Reporter Asks the Right Question

There's times when everyone wants to ask this question. A teacher, a cop, a short order cook, hell, even the president of the United States. Sooner or later, we're asked to do something so trivial and moronic that we just have to ask this question (FYI, the Not Safe For Work lamp is lit):


Angry News Reporter Just Wants to Know What the !#%^ Deal Is - Watch More Funny Videos

Shopping Cart Fail

I have absolutely no idea what the guys in this clip were trying to accomplish. But I'm sure glad they tried it.

Mike Brophy - Hockey "Insider"

I'm not sure if there's anyone as stupid as a Toronto sportscaster. I've tried hard to think of somebody and I've come up with squat.

Granted, I'm a Detroit Red Wing fan, so I'm biased. Then again, I'm partial to the Blue Jays, so I should be on board the Toronto sportscaster bandwagon. But I'm not. I've lived in too many places and listened to too much radio. Final result: knowledge that every sportcaster in Toronto is a wannabe twit. Bad analysis, idiotic theories, you name it.

Case in point: I was listening to the Hockey Central show on the Sportsnet channel. There's Mike Brophy, the hockey "insider," asking Blues coach Andy Murray how devastating Detroit's third overtime period loss must have been for the team. Can they recover? It's just a killer, isn't it? Devastating, right?

Bonehead.

Let us hearken back to the dark, ancient days of...2008. Less than 11 months ago, Detroit played a game against the Pittsburgh Penguins that went into triple overtime. It was the Stanley Cup finals. Detroit lost.

The loss was so devastating that the Red Wings went on to win the Stanley Cup a couple of days later.

I'm not saying Detroit will win another Cup this year. What makes me laugh is a hockey "insider" who can't remember what he had for dinner last night.

Klein on Steyn

I was reading Steyn's piece on Pakistan, and I saw the heavy duty Intellectual Alert that Joe Klein spewed forth because of it:

Mark Steyn, the British conservative who seems to play at thinking rather than going through the actual work of thought, is all upset about the deteriorating situation in Pakistan. Well, yeah. Pakistan, neglected for eight years by a mortally hoodwinked Bush Administration, is a mess.

Ah, yes. Pakistan's troubles are all George W. Bush's fault.

Is there anything you can't blame on Bush? Opinion pieces in today's (but not tomorrow's; they're going bankrupt) high brow journals are a cut-and-paste affair. First sentence: state a problem. Second sentence: write the words "after eight years of" and continue.

Lefties are a funny breed. I think Twain said that southerners regarded the Civil War as the new B.C./A.D. For freaky self-descibed "intellectuals" (the kind of people that ruin a party just by showing up and opening their mouths), the new B.C./A.D. is the Bush Administration.

Before Bush, everything was sunlight, roses, an ask-not JFK speech, and the odd stained dress. Those were the halcyon days of tightly knit ozone layers and peace in our time. After Bush, life is just hell. If it hadn't been for him, Pakistan would be a vacation spot on par with Maui. Alas, the dumb Texan was elected president of the United States and suddenly Pakistan went in the tank.

Vis-a-vis the Pakistan deal, I can think of no better explanation than the one put forward by those venerable hard-thinkers at The Onion. No word on what Joe Klein thinks of it. Then again, maybe he couldn't draw overtime for the chore of watching a video and thinking it over (I'm still giggling over this line: "...the actual work of thought." Does this butthead really answer the phone, tell people he's working, then hang up and...think?)


Volatile India-Pakistan Standoff Enters 11,680th Day

"You Could Smell Him."

Let's see...Breaking into a car that has a uniformed police officer inside. Soiling yourself. Ratting out a buddy.

Not exactly a tale of glory this genius will want to tell around the campfire later in life:

Deseret News: The boy dashed into a friend's house, where a party was going on, police said. Officers were let into the house where they found him — and discovered that he had soiled himself, Child said.

"You could smell him," Taylor said. "He told us, 'Yeah, I crapped my pants.' "

Police said the teen implicated a friend whom Taylor saw trying to break into cars across the street from his home.

"He gave up his friend," Child said, pointing to another 16-year-old who was also arrested in the burglary investigation.

NBC's Bonehead Editors

The amount of stock footage we see on a daily basis would probably boggle your mind.

I've edited tons of video, and in a pinch, I sometime have to reach for the stock footage. Let's say a guy is talking about an auto accident, or an emergency room, but I need footage to cover. No problem. I reach for the stock DVDs, flip to the medical chapter, and select one of three dozen clips showing an ambulance on the move, or a gurney being rushed through the hospital doors, or a paramedic taking someone's pulse.

When you watch Iraq war stories on the evening news, I can virtually guarantee that you're seeing a lot of stock. When a reporter talks about how many soldiers have died in the last week, the footage you see over top of her voice was almost assuredly not taped in the past couple of days. It's an impossibility. The reporter probably never sees with her own eyes half of the images that you see on your television. It's old footage, gathered together, labeled, and put on the shelf for another day. And they never tell you that.

This is especially true of live broadcasts from the field. While the reporter is talking, all kinds of images are placed before you. If she's talking about soldiers, you'll see soldiers, and if she's talking about civilian deaths, you'll see crying children. When was the footage shot? Good question. Maybe last week, or maybe last year. If the producers are feeling a bit guilty, and the footage is very old, you'll see "file" written in the corner of the screen.

In a nutshell, this is why editors don't trust the evening news. They know that a certain amount of grey obscures every news story that has stock footage in it. The stock footage, in fact, is probably the most important factor in determining how an audience will react to a news piece. Trouble is, there's no way of knowing when the footage was captured, or even where it was shot, unless they tell you.

Stock footage allows you to add some visual aids to what's being said. It adds impact. Unfortunately, it also gives you the chance to lie, or be exposed as an idiot.

Who Knew?
Take this recent news piece from NBC, about a girl marching across the North Pole. Of course she's doing it for global warming, and NBC's peacock logo in the corner of the screen is green to prove it. The stock footage in the piece shows ice collapsing into the sea. One problem: I've been to Alaska, and I know glacial ice when I see it. I've filmed it more than a few times. Glaciers have been "calving" for eternity, pushing ice into the sea, where it crashes and bubbles with great dramatic effect. It was obvious that the editor was using blue glacial ice for coverage. But in this NBC news piece, no mention is made of glaciers and, added to the global warming sound bite, we're led to believe that this is ice is falling off the North Pole because...?

Problem two: the news piece is about a girl crossing the North Pole. So why in hell are there two shots of penguins standing around on ice floes? The story shouldn't have been about global warming, it should have been about this girl's miraculous discovery that penguins have migrated thousands of miles north, and NBC was on the scene to record it.

The editor of this piece needs to have his head examined. If you're going to use stock footage to make a point, at least make sure it's from the right end of the earth. Moron.

Coming in From the Cold

Well, what do you know, it's snowing again.

The next idiot that says, "Yeah, but I'd miss the change of seasons," when I say, "Hawaii would be better," is going down. Anyone that says, "Well, there's been worse winters in the past few years," is going to join him.

Like I care what it's been like the past few years. I'm freezing now, bonehead.