This is a perfect artcle, has to sum up what most of us really think..
TV reporters lack sense to come in out of the rain
September 22, 2003
BY RICHARD ROEPER SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
We can see the seas, the angry seas at this point!" -- CNN reporter, covering Hurricane Isabel last Thursday afternoon. "Ow! Ow ow ow. Got hit with a piece of wood." -- CNN cameraman, also covering Hurricane Isabel last Thursday.
By far, the most entertaining reality TV series of 2003 is "Isabel Strikes," aka "Isabel Roars Ashore," which played on the networks and the cable news channels last week.
I laughed so hard, I almost ruptured my spleen.
No disrespect to the families who lost a loved one or saw their homes destroyed, or the business owners who took a serious hit from Hurricane Isabel last week. I'm talking about the TV coverage of Isabel -- all those slicker-clad correspondents who were embedded in the storm so they could shout into microphones that, yep, hurricanes are very wet and also quite windy.
This type of coverage always reminds me of that scene in "Broadcast News" where the reporter played by Lois Chiles has been exiled to a frigid outpost. You watch a correspondent who is cupping a ruler in his mittens as he measures a 4-foot snowdrift, or wearing waders as she stands thigh-deep in muddy floodwaters on Main Street in some town in Iowa, and you wonder what they did to get on the news director's bad side. It's a long way in the wrong direction from the anchor desk to the overpass of an expressway as a tornado closes in.
Live from Kill Devil Hills
Occasionally, though, you'll see a news star covering a big storm just so he can earn another tough-guy merit badge. Who can forget Dan Rather strapped to that lamppost while covering Hurricane Opal in 1995? And how many viewers were secretly rooting for Opal in that battle? (It was Rather who pretty much invented on-site storm coverage in 1961 when he plunked himself in the middle of Hurricane Carla in Texas. It was one small step for Dan, one giant leap for the gratuitous live shot.)
Maybe the biggest name covering Hurricane Isabel was MSNBC's Brian Williams, who is slated to replace Tom Brokaw as NBC's top news anchor. The always-game Williams and the Weather Channel's Mike Seidel were filing a live report from Virginia Beach, Va., when they were literally blown out of the shot.
"I can just hear the folks at home saying, 'Yeah, they got what they deserved,' " said Williams as he struggled to keep his footing.
Yep, we did say that--after we caught our breath from laughing.
Also providing buckets of laughter was CNN's Kathleen Koch, who was hanging on to a railing in a parking lot in Virginia Beach as she pointed to a couple of "curiosity-seekers" parked in their SUVs and said, "As you can see, this is very dangerous. I wouldn't recommend anyone coming out here at this point."
Except for reporters, I guess. At least the gawkers were smart enough to stay in their cars.
You report, we deride
"She's here, she's big, and she's making herself at home!" said NBC's Carl Quintanilla, reporting from Beaufort, N.C. He was driving around in what he kept calling the "Bloom Mobile," so named after the late David Bloom, who had used the vehicle, which is capable of transmitting live pictures as it rolls, while covering the war in Iraq. Of course, this only served to remind us that covering a war from the front lines is a brave and valuable service, whereas covering a storm from the front lines is mostly stupid and pointless. (Especially when a huge chunk of viewers in the storm area are without power and can't watch TV anyway, as was the case in North Carolina and Virginia last week.)
At one point, a Fox News correspondent said, "We're seeing a couple of dummies like this guy come out here and try to prove his mettle." Of course, the Fox guy was standing RIGHT NEXT to the supposed dummy at the time.
Reporting from places such as Kill Devil Hills and Virginia Beach and Topsail Beach, reporters kept saying things like, "It's getting dangerous now," and, "All I have to do is look up and see a piece of roof flying away from me, [but] the good news is it's flying away from me!" and, "Frankly, it's starting to hurt coming out here, so let me be less foolhardy here and get back inside," and, "This is not an act, I'm fighting to stay up!" (These are all real quotes, caught by my TiVo or reported by TV critics at the Orlando Sentinel, New York Daily News and other newspapers.)
As Fox News' Shepard Smith said, "We are the dumbest people on earth, aren't we?"
No, but sometimes you act as if you think the viewers are the dumbest people on earth. Apparently news executives and reporters haven't figured this out yet, so let me spell it out: Nobody is impressed by correspondents who stock up at North Face and then stand in the middle of a storm and shout at us while the camera lens gets covered with raindrops and the winds whip so hard the audio breaks up. We don't think, "Wow, gutsy reporting!" We think: "Wow, what a stupid thing to do!"
