In this Free-for-all-Friday, Trent shares clips of newscasters messing up and also explains why they all sound the same when they don’t mess up.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. Today is free for all Friday. I love newscaster diction, and today I want to talk about that a little bit, but also talk about when news anchors and news reporters mess up, flub up. It is just funny to see because they’re always so poised and professional.
So Mondays and Wednesdays here on the podcast by the way, we talk apologetics and theology, but on Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. And so today I want to talk about newscaster slip ups. Before I do that though, a little bit of a primer on newscaster diction and accents, because you notice they all kind of sound the same, right? There’s a few different reasons for that. One of them is that as the news industry grew, you had radio in the 1930s and forties and turning into television, you would have newscasters trying to project an aura of authority and trustworthiness to their audiences.
So a lot of them adopted an accent that presented that, communicated that, that came to be known as a transatlantic accent. So that’s kind of a hybrid between accents on the eastern seaboard of the United States and British accents, because when something’s British, it always sounds so much more intelligent when it’s British. So that ended up with having newscasters talking like this in old time radio, WKRPO radio, and they always speak a little bit faster. You watch in old movies from the 1940s, people always talking like this. So you would get that. But that eventually transitioned more into what would we call the general American accent. And part of that was newscasters. As they would travel the country trying to break into the industry, you’d have someone, let’s say they’re from Georgia, but they can’t get a job at any local Georgia radio stations or TV stations.
Oh, there’s an opening for a news anchor in Virginia or Massachusetts or Washington. And in order to get the job though, a lot of people would find it off-putting. If you have someone who has a completely different dialect from the listeners, just like if you have someone with a southern drawl kind of an accent, people might not find that it’s pleasing in Massachusetts. Likewise, telling people the best place to pack your car for listeners in Atlanta might not go over as well.
So the newscasters developed more of a non-regional accent. And then over overemphasize pronunciations. They also speak… They do that for authoritative speaking, for clear hearing, and they tend to speak in a lower register. Notice female news anchors when they speak, they usually set their voice lower by a few octaves. You don’t come across a female news anchor that will speak in a higher pitched or a squeaky voice because that would be something a lot of people don’t want to hear for hours on end from television. It may not communicate that authoritative sense that you need from someone. And female news anchors have said if they speak in their normal voice, they might be of a higher pitch, they could damage their voice because they’re speaking for hours on end, and that could end up having vocal fry, damage their vocal cords so they talk more out of their diaphragms rather than their throats in order to project their voice and also to protect their voice.
All right, so that’s a little bit of the background there. Let’s get to the news anchor fails. Here’s one from a ABC seven news anchor. It is, what’s her name, anchor Leslie Sykes is just giving a standard intro for Labor Day, September 2nd, 2013. But she just can’t help but read what the teleprompter tells her, even though she knows that she’s greeting people for Labor Day. Take a listen
Speaker 3:
From ABC seven. This is Eyewitness News.
Leslie:
Let’s take a live look outside on this Wednesday. This is our camera LAX at February 8th. Good morning everybody, Labor Day. I’m Leslie Sykes.
Speaker 5:
I’m thinking that date was wrong.
Leslie:
What was that?
Speaker 5:
I think it’s off by a few days, February 8th.
Leslie:
Is that what I said?
Speaker 5:
Yeah, and it ain’t Wednesday either.
Leslie:
Maybe a few month.
Speaker 6:
She was making sure people were paying attention.
Leslie:
So embarrassing.
Speaker 7:
You’re good, you’re good.
Leslie:
I have no idea what I said. Okay.
Speaker 5:
They probably have the year right, so we’ll go with that.
Speaker 6:
You said it so convincing.
Leslie:
No, it said 2012 February.
Speaker 6:
February.
Leslie:
You know what I remember?
Trent:
So this reminds me of Ron Burgundy Anchorman, which is a hilarious film by the way. But this does happen that you’ll have anchor people who will read teleprompters and just read it. If it is on the teleprompter, they are going to read it no matter what it says on there. So I love this classic scene from the Comedy Anchorman with Will Ferrell, where he reads from the teleprompter.
Will:
Well, that’s going to do it for all of us here at Channel four News. You stay classy San Diego. I’m Ron Burgundy.
Speaker 9:
Damn it. Who typed a question mark on the teleprompter for the last time. Anything you put on that prompter Burgundy will read.
Trent:
Okay, so let me hop over to another example of newscasters just uncritically reading from teleprompters and hilarity ensues. This one though, I don’t really want to blame the newscaster because they were given a breaking news item and it isn’t their fault. They’re just reading it as it goes along and they’re probably nervous and not noticing. Halfway through, oh wait a minute, something’s wrong here. This was something that the editor, the line producer, other technical and director support staff at the news station should have caught. This was KTVU News in Oakland, California. This was from 10 years ago. There was a crash of Asiana Airlines at the, I think it was the San Francisco airport, and it crashed. I think the plane actually caught on fire, but almost everybody survived. Unfortunately, there was a teenager who was unconscious or injured on the tarmac and got run over by a firetruck.
So very sad about that. So this is a disaster, an airplane crash. And then they received breaking news about the names of the pilots and right away a newscaster should be suspicious. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. The Federal Aviation Authority FAA never releases the names of pilots or crew members during an active investigation of a crash. That is not their policy to do that. So right away, something’s wrong here. The news station had been had, they were hoaxed that somebody gave them a stereotypically offensive Asian sounding names to read off and it was then read off uncritically by the news anchor on the broadcast. So all in all, it’s a tragic event, but it is a little bit funny that this ended up happening just a little bit. I’m not endorsing this behavior, but it’s a tad funny.
