It only ever lasts a second, but they look straight down the camera with an expression that says they can't believe what they're reading. And while they're all total pros, and they're onto the next item in the blink of an eye, the sentiment lingers.
Nobody really needs fake news when the world is more than crazy enough to fill the news bulletins. There is so much unbelievable shit going on every day without having to make up more.
If you'd gone back even a few years and told people the President of the United States would be a petulant garbage bag of a human being, and rattled off a short and abridged version of the hurricane of crap that has surrounded the office since he took power, nobody would believe it. A lot of people still don't, because they have all the news judgement of a fried oyster and can somehow ignore the mounting evidence and proper, full-scale investigations into the craziness.
But even if nothing is going on in politics, there is more than enough going on in the real world to fill the bulletins - extreme weather, massive social injustices and strange crime. Some of it can be quite concentrated in certain areas: it's a cliche in the US media that the strangest of the strange stories all come out of Florida, and every country has one district that provides some of the weirdest court stories on the planet (In New Zealand it is, of course, the West Coast. The papers there get the best shit from court.)
Some of it is too good to be true and editors need to use their experience and judgement to figure out if something stacks up. One classic example recently was the dude whose story about seagulls getting into his room and leading to him getting banned from a hotel was just so good, and quickly went viral. And while it was picked up by a lot of places, including the BBC, NPR and Stuff, a bunch of others didn't touch it, because it was just too good a story to be relying on third-hand sources from the international newswires. It certainly didn't help that the story surfaced just a couple of days after April Fools Day, when any kind of interesting news story is immediately suspicious.
Those editors who decided that story was just too good to be true rejected it with some regret, because there is a huge audience for things like this. It's part of the reason why true crime stuff does so well these days - you couldn't make up what happened in the OJ Simpson trial, if somebody wrote it as a fictional screenplay they'd be thrown out of the movie studio because it was too far out there and much too unlikely and strange.
But it still happened. Fact is always stranger and more complicated than fiction, with unlikely twists and coincidences which don't fit into a three-act structure. Real life is incredibly interesting that way.
After all, who could predict that Mike Hosking would come out with an epic self-own last week? After moaning about the fact that the only thing stopping Auckland Transport from functioning smoothly were all the other morons on the road who couldn't drive, he then, just hours later, smashed up part of a race-car on a clear track. His utter shamelessness at these double standards was still eclipsed by the sense of the karma police coming down hard.
Anything can happen and even though newspapers still devote some space to the horoscope, nobody can predict the future. The news industry - and society as a whole - has been totally addicted to breaking news for almost all of the 21st century, after we all woke up one morning in September and saw those towers come down, and now we don't want to miss anything, and the crazier the news gets, the more it gets read by everybody.
If you're fortunate to work in the same office as some of the country's best news readers, you can hear them add their own snarky and profanity-laced annotations to the news when they're reading over their scripts before their broadcast begins, but sometimes the news is so overwhelmingly strange and unexpected, their reaction slips through onto the TV screen. It might not be totally professional, but that's when you know the news is really, really fucked up.
- Margaret Tempest
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