Location reporters apparently don’t like just standing in front of the camera. They’d rather be doing something like riding a train or walking in the rain. ‘Anything to get attention,’ says Wolf Blitzer. So they showed this clip…
A reporter is paddling in a canoe to show how bad the flooding is where she is. As she’s reporting, two guys walk between her and the camera. The water is only about four inches deep! Wolf Blitzer: ‘Talk about shallow reporting!’
Of course, this bit was shown just before The Today Show’s segment criticising the President for staging events.
Isn’t NBC the network that showed the propensity for a certain SUV to explode on impace by putting remotely-ignited model rocket engines in the fuel filler tube a few years ago? :dubious:
IIRC, it had to do with full-sized Chevy pickups, whose gas tanks were positioned so as to make them vulnerable to side impacts (although not vulnerable enough, apparently, for the gasoline to ignite when Dateline NBC tried repeatedly to do so in simulated crashes without the model rocket engines to help the process along).
Anyway, I’m a bit unclear on the actual subject of this thread, so I’ll express my opinions based on what I think it’s about. Do television reporters fake stuff up from time to time? Yup. Has the White House faked stuff up for PR purposes? Yup, and apparently rather more often than just from time to time. Is it hypocritical if the media criticize the administration for faking stuff up if they’ve done so themselves? Yup, but that doesn’t make the fakery any less significant.
Not that they have exclusive domain over that, but yes, they do. This stuff really shouldn’t be tolerated. The fakery in the OP is something you might find on the Daily Show.
I’ve been hearing alot about the recent ABC Primetime report about the ‘Dangers of Reactors on college campus’ and their lack of security’. Another really trumped up set of charges.
More of a funny MPSIMS thing. The image of this woman paddling her canoe, and then having a couple of guys walking by in inches-deep water was amusing to me.
Oh, yeah, it was hilarious, but it’s also disgusting that a woman purportedly conveying the news did so bu purposefully misrepresenting the exact story she was reporting!
Well, it was flooded. Perhaps the flooding was much deeper in other areas. But filmmakers (and I say this while currently involved in making a film) will often get shots that look real but are easier to get than getting footage from the locations where the situation is as they want to depict. Had the two guys not walked in front of the camera, the shot would have been convincing. So it may just be a case of getting a shot where it was easy while the situation was real.
I saw another clip on The Daily Show. This time the woman claims she is in deep water ‘about four feet deep’, and pokes her paddle into it to demonstrate. The paddle can be seen to strike the bottom, indicating the water there was only a foot deep. And in the background a man can be seen standing in water only a couple/few inches deep. The funny thing (beside the guy in the B.G.) was that the current carried the woman out of frame.
They actually aired the clip that inspired this thread last night. The correspondent said “they” wouldn’t let her go into the deeper water for safety reasons. Maybe so, but you’ve got to ditch the freaking canoe if you don’t need it. If those guys hadn’t walked by and embarrassed her, you know she wouldn’t have volunteered the truth that she was only in about six inches of water.
