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You see it all the time. As a news program you’re watching is about to go to commercial break, the anchor reads some sort of news tease to get viewers to stick with them through the break. The tease is often a sort of riddle, where they’ll reveal the answer after the commercials.

However, I’m noticing a recurring problem where the news tease is giving everything away.

Just in one morning on MSNBC, here are two teases that failed to be…teases:

• Anchor asks: “Why are people stopping traffic in London? At the bottom of the screen, there’s a graphic that reads “Abby Rd Anniversary”
• Anchor asks: “What this mother of six is selling on e-bay that’s causing some to call her a bad mother.”  The on-screen graphic  reads “e-bay auction to name baby”

Is this just a miscommunication between the news writers and the person in charge of writing the graphics?  Why would they try to lure viewers with a question, when they’re just going to give you its answer at the same time?

I don’t believe this is a problem unique to MSNBC, I expect other cable news channels (and probably your local news stations) are also guilty of this marketing offense.