TV reporters lack sense to come in out of the rain
September 22, 2003
BY RICHARD ROEPER SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
We can see the seas, the angry seas at this point!" -- CNN reporter, covering Hurricane Isabel last Thursday afternoon. "Ow! Ow ow ow. Got hit with a piece of wood." -- CNN cameraman, also covering Hurricane Isabel last Thursday.
By far, the most entertaining reality TV series of 2003 is "Isabel Strikes," aka "Isabel Roars Ashore," which played on the networks and the cable news channels last week.
I laughed so hard, I almost ruptured my spleen.
No disrespect to the families who lost a loved one or saw their homes destroyed, or the business owners who took a serious hit from Hurricane Isabel last week. I'm talking about the TV coverage of Isabel -- all those slicker-clad correspondents who were embedded in the storm so they could shout into microphones that, yep, hurricanes are very wet and also quite windy.
This type of coverage always reminds me of that scene in "Broadcast News" where the reporter played by Lois Chiles has been exiled to a frigid outpost. You watch a correspondent who is cupping a ruler in his mittens as he measures a 4-foot snowdrift, or wearing waders as she stands thigh-deep in muddy floodwaters on Main Street in some town in Iowa, and you wonder what they did to get on the news director's bad side. It's a long way in the wrong direction from the anchor desk to the overpass of an expressway as a tornado closes in.
Live from Kill Devil Hills
Occasionally, though, you'll see a news star covering a big storm just so he can earn another tough-guy merit badge. Who can forget Dan Rather strapped to that lamppost while covering Hurricane Opal in 1995? And how many viewers were secretly rooting for Opal in that battle? (It was Rather who pretty much invented on-site storm coverage in 1961 when he plunked himself in the middle of Hurricane Carla in Texas. It was one small step for Dan, one giant leap for the gratuitous live shot.)
Maybe the biggest name covering Hurricane Isabel was MSNBC's Brian Williams, who is slated to replace Tom Brokaw as NBC's top news anchor. The always-game Williams and the Weather Channel's Mike Seidel were filing a live report from Virginia Beach, Va., when they were literally blown out of the shot.
"I can just hear the folks at home saying, 'Yeah, they got what they deserved,' " said Williams as he struggled to keep his footing.
Yep, we did say that--after we caught our breath from laughing.
Also providing buckets of laughter was CNN's Kathleen Koch, who was hanging on to a railing in a parking lot in Virginia Beach as she pointed to a couple of "curiosity-seekers" parked in their SUVs and said, "As you can see, this is very dangerous. I wouldn't recommend anyone coming out here at this point."
Except for reporters, I guess. At least the gawkers were smart enough to stay in their cars.
You report, we deride
"She's here, she's big, and she's making herself at home!" said NBC's Carl Quintanilla, reporting from Beaufort, N.C. He was driving around in what he kept calling the "Bloom Mobile," so named after the late David Bloom, who had used the vehicle, which is capable of transmitting live pictures as it rolls, while covering the war in Iraq. Of course, this only served to remind us that covering a war from the front lines is a brave and valuable service, whereas covering a storm from the front lines is mostly stupid and pointless. (Especially when a huge chunk of viewers in the storm area are without power and can't watch TV anyway, as was the case in North Carolina and Virginia last week.)
At one point, a Fox News correspondent said, "We're seeing a couple of dummies like this guy come out here and try to prove his mettle." Of course, the Fox guy was standing RIGHT NEXT to the supposed dummy at the time.
Reporting from places such as Kill Devil Hills and Virginia Beach and Topsail Beach, reporters kept saying things like, "It's getting dangerous now," and, "All I have to do is look up and see a piece of roof flying away from me, [but] the good news is it's flying away from me!" and, "Frankly, it's starting to hurt coming out here, so let me be less foolhardy here and get back inside," and, "This is not an act, I'm fighting to stay up!" (These are all real quotes, caught by my TiVo or reported by TV critics at the Orlando Sentinel, New York Daily News and other newspapers.)
As Fox News' Shepard Smith said, "We are the dumbest people on earth, aren't we?"
No, but sometimes you act as if you think the viewers are the dumbest people on earth. Apparently news executives and reporters haven't figured this out yet, so let me spell it out: Nobody is impressed by correspondents who stock up at North Face and then stand in the middle of a storm and shout at us while the camera lens gets covered with raindrops and the winds whip so hard the audio breaks up. We don't think, "Wow, gutsy reporting!" We think: "Wow, what a stupid thing to do!"
