There’s no business like the news business

Can I just say how ridiculous consumer reporting has gotten? I used to love hidden-camera exposes that news stations do, in which they try to catch The Man pulling the wool over the poor consumers’ eyes. It always ends the same way, with the ambush of some no-good retail-giant executive or business owner who has stiffed some poor schmuck who didn’t know he was buying contaminated meat or hiring an unlicensed contractor. The news report would always end with The Man angrily swatting at the camera or running off to hide from the persistent journalist.

I suppose that model hasn’t changed much, but the ridiculousness factor has increased tenfold. A few weeks back I watched Penny Crone on Fox 5 report about some new three-hour diet, and the professionalism was akin to Joan Rivers on the red carpet. She’s double-fisting fast food as she spews forth the deets on a new fad diet (essentially, eat whatever you want in small portions every three hours to keep your body from burning lean muscle instead of fat) while wearing something that decidedly was not your standard broadcast attire (floral shirt, I think) and sporting deep-purple fingernail polish. Her sign off was a brisk powerwalk off camera as she proclaims, “I’m Penny Crone, and I’m running to get a burger,” as the cameraman trails behind. (You only see the back of her head). Wtf? I mean, I know it’s Fox and everything, but I still thought it was pretty ridick.

There was a report I was watching once by another Fox consumer reporter, Mary Garofalo, who was doing the typical chasing-after-the-consumer-swindler-who-is-shielding-her-face-and-running-off-in-shame bit. But instead of saying, “Ms. Swindler, don’t you want to tell your part of the story? Are you going to offer a refund?” Mary starts screaming at the woman, “Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it?” Since when did it become okay for journalists to curse on television, even if it is just the B-word? Wasn’t there a local reporter who got fired for cursing on camera when he thought he was off-air? And a while back I remember seeing another “consumer” report once (wait a minute, I see a pattern here—I think it was also on Fox), to “expose” a fortune teller who would do the egg cracking bit, where you break an egg into a bowl and the yolk comes out all black, which means that someone wants you dead or has put a curse on you or something. In real life, the fortune teller has palmed some bloody animal part into the egg bowl. Ace Reporter was “exposing” this woman for some lady who kept getting swindled out of money to have anti-curse spells performed. Anyone who thinks that fortune-teller clients are helpless, innocent consumers who need help from getting swindled must have run out of real consumer complaints to address. Isn’t there someone getting screwed over by a Times Square electronics dealer somewhere? C’mon, even Arnold Diaz, of CBS 2’s “Shame, Shame, ShAAAAmmmeeee……SHAME ON YOU!” finger-wagging fame wouldn’t stoop that low.

Even non-consumer reporters are getting in on the act. I can’t stand how whenever John Montone reports on a story about someone getting murdered, he always concludes with, “the slimebag got away,” or “the sicko is still on the loose.” No one is saying these men aren’t slimebags or sickos, but c’mon 1010 WINS, you only have 20 minutes to give us the world, so let’s keep the little extra commentary to yourself.

Now with the death of Peter Jennings (Rest In Peace, Mr. Jennings), I’m afraid that even more real newsmen and women are becoming a thing of the past. Boohoo. I really hope up-and-coming journalists model themselves after those guys and not the sensationalists of today. I really don’t think the world needs any more reporters who seem more fitting for A Current Affair than World News Tonight.

**********

Random Crazy New Yorker (RCNY) sighting: Well, I don’t know if this counts as a New York sighting as I was actually on Long Island when I saw this RCNY, but I went to Long Beach, and there was a rather large woman sunning topless on a decidedly non-topless beach. There were little kids running around everywhere, but she seemed happy to free her willies. When I first saw her, I thought she must be just a very large man with very large man-boobs, since we weren’t on a topless beach. But later when she sat up, I saw that she was definitely a woman. My friend informed me that the indecent exposure laws were changed after that whole controversy over the double standard that lets men go topless, but not women. But after that whole Central Park protest of breast-baring women supporting the woman who was arrested in New York for sunbathing topless, I now realize that Ms. Nude-on-a-Non-Nude-Beach was in fact breaking the law. Even if you were allowed to do it, however, doesn’t mean you should. I just got the shivers. Please God erase the image burned in my mind.