[Moderator's Preface: Please let's not start TV specific discussions
here in rrb. As far as it applies to radio AND TV, fine, but I would
appreciate not having to kill the hthread as being off topic. So far
it has been mariginal at best. Thanks for your help. Bill]
: >
: >I have recently help to form a student run TV-staion that is broadcasting
: >over the air, WEXP-TV, Channel 28, Hoboken (across the river from Manhattan).
: >I wos wondering if anyone out there knows the rules as to what we can and
: >can not say over the air. I imagine it would be the same as with radio.
: What you fail to disclose is whether you are training the "students" to be
: professionals or toilet mouthed idiots.
The following has almost nothing to do with radio, but it caused quite a
scandal in Columbia, Mo. at the time in 1979.
KOMU-TV (channel 8, NBC affiliate) has faculty staffing the station as
editors and anchors, but many of the reporters and weekend anchors are
students at the University of Missouri, which owns the station.
The local joke was to refer to the Saturday night newscast as "the opening
act for Saturday Night Live." Blunders and bloopers abounded.
People watched just to see what would go wrong.
(Probably was a great way to fight cable: Columbia had just gotten,
wonders of wonders, a *20-channel* system!)
Moreover, Channel 8 had yet to switch over entirely to tape; so there was a
reel of the newsfilm that was also involved. Sometimes the reel would
break, throwing off all the timing. For newsfilm stories, the voice-overs
were done on carts. So, you can see, timing and precision were everything.
Saturday nights were so bad, we used to take bets on who would***up the
most--engineering, production, or news. Winnings were fairly evenly
distributed.
Anyway, the student anchor one Saturday night just had one hell of a night.
The wrong audio kept getting punched up, scripts were out of order, you
name it, and it went wrong.
There was also a reporter in-studio that night for some breaking story.
The camera switched to the reporter. The student anchor's mike was still
on.
Not realizing that, he said, "What the *** is going on?"
It made the papers the next day. The student anchor was red-faced, to say
the least. Moreover, such a comment was extremely out of character for
him. (He was a friend of mine and you couldn't ask for anyone better. It
hurt to see this happen to him.)
Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. He was suspended for a couple
of weeks, then went back on, graudated, and, last I heard, is news director
for a TV station in Alabama or Mississippi.
: Just tell your students to grow up, act professional, and you don't need to worry a bit about what language you can use. It should be self evident.
Time for a Transvoxian comment: it seems radio has preceded TV by about
ten years or so when it comes to the dumbing-down of programming. No doubt
it won't be long before radio morning-show type antics get translated
somehow onto the TV airwaves. Maybe these guys are preparing for the
future? One would hope not, but entropy *is* everywhere.
--
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Kansas City, Missouri | These accounts are personally funded.
Any uncredited opinions in this Usenet post are page faults of my imagination.
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