New Scaratings

OK, let's say you're in a relationship, and while it is imperfect, you feel pretty good about where you're at until the other person becomes a Jehovah's Witness. In my case, Instant Dealbreaker.

Scorchers in Northfield, Ohio has been very good to me and other NTN players. At considerable expense, they went from a 10-box site to a 20-box site to accommodate both THE and Buzztime players, and even timed their setup to accommodate QB1 players on Channel C last NFL season.

While the play is not as competitive as some Greater Cleveland sites (see Damon's in Twinsburg and West Park Station), some strong players stop in sporadically. It's the closest by far to home of any Buzztime location, and I can't say enough about the courtesy and coolness of the staff, particularly Holly and Katie who have my draft and my Playmaker ready for me on Wednesday nights.

The drinks are also about the cheapest in the region.

So, why the impending breakup?

Two words. Fox News.

On one of the five HD monitors above the main bar, previously reserved for CNN or sports programming, management has elected to air Fox News. Fox News, while claiming many devotees, is also extremely polarizing.

Politics aside, it does not make good business sense to air something that offends at least as many people as it attracts. This is even more true in a market like Greater Cleveland, which trends overwhelmingly blue on the electoral maps.

If this persists, I'll simply restrict my play to Six at West Park Station and occasional Tuesday trips to Damon's to meet with the Fellowship over Showdown.

Holly and Katie, I'll miss you. It's not your fault, but you know I can't go on like this.

Management? You have a great staff and run a great bar, but yes, Fox News is a dealbreaker. Keep airing it, and watch "BIGDOG" disappear from your boards.

We have that problem at our BWW as well.

Fox News? At B-Dubs?

Wait Do you mean UFC and not Fox News?

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Mitch (MTCHWF/WLFFLY)

Co-Home Bar: Buffalo Wild Wings Edwardsville, IL and Time Out in St Louis, MO

except for sporting events,the sound for the tv's are off. i do agree with your views on fox news so even if that is on at least the volume is down.

I've heard a lot of reasons for changing sites but Fox News is a new one to me.

I remember when TWLV X (HouseBowlerz) left his site because of American Idol.

Any news station is bad in a sports bar. Besides one is just as bad as another. Don't tell me CNN is better than MSNBC or Fox. No one should be getting their news from any of these channels.

Fox, CNN, CBC, whatever, they shouldn't be on in a bar with sound unless there is a world altering event in progress. like 9/11

If the sound level was high and was throughout the location, I would divorce the site too. If it was localized I would change where I sit.

If I did leave, just to make sure they understand, I would also confirm to them in writing (email, letter whatever) the reasons why and the amount of business they are losing

Note: I have the luxury of 10 sites to choose from within 10 miles. If I had a limited number of sites to pick from, I would just grin and bear it

This is actually the silliest reason I have ever heard for someone leaving their site. I also have to say MSNBC, CNN, are just as crappy as any news station.

I have left sites because of what they put on the TVs before, but they were Colorado Avalanche induced. Some bars had 30-40 TVs that had to have every stupid TV on the game, I left and never went back.

Over ONE TV, you have got to be kidding me.

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Buzztime is a company full of dumbshits.

As long as the sound is off, I've found that simply averting my eyes from crap on the screen should be sufficient. My aversion to all things Fox News is fairly well known, but as long as it wasn't pushed into my eardrums, I could live with it showing on one screen while I paid attention to another screen. Ridiculing it and the people who watch it can be fun between questions too.

Come on BIGDOG that is the stupidest reason to leave a place, as long as there is no sound on.

Don't look at the screen, there is no reason to take this out on the servers who will lose out on your tips.

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BUD - Stained Glass Pub Silver Spring MD
OC BUD - Grotto Pizza DE near Ocean City MD

LET'S GO ....Caps and Os!!!!

I bought a miniature tv remote off ebay thats on my keychain. It works on most cable tv setups, but not on directv obviously. with only 5 tvs, you couldn't be too inconspicuous but it might be worth a try.

$1.95 on ebay.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Mini-Universal-AV-TV-Remote-Controller-Keychain-Keyring_W0QQitemZ250551321739QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item3a5605c48b

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https://www.buzztime.com/players/profile/rt/8915269

My understanding is that policy at our BWW is that the only news station allowed is Fox. Yes, the volume is down. But some of my teammates are disgusted enough with it that they want to move.

I'll miss them. I don't like Fox, but it is easy to ignore.

Sounds very silly to me. Leaving a decent home site because of what kind of news broadcast they prefer to air? I dont think any bars should be broadcasting a news show continuously, but if they choose to they can air whatever they like. If you dont approve you have a decision to make, and it sounds like you are making it, but does seem a little over the top. I agree with Lewser.

The people blithely pretending "all channels are as bad" and that there is nothing wrong with Fox out of the range of choices are either misinfomred or wilfully lying. The rates of people with incorrect perceptions has been studied and segmented by principal news source on more than one occasion and Fox has always come out worst.

For instance the percentage of viewers who got at least one of followiing three questions wrong was as follows

Fox 80%
CNN 55%
PBS 23%

Questions being "Were Al-Qaeda and Iraq working together before the US invasion" "Have WMD been found in Iraq" and "Did world opinion favor the invasion" (correct answers are all "no").

Average percentage of viewers having each incorrect perception were

Fox 45%
CNN 31%
PBS 11%

In each case Fox viewers were half again as likely to be misinfomed as CNN viewers and several times more likely than PBS viewers.


Full study here

http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/ ... 03_rpt.pdf

Google for others. Easy to find. Fox ALWAYS loses.

