In this week's segment, "Reduce Period Stress," Channel 5's Dr. Michael Resnick laid out his plan to lower the number of female menstrual cycles to three per year. Dr. Resnick's plan involves the use of the most common birth control pill, Ortho Tri-Cyclen, and what is commonly referred to in the medical field as "overdosing."
At the end of each cycle of Ortho Tri-Cyclen, there is a week of sugar pills that allow the woman to menstruate. Dr. Resnick's regiment, however, asks women not to take that week off and instead to start a new pill cycle.
The natural inclination may be to ask what health risks are involved in such an endeavor. According to Dr. Resnick, there aren't any, except of course the possibility of not knowing when one's pregnant. It is this last part that probably prompted the second major health article on the News 5 website, "Obtaining Someone's DNA sample" (seriously).
The article ever so covertly asks for the use of latex gloves, wax paper, a cotton swab and a marker. The combination of these should send up a red flag: Guys, she's not being "kinky," she thinks it's yours.
While there may be a silver lining to Dr. Resnick's plan — those that tune into a two-minute health report for their medical advice may quickly sterilize themselves — the same cannot be said for the health news provided by the Valley's ABC affiliate, News 15.
In their health news section, ABC 15 reported on how to prevent beer guts. For those of you from Broward, Palm Beach, or Miami-Dade counties, they even define a beer gut as "a protrusion caused by fat" sometimes called a "belly."
Their two main suggestions: exercise and don't eat so much. To illuminate the latter, they added, "beer should not get all the blame for building the structure. When people drink beer, they often accompany it with other stuff like pretzels, chips, [and] fried foods." Information as revolutionary as this is bound to generate questions:
Question: Is my "belly" actually full of beer? If so, what type of keg tap does that require?
Answer: Vice President Buck, please stop calling in.
Question: I've followed your recommendation on exercise and healthier living, but after buying all this running gear and exercise equipment, I'm still lazy, what should I do?
Answer: See our special section on "Liposuction: are your children at risk?"
Question: I've heard that there's a large lawsuit against the major fast-food chains, wouldn't it be more lucrative to sign on and keep my beer gut?
Answer: Noooorm!
In the end, I'm not sure who to blame more, pseudo-journalists or pseudo-viewers. In a genre tailored directly to its audience, viewers must be partly to blame, but perhaps partial fault lies within the medium itself.
As Henry Fielding once noted, "A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not." Apparently, the same goes for TV journalism.
Joshua Billar is a chemical engineering graduate. Responses can be sent to joshua.billar@asu.edu.
