Sally Thorner on WJZ Baltimore has to suffer from “emotional whiplash”. That woman can flip from “maternal” to “concerned” to"angry" to “amused” all between commercial breaks.
Amazing.
I think it’s also the difference in sentence structures. News reports are similar to formal writing and very different from natural speech. Grab a newspaper and try reading it out loud, I think you’ll sound the same way.
Pretension, IMHO. I noticed that pretentious people will often mispronounce or overpronounce a word here or there, as if to validate their status. (Stay-tus, not stah-tus. Take the standard NPR pronunciation of a certain Central American country, for instance: Nee-kah-LAH-goo-WAH …
It’s just really, really bad practice for a TV journalist to talk this way. Some end up talking like this by copying other journalists, erroneously believing that some freakish cadence is “newspeak.” It’s not, and any journalist coming through a newsroom I worked with using those rhythms would quickly be given some pointers.
Some of it also derives from voice exercises given to younger reporters to sound more weighty/older/have more gravitas - the patterns become overexaggerated and they end up with a sort of pretentious heaviness.
Absolutely not, or it shouldn’t be. Writing for broadcast is an entirely different discipline than writing for print. Writing for radio or TV (with a few differences, such as in TV you don’t need to mention interviewee names because you strap them) should be in language as close to natural speech as possible. Reporters using lengthy, formal, “print” journalese are just doing it wrong. What they should be doing is talking to the audience as though the viewer/listener was on their level, ie a peer, NOT reading or declaiming or lecturing to them.
It’s not just the enunciation, it’s removing what I suppose they consider to be non-essential words. For example, instead of saying “The weather tomorrow will be cloudy with temperatues in the mid 70s” they’ll say “Weather tomorrow: cloudy in the mid-70s.” This is common in both TV and radio (and it’s not just the weather report). I guess they’re trying tro fit as much info as possible into the smallest time, but to me it makes everything sounds choppy and hard to follow. If your attention flags for half a second you lose the gist of what they’re saying. It bugs me.
How about David Broncatio’s pronounciantion of “in-TEL” (as if it was some telco company) instead of “IN-tel” (as in intelligence).
An Intel PR person eventually corrected him a couple of years ago.
I keep hearing this kind of thing about the newspapers and tv news, and it’s simply not true. If it’s true in your family, then you have an extremely advanced 6th grader.
Words like “ironic” “contend” “categorically deny”, etc are used all the time, and I’ve done enough teaching to know that your average 6th grader would just up and admit that he doesn’t know what these mean.
When I studied journalism, admittedly more than forty years ago, that is pretty much what was taught. My old geezer memory is a little foggy on the details, but let’s compromise at 8th grade level. I was surprised at the time that we were told to tone down the writing so that basically an ignoramus could understand it. It’s difficult to do if you have a decent vocabulary. Some of those “big” words will slip into the writing from time to time unbidden.
But if you read some of the other message boards and especially chat rooms it isn’t hard to believe that basic ignorance is the norm and anything approaching literacy the exception. That’s the great attraction of the SDMB–that a high percentage of its members are literate and well-spoken. SDMB members probably do read and understand newspapers, but the pre-digested pap offered by television news (where the vast majority get their news) makes words like “ironic,” “contend” and “categorically deny” easy to swallw because the listener doesn’t have to actually read them.
As for understanding, I would add that many people do not understand the difference between “ironic” and “coincidental,” but think that they understand the news. On point (the OP, you know), quite a few news readers, for all their pomposity of speech, mispronounce words they should know and scramble their grammar. I don’t expect them to be perfect, but it would be nice if they at least appeared to have earned their degrees.
To further illustrate my point, I was the kind of geeky kid who read all the time, to the point that my parents had to forbid reading at times because it was interfering with my getting things done.
When I was in 6th grade, I didn’t fully understand the news, so I know it’s true.
The other statement thrown around is that the newspapers are written on an 8th grade level. This is simply not even close to being the case. I tutored 10th and 11th graders on vocabulary and verbal skills, and discovered that even those getting average scores on the SAT I Verbal could not fully explain the L.A. Times or Newsweek, because the vocabulary and references were too adult.