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Please forgive any strange typos or grammar errors. I am typically using voice recognition software to enter text, and sometimes editing works differently from how I expect.

Not sure I understand. Are you saying that because the VIEWERS of Fox get more wrong answers than CNN, you can infer the basis for the difference is the quality of the reporting ?

Wouldn't you need a control group (I didn't read the whole study) ?


I have no dog in this hunt, don't watch any of them.

Doesnt sound like a very realistic study to me, based on those questions anyway. Really...............you want form an opinion an the veracity of a news organization based on those particular questions? Puh - leeze. If youre going to do a study based on answering questions like that you would have to ask significantly better (and more) questions that that sample size! You really think that is a good study?? My God, what are we coming to?

Although I personally would not leave a place for the simple reason of its showing Fox News, I'm not sure that the chastisement that some have had for BigDog is warranted given things like Ranger reported. It seems that any establishment that wants to draw the widest possible clientele would want to avoid forcing any politically polarizing programming on its customers--this would go as much for Fox News as it would for MSNBC. Whether or not some people think it is a "valid" reason to leave is immaterial--if it is a decision that drives more business away than it brings in, it is a bad decision from a business standpoint. Although I am sure--based on what they've said here--that BigDog's critics here would have no problem with their home location devoting a TV to non-stop Obama commercials if the sound was down, I can think of some people for whom that would be a deal-breaker.

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Anon
"He may seem like Mr. Rogers but a dark spirit lies beneath."

You don't really need a control group when you have multiple categories for primary news source. The point of the survey is not to see "is news effective in forming opinion" but to see "the viewers of which news source are better infomed than the viewers of another". The difference may be that Fox viewers are looking for confirmation bias rather than information (and Fox may do an excellent job of supplying it), but it still means they are less well informed than PBS viewers.

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Please forgive any strange typos or grammar errors. I am typically using voice recognition software to enter text, and sometimes editing works differently from how I expect.

I don't think you are using the correct meaning of sample size here. You could get a valid inference from ONE question where one set of viewers are misinformed more than another. The sample size is how many viewers were asked, and that's significantly more than three. By this reasoning you could never get a valid survey on "would you vote for Obama or Palin" because you're only asking one question! This is a perfectly valid study for showing which viewers were more misnformed on a very important and high profile news story. Fox News viewers were not well informed on the Iraq war, and the options are that either Fox misinformed them on the topic or Fox News viewers are all idiots who cannot absorb information.

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Please forgive any strange typos or grammar errors. I am typically using voice recognition software to enter text, and sometimes editing works differently from how I expect.

My point is that you are operating under the assumption that we have been fed "the true story" on the WMD question, and the Al-Queda/Iraq questions (among many, many others). Just because the "popular" news media and so forth have "proven" all these things as "facts" just goes to show who is so-called "informed" and uninformed". There is a fairly large (and ever-growing) segment of the population that recognizes that there are so many behind the scenes things occuring that we never find out anything about more than what they want us to, that renders the mainstream news services as poor sources at best as to what is really going on. Do I really care or base any of my world-wide views on some survey that purports PBS viewers to be better informed than FOX viewers? Methinks you have a rather naive view of what is really happening in the world today

I haven't looked at the study but it might help too know what percentage of PBS viewers watch at a B-dub with the sound off. (One of my "home" bars, Brigadoon, has Fox News on all the time but usually has the sound turned down out of respect for the "Wheel of Fortune" players so it doesn't bother me much.)

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"We don't do comprehensive well." Lamar Alexander.

The evil mainstream news media didn't invent the story that the former administration's point man on WMD went in front of Congress, oh, about a year after the invasion, and admitted that his task force searched Iraq far and wide, and found nothing. The evil mainstream news media didn't tie George W. Bush to the rack and force him to say, 'We've had no evidence Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th."

Your own side declares these things to be so and you refuse to accept them? Or are you so catastrophically misinformed you were unaware of all this?

Distrust of all media, as you mostly imply there, should lead to agnosticism, though, not conspiracy theories or historical revisionism.

Bobby didn't leave...Bobby got booted.

FWIW--He's now allowed back there (Damon's).

Update on Scorchers in Northfield, Ohio:

Two doors down in the same plaza is a small, independent grocery named Peppers, whose deli meats are equal or superior to the dominant grocery chain in Greater Cleveland. I bought a pound of Bavarian ham there and an apple pie, before I went to the home site I threatened to divorce.

Lo and behold, there was no Fox News on their monitors, so I stopped in, had a few beers after a ten-day absence, and left a 40% tip. That was on Monday. I told Holly it was great to be able to come in again, and she replied "Great to see you."

We're looking at the Fox News deal like we would look at the bad pierogi on the plate during the picnic. Everyone knows, but no one says.

On Fat Tuesday, I stopped in once again, and once again, no Fox News, but instead, Olympics on MSNBC this time (Women's hockey, 13-0 over Russia). After that annihilation, their DirecTV system was on MSNBC with its usual nightly lineup, and I said "I have to be fair and balanced on this. Just put more Olympics on!"

Not long after, the beautiful Jennifer, who was the first woman who served me there before she went on to better things, walked up to me, gave me a hug, and said "You did what you had to do, and you proved your point." (By walking out over Fox News).

Jen knew. Management got the hint. Ten days of no NTN play in a row.

I'm thinking of giving up alcohol altogether for Lent, but respecting the way Scorchers responded to the problem, I may modify that sacrifice to only drink there.

See a problem? Solve it. Make a mistake? Correct it. Props to Scorchers.

And if any BT/NTN travelers find themselves halfway between Cleveland and Akron, Ohio, BigDog can be found at Scorchers (provided they do not reinstate Faux News).