Interesting little story about the big sinkhole down there close to Houston. But did anyone else notice how clueless the anchorperson/reporter sounded? I mean - there's nothing new about about on-screen news persons being cited as unbelievably stupid, but I have to wonder if there are others out there who feel this trend continues to get deeper and deeper... For the past few years my ears have been picking up on a tendency for the newscaster's inflection being WAY OFF for the material they are reading, as though the teleprompter is feeding them word by word rather than in sentences or paragraphs which their brains could possibly pre-decipher before regurgitating the information verbally. In college, when I worked at the ABC affiliate in Shreveport - I was a little surprised to discover that the newscasters (of that time) actually wrote their own copy. The teleprompter of the day displayed at least three lines of text at a time. The teleprompter was a black and white television screen in reverse image which reflected up to a piece of glass angled at about 45 degrees - which was positioned directly in front of the camera lens. The result was that they were looking at the camera lens while reading their copy. You could see their eyes moving back and front of the camera (but they were reading back words that they themselves had written up). But yeah - getting to know a little about these people did confirm they were indeed shallow and not exactly candidates for Mensa. Back in the old days, reporters were reading from actual sheets of paper. I remember I was impressed by the newscasters who could scan ahead several lines at a time and then look back up at the camera as they "read back" what they had just scanned. This was typically done with perfect inflection. By the way - I'm getting WAY off topic here.
Where I was going with this - is the pathetic "conservatist nature" of the Fox News Organ. Along with the story on the web page about the 'Sinkhole De Mayo' - I saw a link about some gaffe by author/writer Steven King. Apparently Mr. King said something to a group of students about the importance of READING. He said something like "reading is important - if you *know* how to read, you're bound to get better jobs - if you *don't*know how to read you'll end up in the ARMY going to Iraq or some place like that.." I WAS DUMBFOUNDED by the commentators response on this. An insipid pretty lady with a big red ribbon around her neck (which apparently covered cleavage exposed by her low cut dress) - the voice deflection of an oxycotin user - she, a third person commentator - rattled on about Stephen King being "brain dead". So within a short period of time - there's at least three Fox News personalities making personal attacks on Mr. Stephen King - one asking the other if he had suffered brain damage by being hit by that pickup truck several years ago - and criticizing his body of work - a diatribe that goes on for about 5 minutes - which had very little to do with what Mr. King had actually SAID! All these morons were doing - it appeared - was attempting to discredit Steven King, because he inferred that the ARMY is for stupid people? Boy, that Pat Tillman dude sure made an intelligent choice... (Too bad his patriotic motivation was so terribly misguided.) So I watched a few other little Fox News video clip features. One that caught my eye was Hillary Clinton vs Obama - so I watched it too. WOULD YOU BELIEVE these axehandles brought up *Monica Lewinski*?!?!?! They actually got into the Clinton's legacy of being a smudge on the character of the WhiteHouse... *whew! * Could these people actually BELIEVE the crap they're saying? Or is someone in "the regime" paying them big bucks to say things that make them look very, very stupid? -WaV
