I sometimes wonder if Toronto is still the #1 market in Canada. Especially after seeing what passed for the 6 o'clock newscasts in the city on Saturday. 

I like to flip around during the shows on CTV, Global, City and the CBC. What I saw was unbelievable. (And I'm not the only one who felt that way - shortly after they ran, an old colleague of mine called on the phone to ask, "can you believe what CTV just did at 6?")

No I couldn't, so let's start with CFTO's so-called "Toronto's #1 News." Their lead off the top was the cancelling of the King's Plate race because of the weather. Good story, but the top one? The GTA endured more rain in several hours than falls in an entire month, resulting in flooding on various highways and roads, people being trapped in their cars, power outages in Mississauga and even a tornado warning for the outskirts of Toronto (and one that apparently touched down near Cambridge.)

How is a cancelled horse race for the hoi polloi, even an historic one, more important than the effects of that downpour in the entire city? I could not believe it. 

But it got worse - when Mike Walker threw to his piece it started with stock viz of horses taking off from a previous race, and then viewers heard this:

"An event..."
"An event..."
"An event..."

Yes, it repeated the first two seconds three times. Then it happened again. "An event steeped in tradition..." was followed by the same horses out of the gate and the phrase, "An event steeped in tradition," repeated one last time, before the entire thing finally played like it was supposed to. I've worked in TV news for 25 years and I've never seen a pre-recorded report stutter like that. No idea what caused it, but it was very strange. 

Later, they went to the weather, which was handled in a terrible ad lib fashion by anchor Andria Case, who botched the entire thing. (They didn't even run the future-cast radar, the only really useful map.)  I get that it was Saturday, but when you know there are a plethora of weekend weather advisories and several tornado warnings near Toronto, you might want to call in an actual TV forecaster and let them handle it, even if you have to promise them a day off during the week. It was just that urgent. Instead, they left it to an unprepared anchor, who even missed the temperature in Toronto board when it came up. Terrible. 

But it wasn't just them. Global didn't even bother to lead with the weather. Instead, they started their newscast with that leaning building that was threatening to fall over in Kensington Market. Good story, but definitely not more important than the huge storm that rocked the city. What was their producer thinking? 

Still, it was better than what was on offer on City TV. Which was nothing. The cancelled King's Plate was supposed to run until 7 PM, but when it was cancelled before 6, City failed to have a newscast ready, so they showed a rerun of Hudson & Rex in that time slot instead. They should always have something prepared, just in case. They didn't.

Only the CBC led with the chaos from Mother Nature and had an actual honest-to-goodness weather person, Saphia Khambalia from the Weather Network, talking about what happened and what was coming, with a complete forecast.

Definitely an odd night of news. But not, alas, a good one. What an embarrassment for almost all of them.