Watched a news anchor lose it over a teleprompter glitch yesterday

I used to think news bloopers were just old VHS tapes but found a clip from a live broadcast in Tampa where the anchor's face froze for 3 full seconds. The text scrolled way too fast and she just sat there staring like a deer in lights. Has anyone else seen a reporter totally break character on air like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

mileslane4d ago

deer in lights" thats exactly it lol. they always train these anchors to just nod and smile or read something generic when the prompter dies, but the panic in their eyes is impossible to hide. i think the best one i saw was a weather lady in dallas who was mid sentence about a cold front and then the green screen crashed, she just started laughing and said "well folks we are all just figuring it out together." honestly that kind of breaking character makes them more human to me. the ones who try to power through and look serious end up looking worse. its like watching someone try to hold in a sneeze.

patricia324d ago

Piling on to what you said about the ones who try to hold it together. I saw a guy in Chicago during a snowstorm report. His prompter went black and he just kept reading his notes out loud but they were the wrong notes. He was talking about a charity bake sale while the screen showed a plow truck stuck in a ditch. You could see him realize it halfway through and his voice cracked. He just stopped and said "I'm gonna need a minute" and they cut to commercial. That raw moment was way better than any smooth recovery. Makes me think the networks should just let them be people when stuff breaks.

xena5824d ago

What gets me about that "I'm gonna need a minute" moment is how it breaks the whole illusion of control we expect from news. We watch these shows and think theyve got everything wired tight, but really theyre just people flying by the seat of their pants with a teleprompter and a prayer. The networks spend millions on sets and graphics and training, but one power flicker or software glitch and its all just a house of cards. Maybe thats the real lesson, the more they try to polish the product, the harder it falls apart when the polish scratches off. I think the audiences are smarter than the execs give them credit for, we can tell when someone is faking calm and we respect the ones who just say "welp, this is happening now.