Actually, it was talker Jeff Wagner, not justice protesters, jumping the shark

[Updated 9:00 p.m.] There is a hilariously unintended consequence to the ingrained cheapness that reflects the intellectual poverty on AM 620 WTMJ talk radio. 

Station management's money-saving/no-imagination practice of re-broadcasting its right-wing talk shows - - even though events have overtaken or flat-out blown up the content - - features weak or uninformed commentary that's turned embarrassingly stale or wrong when it hits the airwaves a second time.

A phenomenon noted here, earlier.

Anyway, there was a wonderful example Saturday evening of how the station's penny-pinching can produce a self-inflicted fact-checking wound as the station aired in its 5:00 - 5:30 p.m. segment a re-broadcast of a Jeff Wagner show from Wednesday  - - about Tuesday's news.

But first - - take note of this news story I downloaded through the national news tab on the 620 WTMJ home page when I got home Saturday night with Wagner's canned talk on my mind:

The families of more than a half-dozen black men and boys who have been killed by police addressed thousands of protesters who marched in Washington, D.C., Saturday, demanding Congress adequately tackle police brutality...

Protesters gathered Saturday in other cities too. Thousands marched up Fifth Avenue in New York City, holding signs that read, "Black Lives Matter" and "Who do you protect?" And hundreds shouted the same messages in Boston, where they also staged "die-ins" and blocked traffic, according to New England Cable News. 

OK: back to the Wagner re-broadcast, which was from his Wednesday show about a Tuesday news story he'd seen and read about the arrest of one person at City Hall who had been protesting the lack of charges in the Milwaukee police shooting of Dontre Hamilton downtown months ago.

Walker said he was tired of seeing "story after story after story" about these and similar protests - - both locally and nationally - - and predicted diminishing interest and  participation in the demonstrations because he believed they had "jumped the shark"

That's a cliche about the moment when something has run its course. It has its roots in an episode of the sitcom "Happy Days," set in fictitious Milwaukee, when Henry Winkler as "The Fonz" water-skied in his iconic leather jacket, jumped over a shark - -  and disillusioned viewers began to desert the show.

Wagner was sure that the protests had jumped the shark and it was time for everyone to move on, projecting his disconnection from and weariness with the story onto protesters who were and are still protesting making the story and a movement newsworthy.

As I said, WTMJ radio was re-telling us this while events as recorded in today's Washington Post suggest that it's Wagner, not the protesters, who've jumped the shark:

Thousands of demonstrators streamed down Pennsylvania Avenue on Saturday, shouting “Black lives matter,” “Hands up, don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe” to call attention to the recent deaths of unarmed African American men at the hands of police...

“The Washington march was one of a wave of demonstrations across the nation. Separate marches were held from San Francisco to New York, including a Millions March and rally near New York University, and a demonstration before the nationally televised basketball game between two top teams, the universities of North Carolina and Kentucky... 

Thousands of protesters crowded New York’s Fifth Avenue on Sunday for the first large-scale, organized protest in the city since a grand jury on Staten Island declined to indict a police officer for the death of Eric Garner.

The crowd reflected the diversity of the city, if not the high-income neighborhood in Manhattan’s West Village. “I’ve never seen something so beautiful,” said Josh Toney, an African-American man in his 20s. “Seeing the Asian community, seeing Union workers, seeing people who probably don’t even speak English.”

And since Wagner often talks about subscribing to and reading closely The Chicago Tribune, he might be further irked to see a big story there Saturday about the national protests and the Chicago iteration, too.

Update: And, oh, damn, there goes the Journal Sentinel Saturday night, too:

The march in Washington coincided with demonstrations across the country, from iconic Fifth Avenue in New York to the streets of San Francisco and the steps of the Boston Statehouse - mostly peaceful protests although about two dozen people were arrested in the Massachusetts capital for disorderly conduct…

Organizers had predicted 5,000 people at the Washington march, but the crowd appeared to far outnumber that. They later said they believed as many as 25,000 had shown up. It was not possible to verify the numbers; Washington police do not release crowd estimates.