I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t watch a lot of television news. In fact, if my wife didn’t turn the news on every night I might never see the news at all. But there’s one thing about our local news anchors that is really starting to irritate me. It’s not the fact that they seem to stumble over their words almost every night. It’s not the number of “soft” news stories they run, or the number of stories that are thinly veiled commercials. It’s the informality of their speech.

On one of our local stations, the news anchors seem to be bending over backwards to seem “cool”. For example, if they’re talking about money, it’s pretty common for them to say something like “For a couple of bucks, you can pick one of these up yourself.” or “The thieves got away with cash and merchandise with an estimated value of three thousand bucks.” If they’re discussing jewelry or some other kind of valuable item, they might comment after the story that “I sure could use some bling like that.” Maybe I’m the only one who finds these colloquialisms irritating and unprofessional.

How about you? Are your local news anchors too informal to suit you? Are they too formal? Is there a “happy medium”?