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NCAA Basketball vs Hostage Situation Poll Results: ‘News Always Trumps Sports’

Atlanta CBS-affiliate WGCL had a tough call to make last Friday night as local police were locked in a hostage situation with an accused cop killer while CBS was in the midst of broadcasting the NCAA basketball tournament.

Steve Schwaid, VP of digital content for all Meredith stations and head of news at WGCL, called the situation a “news director’s nightmare.”

So earlier this week we put the decision to you, and here are the results:

“Do what WGCL did; double box the news and game”: 79.17%
“Stayed with the basketball game, leave the hostage situation to the other stations”: 16.67%
“Other”: 4.17%

Most of the people that chose “Other,” wrote that WGCL should have dumped basketball altogether. One voter offered an interesting resolution, suggesting that WGCL bump the news coverage to a digital subchannel and run a crawl over the basketball game alerting viewers.

“News always trumps sports,” wrote one commenter conclusively.

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