TV reporters

When I was a journalism major in college, the media in which students specialized was pretty segregated. I was a print (newspaper) journalist. We had some classes with those from other media, like radio, TV, magazine and yearbook, and they seemed like nice folks. (With the internet, there’s a much bigger push for integration between the media now.) But everyone knew that working for the award-winning student newspaper was the hardest gig there was. 

I usually put in 40-hour weeks while maintaining a full load of classes. I started as a reporter when I was a freshman and worked my way up to editor in chief as a senior. Our newspaper won two national awards that year, and to toot my own horn, I also won 2004 Missouri College Journalist of the Year (beating out several uppity Mizzou folks). I nearly killed myself along the way. My colleagues and I worked so hard to get scoops, expose wrongdoings and tell the stories of seemingly ordinary people who had done extraordinary things. In short, my work at the college newspaper taught me more about the career of journalism than any professor or textbook every could, and it secured me a job two months before I even graduated. But there was one thing for which it did not prepare me: television reporters.

Let me say that I know some first-rate TV reporters. They are bulldogs for truth and have high journalistic standards and integrity. Sadly, they are the minority.

My first introduction to the incompetence of most TV reporters came during the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I interned at a newspaper in one of the larger suburbs of the Kansas City metro area. There were three other reporters there, and the awesome editor gave me just as much responsibility as they had. About a month into the internship, I was covering a board of aldermen meeting in a smaller, neighboring town. It had drawn in TV reporters because of the oddity of what was going to be discussed that night: the town’s police chief had almost died because he overdosed on crack that he stole from their police department’s evidence room. I felt honored that the editor chose me to cover it. Seated on one of the metal folding chairs in the gymnasium of the high school, I furiously was taking notes. I wanted to get everything right. Then I felt something on my shoulder. I looked up, and the TV reporter sitting next to me was copying my notes - writing down the juiciest quotes that I had captured. What I’d felt on my shoulder was his face. I wished I’d had a desk where I could covetously wrap my arm around my notes, like you do to prevent cheaters from stealing your answers on tests in elementary school. All I could think was, “Dude, you’re copying the notes of a 20-year-old intern. What does this say about your skills?” He just hadn’t been paying attention. This was before smart phones, so he wasn’t distracted by that. I don’t know what the deal was. I turned to the side so that mostly my back was facing him. I wanted him to realize the 20-year-old intern caught him cheating. A few years after that, I learned he got fired for getting too many DUIs. So maybe he was just drunk during the meeting.

When I started my real-world newspaper reporter gig at a daily newspaper, I encountered TV reporters often. I would see them report things about the same stories I’d covered that I knew were wrong. If I had made those mistakes, a correction would have had to be run in the next day’s edition. The general rule was three corrections = fired. And what happened to the TV reporters who got the facts wrong? Not a damn thing. They didn’t even acknowledge the mistake. On more than one occasion, I also saw my story on a TV station’s web site, verbatim. My managing editor would call the stations and ask them what the deal was, and they would take the story down or give us attribution. But as far as I know, nothing happened to the reporters who claimed to have written them. In print, just one instance of plagiarism is a fireable offense. You see how different the standards between TV and print journalism are, here?

Now that I’m in PR, I often serve as the liaison between media and the law enforcement agency for which I work. We get calls from TV reporters all day, everyday, especially if something big is going down. About a third of the time, they’re just calling to say, “Is anything going on?” Because unlike newspaper reporters, who dig up their own stories, most of the TV folk just want an easy story handed to them on a silver platter. And crime stories are generally easy. 

Another third of the time, they call to ask, “Can you confirm …?” This means, “I saw the story another reporter wrote, and I’d like to steal it, but my boss is making me call you to make sure that the story I want to steal is accurate.” 

Other common calls include:

* The 4 p.m. request for statistics that either do not exist or would require a week’s worth of labor to compile. E.g. “Can I get numbers on how many domestic violence victims were eating soup at the time of their assault?”

* Asking a question that someone else at their station already has asked, but they haven’t bothered to communicate with each other.

* Trying to get a local perspective on an inapplicable national story. E.g. “This one town in another state allows public nudity. What would police do if that happened here?”

From a PR perspective, TV reporters’ lack of enterprise reporting skills makes it easy to feed them positive stories about our organization. But some of them just don’t want any part of that. One guy called last month and asked if anything was going on. We told him about something good our officers had done. He said, and I absolutely am not making this up, “No, I was hoping more for a school bus crash or double shooting. Do you have any of those?”

Let me reiterate that there are some extremely talented TV reporters out there. I know and respect them, and their work has changed lives, exposed corruption, prompted government action and the like. But they are rare flowers. 

Also, this post also only discusses local television reporters. National network reporters are a whole other post. 

