Dear Editor:
My 9, not New Jersey’s My 9 WWOR-TV even though it is located in Secaucus and licensed to New Jersey. They just announced that they will kill their 10 pm newscast and air at 11pm against three other network newscasts and cut it in half to a half an hour and cancel their weekend news all together.
New Jersey this a wakeup call if you don’t write the station, your legislators and become an active New Jersey citizen we stand lose not only our only fully commercial VHF station, But our NJ voice. We need to send Rupert Murdoch a clear message that he needs to respect New Jersey and while he gave us a different voice politically he is taking New Jersey’s voice away.
I have a tremendous amount of respect for Murdoch, however when it comes at the expensive of our station then I have a problem. The game plan for channel 9 seems to be making it a shadow network to plug and promote its bigger, more glamorous sister station Fox 5 NY! With the cancellation, of our New Jersey newscast on 9 they announced they will expand GOOD DAY NEW YORK by adding another hour to its marathon already. They are also taking the new Wendy Williams Show (it will have a first run at 10 am on Fox 5 first) and putting that on ch. 9 at 10 pm where our jersey centric newscast is supposed to be all in the name of maximizing exposure and ad sales for sister station Fox 5. NY. New Jersey let’s not lose our only Jersey station that produced some great shows and personalities like Joe Franklin, Morton Downey Jr., Sara Lee Kessler, Jennifer Valoppi, Matt Lauer and Lloyd Lyndsay Young just to name a few.
While Fox is saying that this is all being done because of the economic crisis this has been going on since they bought the station over in 2001 and became a duopoly.
In fact, nearly two years ago, there was an FCC licensing meeting about Ch 9 where Senator Frank Lautenberg put on a show and said he was challenging Ch. 9’s inadequate coverage of New Jersey. The only thing to come of that meeting was a name change for their website from my9ny.com to my9tv.com it seems they should have kept it because at least it was accurate.
However, New Jersey we can send Murdoch a real message one that he will listen to and be obligated to respond. Let him know that our New Jersey studios in Secaucus should go back to producing Great New Jersey TV shows. They have one the area’s best multi-million dollar studios which are dormant and unused; they can be doing a talk show there, game shows, cooking show, or adding our own Good Day Jersey show. This would be showing us Mr. Murdoch that New Jersey Matters and not just broadcasting hot air! We need our New Jersey Media!
Steve Sacco