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Edited on Thu May-10-07 10:28 PM by ForrestGump
There's a massive fire here in Vegas (an under-construction condo complex) and I watched the proceedings on the local TV news 'cos I got curious about the huge plumes of black smoke I could see from my balcony. As with a recent fire, that was a brush fire further away, I seemed to know about it before the local Eyewitness On The Spot Investigative Team did and a bit of time spent watching their coverage confirmed that not only am I better at finding news than these alleged news professionals but that I am way better at reporting it. In fact, Billy Bob Thornton's character in Slingblade could have run narrative circles around these media clowns, mmmm.
The anchors back at the studio revealed themselves as utterly incapable of stringing together coherent thought or coherent sentences without a Teleprompter, a fact that was hardly a surprise because my impression of most such pseudo-journalists in the US is that they're as far removed from real journalism and reporting as George W. Bush is from being the real President. Airheads. Airheads who not only do not think well on their feet but who reveal that the very concept of logical thought may be a foreign one. I can't give examples, because the entire 'reportage' was one long, running example. The female wanchor was particularly vapid and clueless, but her male peers were not exactly operating at Kronkite levels of newsmanship. I finally succumbed and yelled at the TV when they were, all three of them, trying to figure out in which direction the smoke was blowing -- this hard on the heels of one of the many, oddly superfluous, weather updates on the weather in that particular block of Las Vegas (it was 92°F, 7% humidity, and 11-mph winds throughout, but for some reason the woman reporting the weather felt the need to show us maps of the entire Western US and Northeast Pacific Ocean as it affected this fire in our humble village.
Oh...she kept saying that the wind was from the southwest. It was the entire time. So if the wind was from the southwest, in what direction would the smoke blow? Hmmmmmm.
It took them forever to discover the name of the complex, or its exact location, and apparently it takes 20 minutes for a news helicopter to cover the vast mile or two from the airport to the scene of the fire. I did, however, discover startling pearls of wisdom such that one of the anchors walks his dog in that area, and endured an ongoing debate about the names of the three schools in the vicinity.
The classic lines, though, belonged to their dude in the helicopter (who was receiving direction from the main anchor on where to point the camera..."no, the other South"). He actually was the most on the ball and coherent of them all -- though his speculation that a fender bender two large blocks away, that he zoomed his camera in on, was the result of the fire was a little tenuous -- but he uttered two excellent malapropismic gems, one of them repeatedly.
The first of his classic lines was related to a fire engine that was arcing water across a nearby house to both wet the house and the fire beyond, as part of the containment strategy. He said that the fire department was "sending an arclight over the house." Sure, an arclight B-52 carpet bombing strike would put out the fires, and render meaningless the debate over the names of neighborhood schools, but it seemed a little extreme even for Vegas.
The second -- and surely they have radios and things through which someone could have corrected this character without it being on-air -- was that one of the roads blocked off nearby was Pollock (you know, like the painter) but this news god pronounced it, every time, as "Polack," and with a definite break between the two syllables. I couldn't believe it the first time I heard it. By about the fifth time -- his earnest delivery was the key -- I couldn't stop laughing. I felt like calling up the station to, claiming Polish heritage, express my outrage over this slur. I should have...I missed a golden opportunity.
I just hope they never let him report on a certain African country. And, no, I don't mean Chad.
EDITED to add the wind direction...I didn't forget Poland, but, like the news people, I forgot the wind direction
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