Meanwhile, enjoy some of these awesome local news bloopers.

Current first-world problems, Vol. 1

This probably will be a recurring series. Because I frequently get annoyed by stuff that people in places ravaged by ebola and famine likely think is stupid. So here are my current first-world annoyances:

Not being able to see the Royals

For the first time in 29 years, the Kansas City Royals baseball team is in the post season. They are thisclose to competing in the World Series. They haven’t even made it into the playoffs since I was 3 years old. The postseason games have been thrilling, and I haven’t seen a single one of them. Like someone who really is from a third-world country, I’ve had to listen to them on AM radio. Because Major League Baseball hates the poor and only broadcasts their games on cable. OK, I’m not poor, but I don’t have cable as a lifestyle choice. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on something that will make just make me fat. Because I imagine if I had cable, I would just sit on the couch a lot eating Cheez-Its and watching shows about picking the perfect wedding dress and hoarding. (I do pay $8 a month to watch reruns of such shows on Netflix, which I honestly hardly ever do.) But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to watch my hometown, underdog Royals make history. I can watch the Chiefs play every game because apparently the NFL isn’t classist and elitist. They broadcast their games for all to see. The MLB might as well hang a “Po’ folk not wanted” sign on the stadium door.

Putting babies on the phone

I don’t want to talk to a baby or toddler on the phone. Not even my own. He doesn’t get it. Someone is holding this electronic device to his face, and all he thinks is, “I want to throw that on the floor to see what sound it makes.” So they could care less, and I’m left there on the other end of the line - often at work - saying nonsense to him in high-pitched voices in an effort to get him not to throw the phone on the floor. Which I really shouldn’t worry about because it would serve the person right who gave their phone to a baby.

Cheap toilet paper

I was telling my pal Emily the other day that I feel like my husband and I are finally successful enough to buy really good toilet paper. For years, I lived the impoverished life of a college student and then single, underpaid newspaper reporter. I bought the cheapest, store brand, two-ply I could find. (Even at my poorest, one-ply was not an option. It’s basically air with a few fibers and no absorptive capabilities.) 

So in the last year or so, after five-plus years of marriage, we decided our income could support buying smaller versions of soft paper towels for our bums. Because it’s so thick and scrumptious, you don’t have to use nearly as many squares as you do of the cheap stuff, so I think we’re actually saving money. 

But the wonderfulness of our home toilet paper makes the stuff I encounter at work all the more infuriating. It’s lower quality than the stuff I bought at Aldi’s in my early 20s. It falls apart, rolls up into little chunks and gets stuck in your special bits. When you flush it, little pieces of it break off and float back up, and you have to flush it again. It’s a travesty. And a waste of water. But I’m not going to leave flecks of my used toilet paper in there for the next person.

Then Emily told me that at our local zoo, they’ve put up signs in their bathrooms requesting you only use two squares of toilet paper. Two squares of one-ply. That’s like saying, “Please only use this plastic grocery sack when jumping out of an airplane.” No. Just no. You need a parachute for that, and if it’s one-ply, you’re going to need like 50 squares. You can’t even pick a boogie with two squares of one-ply.

Hidden frozen dinner directions

So when I microwave a frozen dinner - ironically, usually for lunch at work - the only thing I want to see is the directions for how long I should cook it. And yet that is consistently the most obscure thing on the packaging. I don’t want to read about your home-style recipes and delicious ingredients. I know it’s mostly just factory-produced sodium. Nobody’s grandma was involved. So I don’t want to read a story about her. I just want to see how many minutes to nuke it. And whether I need to pull back the plastic or stir midway through (which is a huge pain, by the way. I buy these things to cook and eat quickly. I want to put it in the microwave in the lunch room, go to the bathroom or answer an email, and then come back when it’s all done. But noooo, on some of them, you have to babysit them and stir it midway through, like an animal.). 

I just want the directions in big, bold type on the back of the box, in the middle, so I don’t give myself mouth burns or salmonella by cooking it incorrectly. Also, when I get older and need reading glasses to see stuff close up, that seems like even more of a danger.

You hear me, Amy’s and Stouffers?

My ideal (and therefore imaginary) political party

Around election time, I always lament that there is no political party for me. I often end up picking the lesser of the two evils. 

