Reporting Live

Matthew Preston | September 5, 2004
This just in...

While local residents evacuate Florida, the state's population triples as news reporters move in to report directly from the eye of Hurricane Frances.

Lori Lancaster | September 5, 2004
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | September 5, 2004
Good. Let's hope they drown. News at eleven.

John Edwards told a good story last night, as we sat at Egg Platter trying to ignore the hurricane news being played at a loud volume. Shortly after they'd moved back to Florida about twelve years ago, he and his wife and baby daughter were once caught in a tornado at an intersection, and debris crashed into their car. They ran and took shelter in front of a gas station because it was the only building around. No one was seriously hurt; the only injury was a half-inch cut on the baby's hand. When emergency crews arrived on the scene to make sure that the gas tanks hadn't been ruptured, the local TV crew was right behind. When John had gotten back into the car and was pulling away (he was in the passenger seat holding the baby), a reporter ran up to the open window and put a mic and camera on him and asked what happened. He calmly said, "Everything is fine, there's no major damage here. My baby got wounded and I have to take her to the hospital. Please get out of our way." The reporter backed off and they drove away. Little did John know that the local TV station breathlessly reported on the tornado with a clip of him saying, "My baby got wounded and I have to take her to the hospital," followed by a shot of the car driving away. The clip made it all the way onto CNN, and John's parents in Colorado, who didn't have his new number yet, were panicking and trying to reach him for days over an incident in which nothing serious actually happened, all because the news media needed to hype the tornado. Don't believe what you see on TV.