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Memo to Rhonda LaVelle, news director at WXYZ: This is a metropolis, not Mayberry. Mowed-down trash cans aren't newsworthy, except maybe on a Nextdoor neighborhood chat site.
Yet for some reason, viewers in this Top 15 Designated Market Area saw two minutes of pumped-up coverage Monday night about a "delivery debacle" in Royal Oak.
Two homeowners "were surprised to find two of their garbage cans knocked over, creating a mess," says the anchor's lead-in to Kim Russell's report. "When they looked at surveillance video to find the culprit, they were shocked."
So were we, actually -- by this coverage decision, not by the "news" that an Amazon contract delivery driver's rental van sideswiped suburbanites' curbside bins. Oh, the humanity!
"When I checked the Ring app [video doorbell], I was flabbergasted," victim Nadia Ahmad tells Russell.
We share that flabbergasted feeling, Nadia, and not just because Russell's account of the dastardly deed includes a dramatic restaging in which the station's van nearly smashes into the garbage containers.
When news director LaVelle came to WXYZ from Houston in June 2016, according to her station biography, the Central Michigan University graduate spoke of supervising "a team with a rich reputation of being a news leader in Detroit."
We'll just leave it there, as they say on TV.