Right now there is a guy from my neighborhood who is running for state representative. I’ve met him a couple of times. Once at a neighborhood picnic. And then again when he was going door to door last month right after my son pulled out a drawer too fast. It hit him in the face, and he was a hot mess. In other words, the worst time for a politician to stop by asking for you to vote for him. With the baby (I’m reluctant to call him a toddler, although I think he technically is, since he’s toddling and all) screaming in the background, my husband told the candidate our son had an accident, this wasn’t a good time, and we kind of shut the door in his face. A few days later, we got a card from him saying how sorry he was to have come by at such an inconvenient moment, and how he hoped our son was OK. I was like, “Bam, you have my vote, sir.” That kind of consideration is rarely heard of these days, especially from wannabe politicians. He’d also sent us something about how much he was going to work to make public schools better. But later that week, we got a mailer from his campaign all about how much he loves guns. You know, those killing machines that make America and its ridiculous violent crime rates the laughingstock of the rest of the civilized world. So he seems like a super nice guy who wants to increase school funding, and I’d really like to vote for a nice guy, but I don’t want to vote for someone who is going to move to make guns as available as candy.

And there is my dilemma. I feel really strongly about things on both sides of the aisle. 

Why can’t there be a party that loves unborn babies AND hates guns? 

It seems like both of those stances are pro-life. Anyway, I’ve already said what I think about guns. But here’s what I think about unborn babies. After having one in me (who later came out of me, but at that point he was a newborn, not unborn), I can’t be anything but pro-life. I had significant bleeding when I was 11 weeks pregnant. It was terrifying. I got sent for an ultrasound, and I was sure they were going to tell me I’d lost the baby. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. But I got to see this thing inside me, and it was a complete person. At just 11 weeks. Before my pants even got snug. He had every finger and every toe. I could see individual vertebrae. Earlier, at eight weeks, I’d heard his heart beat. He already was a person, and “getting rid” of him seemed so unconscionable. But a lot of the argument could be avoided altogether with better contraceptive accessibility and education.

That cares for the poor AND supports a flat tax rate? 

Our tax code is redonkulous. There are tens of thousands of people whose career is just to interpret it and to help us commonfolk make sure the government gets enough of our money every year. And then there are the ridiculously low capital gains taxes and other handy loopholes for the rich to become richer. Also, there’s the whole issue of people who hardly pay any taxes at all because of their low income getting tax returns that are like $10,000. I pay probably ten times the taxes they do, and I get just enough back to make an extra mortgage payment. So let’s just make it fair across the board. Everyone pays a certain percentage of their income, and it’s the same. For rich people, poor people, small businesses, big businesses. And businesses HAVE to be a part of it. Even if they’re headquartered in another country. If they do business here, they have to pay taxes here. Which pretty much means no politician will ever champion this because then where would their campaign donations come from?

But we still need to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves. Children born into poverty. The elderly on fixed incomes. Those with debilitating illnesses. And yeah, down-on-their-luck immigrants. I am so very OK with my tax money helping all those types of people out. I don’t know how you can’t be, but those politicians who purport to be Christians are the ones who speak most loudly against it. They conveniently forget that part of the Bible where Jesus says to care for the widows, orphans and aliens. They’d rather focus on all that stuff he said about gay people. Wait a minute…

That champions individual responsibility AND the environment? 

However, I’ve seen the system not just abused, but beaten senseless. People complaining at the pharmacy that they have a 4-cent copay on their medication that Medicaid didn’t quite cover. Complaining about four cents! I heard this happen! I had to pay $200 for a crazy antibiotic to kill my strep face a few years ago, and it ended up giving me panic attacks. But I just sucked it up and swiped my debit card. There’s a whole unit of the police department I work for that investigates disability fraud, and they have found some doozy fakers. And also, good people I know who have been on public assistance have told me that the system creates dependency. If they get even a part-time job, they lose their food stamps. So work or keep getting free food? The choice seems obvious. And do you know what food stamps can buy? Like, anything. Bathtubs full of soda. Bushels of candy. The cut-off isn’t whether it’s junky - it’s whether it’s hot. Seriously. So you can’t buy a rotisserie chicken with food stamps, but you can buy a cart full of Oreos and Doritos. I just want something that makes sense. Something that helps people who need it but encourages them to become self-supporting.

So can I get that along with a party that cares about the environment? That believes global warming is a thing and that some regulations on stuff like manufacturing and energy production are OK so that there’s still an Antarctica for my grandchildren (and for the freaking adorable penguins)? That realizes what we’ve done to food through GMOs and factory farming not only is bad for our earth but bad for us (and maybe is why everyone’s gotten so fat and allergic to everything recently [but they need to leave Cheez-Its alone. Also, I eat McDonald’s chicken McNuggets once a year, don’t judge.])? 

Also, I’m for universal health care, strong public schools - including universities, taking excellent care of our society’s most vulnerable (including animals), solid infrastructure, revising the FMLA and just enough defense to keep us safe.

I think adding all those things together makes me a flaming moderate. Maybe a little socialist. I think the point is that I don’t fall into any political category, and it makes me so frustrated. I don’t have the time, passion or thick enough skin to run for office myself, so like a true patriot, I’ll just whine about it on a blog.