Speaker 10:
We have new information now also on the plane crash. KTV has just learned the names of the four pilots who are on board the flight. They are Captain Sum Ting Wong, We too Low, Ho Lee Fuc, and Band Ding Ow. The NTSB has confirmed these are the names of the pilots on board Flight 214 when it crashed. We are working to determine exactly what roles each of them played during the landing.
Trent:
Oh no, by the way, I apologize. It’s not the FAA that obviously investigates crashes, though they are involved. It’s the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board. So they’re involved in that. Captain Sum Ting Wong. Oh gosh. So once again, I don’t blame the news anchor on that one because they’re trusting the teleprompter on that. Even though halfway through that you might think, “Wait a minute, something’s wrong here.” They just wanted to just get through this. Really, somebody got fired that day for allowing that to get on the teleprompter.
All right, here is the next one. I don’t know which news station this is. It’s Cynthia Izigiri. I think it’s some kind of action news seven. She’s talking about someone who has climbed Mount Everest and one of the first people of a particular group of people to be able to do that. That’s all give for the setup. Here is the clip.
Speaker 11:
Right after the break we’re going to interview Eric Wyanmayor who climbed the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest. But, he’s gay. I mean he’s gay. Excuse me, he’s blind. So we’ll hear about that coming up.
Speaker 12:
Okay. As we head to the break…
Trent:
Not even… There’s something I couldn’t have even understood if she had said something like he’s the first person to climb the highest mountain who is paraplegic or deaf or had identified some other disability. I could have even understood that. But guess what folks? He’s gay. I mean blind. I don’t know why, but there is just something, I don’t know, something very surreal and humorous about that. A few of these unfortunately, I’ll do one more that is, it’s funny, but it’s also not funny because it’s a serious situation like the plane crash one that I gave earlier, this is from four years ago. It is talking about a funeral for a fallen police officer in what do I want to say, I think it’s like Lexington maybe is where this happened. And the officer was Deidra Mengedoht. I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing that right, but I’m pronouncing it better than what the newscaster did. So here is another newscaster talking about that and giving the correct pronunciation of the officer’s name.
Speaker 13:
32 year old Detective Deidra Mengedoht should be at work in the west end of Louisville today. But that all changed one week ago.
Speaker 14:
When an out of control driver plowed into Detective Mengedoht’s patrol car.
Trent:
Okay, so sorry, it’s not Lexington, it was Louisville and Mengedoht, right? That’s just M-E-N-G-E-D-O-H-T. If you saw it, Mengadot, Mengado, I think that’s probably what you would say. Here’s a news anger. Local six WPSD didn’t quite get the pronunciation right.
Speaker 13:
Final goodbyes to this fallen Louisville police officer DD Mengadodo, I’m sorry, Mengodo.
Trent:
So first DD, it’s clearly Deidra. Megadodo. I got to do it one more time. One more time.
Speaker 13:
Goodbyes this fallen Louisville police officer DD Mengadodo, I’m sorry, Mengodo.
Trent:
So it is difficult, obviously when you have people’s names that can be hard to pronounce. But like I said, I don’t want to relish in these things. You might think, Trent, this is mean. I’m not trying to be mean, but it’s a little funny when people have their slipups. It happens. I mispronounce stuff all the time. I’m so bad at pronouncing words because most of my knowledge comes from reading, not from listening to stuff. So I’m really bad at pronunciation, but you got to be able to have a little bit of fun in life.
So speaking of having fun, I love this clip by the way. This was posted a few months ago. Mark Woodley, I think he’s from Iowa, and he does a half hour sports show on KWWL. And normally he does sports and he was enlisted by the news station to go out to do weather that day instead of sports. And it was like this blizzard in Iowa and he absolutely hated and resented being asked to do that. So he is just so sarcastic and amazing. This is not really a slipup. There’s an entire other genre of newscasters slipups that are done on purpose because they just don’t care anymore and they’re going to let people know about it. So here is Woodley talking about how he really, really doesn’t like doing the weather and we prefer to go back to sports.
Ryan:
Mark, how are you feeling out there?
Woodley:
Again, the same way I felt about eight minutes ago when you asked me that same question, Ryan. I normally do sports. Everything is canceled here for the next couple of days, so what better time to ask the sports guy to come in about five hours earlier than he would normally wake up, go stand out in the wind and the snow and the cold and tell other people not to do the same. Tune in for the next couple hours to watch me progressively get crankier and crankier.
Can I go back to my regular job? I’m pretty sure, Ryan, that you guys added an extra hour to this show just because somebody likes torturing me because compared to two and a half hours ago, it is just getting colder and colder. Live in Waterloo for the last time this morning, thankfully, I’m Mark Woodley News seven…
Trent:
Finally, as I noted earlier, newscaster diction is a funny thing. Here is a female news anchor in Washington DC making fun, sharing a video of her at home with her husband or partner. I don’t know their exact relationship, but using just her newscaster voice and talking to him all night in it. And he just gets progressively more annoyed and it just culminates here.
Speaker 17:
Taking a live look outside, the sun has gone down and it’s a bit chilly, but certainly not a bad way to end your Friday night. I want to switch gears here and turn to my colleague who is throwing down in the kitchen as they like to say. What is it that you’re cooking this evening?
Speaker 18:
All right, we get it.
Speaker 19:
Oh!
Speaker 18:
I’m sorry. What is it that you get in here at 9:32?
Trent:
I just love his response. All right, we get it. Please, please stop doing that. All right, well, I hope that you guys enjoyed a little bit of light fare here on the Council of Trent podcast. Hopefully we’ll revisit the topic in the future because there’s always all kinds of slip-ups, and mess-ups in the world. I contribute a few of my own on the podcast every now and then. Thank you guys and hope you have a very blessed weekend.
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