Funny thing about the news here

I've been watching the news all the time when I'm home, and I do think I'm getting my ear for the accent finally. But I just noticed something really funny.

One thing they do here that they don't do in the US is linger, in particular when they're live on-site for something. They'll spend two, three minutes showing a demonstration or an accident scene or the crowd at the beach. And frequently when they're on-site like that, there will be really long lulls in the commentary, which would never happen on US news. But what's really interesting is that they sometimes play music. Right now, the station I'm watching has been showing a freeway accident scene for at least three minutes. And in the background, they're playing this totally menacing music, like something you would here in the background during a Terminator movie, when Sara Conner is trying to slip away but the terminator is stalking her. I just flipped to this channel and it was showing this freeway accident scene with this really threatening music playing with no voice-over, and it was pretty hilarious.

I guess this is just another way to sensationalize the news. And guess what, it works pretty well. This music certainly puts me on edge a little.

I'm not sure how common this is -- it may be a particular trick of this station. But it's kind of hilarious -- it's really end-of-the-world type of music, so very, very not-subtle.

Update: OK, this is actually a little extraordinary. It is at least ten minutes later, maybe 15, and channel 5 here has still not left the scene of this accident, and is still playing the menacing music. One thing I didn't mention earlier is that they do have some amazing video of this accident, pretty much the whole thing on rough grainy tape. And best of all it includes a very fuzzy person getting out of his or her car and vaulting over the concrete median barrier literally a fraction of a second before his or her car gets creamed. It was so close that at first I thought they were showing the person get hit by the car, but the person really just escaped -- I'd say the car missed this person by no more than 5 feet. I don't know where they got this video -- it's really grainy, like it came from some kind of government traffic monitoring video -- but it's pretty amazing, and I guess this is why they played it over and over for 10 minutes. (They actually just left the accident scene, about half-way through this paragraph.) Still, the lucky video doesn't account for the terminator-style end-of-the-world music. That's pure sensationalism, and pretty damn good sensationalism at that.