Years ago on Montgomery, AL WSFA (NBC affiliate), a line that made me feel bad for laughing. Phrasing approximate but the point accurate.
cut to film footage of paramedics saying “We were too late to save her” and firemen saying “We were able to stop the fire from spreading to neighbor’s homes but the house is a total loss” and neighbors saying “She was such a good woman why did this have to happen”, then return to newscaster who says (and you could damned near hear everybody in the viewing area spew Coke at the same time)
Another from Montgomery- requires that you know there’s a big flea market in the countryside above Montgomery in a community called Santuck (used to be called Sand Tuck and some still pronounce it that way). On first weekends in summer it’s especially a really big deal; it’s literally just a pasture with some sheds, but dealers come from hundreds of miles away and they sell everything from beanie babies to junk to $2,000 puppies and cars, etc…
A local and popular male newscaster announced
sound of laughter throughout the studio, host turning beet red, trying to control himself, eyes closed…
To the best of my knowledge he got in no trouble. It was clearly an honest mistake and he had years of experience, but I’m guessing he got ribbed over that for weeks.
I had a physics prof who pronounced it “eye zero”.
A favorite was the time I heard a sportscaster, narrating highlights, say that a player “injured his ankle on that play. It was later changed to a knee.”
I remember watching a baseball game, broadcast from the States, a few years back where the announcer said that a certain player didn’t speak “Mexican.”
Or how about a weather announcer stating that tomorrow would be twice as warm as today. (I understood that he meant it would be, for example, 20 degrees C instead of 10 degrees C, but that’s not really twice as warm now, is it?)
Actually it was way the hell out in the Rockaways, near the Sound. Not very close to either river.
This isn’t quite a stupid thing that a newscaster said, but I was once watching the local weather report on WNBC. As they went to the full-screen forecast view live on the air, a Windows dialog popped up on the screen informing the entire viewing audience that their license had expired and this dialog would appear every fifteen minutes until it was renewed. Some diligent technician dutifully clicked “OK” before the end of the forecast.
I remember reacting strongly to a Chicago anchor - Ron Magers - on the day of Chernobyl, asking “Is there going to BE a tomorrow?” That’s probably right around when I stopped watching the local news.
Well, if you’re going to allow silly sports commentary, I think you’re going to have to set up a whole new category just for the BBC and their legendary commentators.
Anything said by local ABC news affiliate reporter Don Germaise. There’s too many to pick one example, everything has to be dramatic. As he finishes his teasers for his stories, he pauses and hunches down a little and steps toward the camera, usually gesturing toward the camera with his hand as he finishes his line. This is also the guy who can’t pass up the phrase “hunker down” during hurricanes. I once tried to count how many times he used the phrase in one report and lost count after about 20 but he was still going. If you play drinking games during hurricanes and drink every time you hear that phrase that man could kill you. He is always going out in hurricanes, if we don’t have one in our area he travels to where ever it is making landfall. I figure it’s a just matter of time before he gets hit with some flying debris. It will be ironic because he will have failed to hunker down.
This doesn’t really count but I was watching Fox News (not by choice) at the gym, since they play music all the TV’s are set to closed captioning and the result was hilarious. The phrases “people of that elk” and “Hurricane Dali”, in particular, stood out.
“We didn’t have hurricane force winds, we had a hurricane, right here in North Carolina!” – Said by one of the ladies on WTVD (Channel 11) after Hurricane Fran.
Maybe not so much stupid as could have done a little bit of fact-checking, but I remember one morning back when Bob Edwards was still doing Morning Edition on NPR, I woke up to hear him rattling off the birthdays at the top of the hour, including “Reggae musician Peter Tosh, who turns (I forget what age he said) today.” The only problem being that Peter Tosh had been dead for about ten years.
During an NPR news talk show a few years ago, the host kept calling MI5, “Em-Fifteen”. Worse yet, she was interviewing a British expert on the British intelligence services.
He was too polite apparently to point out her mistake, and instead he just used the correct name. Finally, half-way through the show, the penny must have dropped in her brain. She switched over to “Em-Eye-Five” without any further comment.
My favorite was 7-8 years back on Channel 11 in NY. The female reporter just got done with some dumb puff piece on an airline, and briefly recounted her initiation into the “Mile High Club” with a male steward.
So I’m working at home today with the TV on in the other room. The weather report comes on, and the weather guy says it’s sunny in Cleveland, and “ironically, partly sunny in Akron.”
?
What the hell is ironic about it being partly sunny in Akron?