by Robert LaFrance
I am glad I don’t call myself a journalist, television or otherwise. Too much pressure. I am just an apple grower who types.
That earthquake in Virginia a couple of weeks ago—give me a break. It was pathetic the way CNN and other TV networks tried to make that into a major story. True, a few (okay, a lot of) buildings shook a little—so do I when I get up in the morning after an enthusiastic evening of darts and lemonade at the club, but it doesn’t get on the national news.
Almost seven minutes of one CNN report dwelt on the fact that two buildings in some city near New York had leaned into each other and were touching each other, no doubt as a result of that horrific earthquake that measured 5.8 or 5.9 on the Richter Scale. A good belch would measure 5.5. Come on!
So here are hundreds of people dashing out of these buildings before they caved into the sea. The news reporter interviewed half a dozen people who were under great stress from what they had escaped. Meanwhile, they were standing about two car lengths from the building. One older lady said her son had been working in one of the buildings and she didn’t know if he had been rescued. By this time the nearby sidewalks and streets were filling up with panic stricken people.
Since the broadcast was live, the hard-hitting, up to the minute news team didn’t have time to prepare for what happened next. One of the people emerged from the crowd. He was holding up a photo. When he got near enough, and the camera could pick up the details of the photo, it was clear that it showed the two buildings in question. “Just thought you’d like to see this,” he said to the reporter. “I took this about ten years ago. I just went over to my apartment and got it.”
Holy poop Batman! The photo showed the two buildings clearly touching each other even back then. “Yeah, the earthquake didn’t do it,” he explained. “They been like that since the 1950s.”
The camera then switched to the reporter. It’s not often I get to use the word ‘dumbfounded’ when describing one of these television personalities. His expression reminded me of last Christmas morning when my friend Flug and I watched Flug’s nephew Raymond III open his present. He was sure he was going to get the keys to a new Malibu, but all he got was a pair of socks and a Swiss Army Knife. Another word that would have fit was ‘crestfallen’. That’s also how the reporter looked. His fabulous story was, as they said in the movie Napoleon Dynamite: “A decroded piece of crap”.
As the ‘earthquake’ story continued on CNN, they grew more and more desperate to find someone, anyone, who had been hurt, got a hangnail, suffered post-traumatic stress, fell down, cut themselves shaving. Because it was the most entertaining show on TV at the time, I stuck with it. Finally I was rewarded. A ‘news’ team in Norfolk, Virginia found a cracked basement wall. The news networks descended on the area like relatives to a free and open bar.
They were interviewing people like mad. “How did you escape the devastation?” Then, the same thing happened as before. The homeowner, who had just returned from Wal-Mart, where there was a sale on toothpicks and Barry Manilow CDs, wanted to know why 200 people were trampling his lawn. Oh, that,” he said, after someone had explained. “That crack has been there since my brother-in-law Gerald backed into it with his pickup. He was drunk of course. This was 1999, or was it the year before? I tell you, those Hendersons spend all their time suckin’ up beer. The whole family should be taken off welfare and…”
At that point the camera broke, or something, because the scene quickly shifted to an interview of a guy in Richmond, a few hundred miles away from the quake’s epicentre. It seems that he had been out ‘with the boys’ and only got to bed at 9:00 am. The quake woke him up. “Oh no!” he told his wife. “That quake shook the money right out of my wallet. I don’t know where it went!”
In all seriousness, the earthquake did cause some damage to historic buildings in Washington, and some people were injured, usually in panic evacuations of office buildings. According to a press release from the Delsey company, there must have been other types of evacuations too, because their sales went up 11% that week. My point is, you can do better, CNN and others. We had a 5.9 earthquake here in Victoria County in 1982 and the only casualty was the radio that fell off a shelf in the bedroom of my Birch Ridge estate.
My dog Belvedere didn’t even wake up.
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