VO (:30)
How in the world am I going to be a journalist? Our job is to condense “just the facts” into cold, impersonal little snippets that even the most simple minded of people can comprehend. Our job is to tell people about the world, without really telling them about the world. Our job is to check our opinions, compassion, and sometimes morals at the door. Just the facts. The cold, hard facts that the public needs. But that is not me. No. I am too full of passion, verbose sentences, love, and sprawling adjectives. [I get off on alliterations and pathetic fallacy, for God’s sake.] “The accident on I-40, just west of mile marker 218, resulted in the death of one Greensboro man, James Talbert. Authorities are still determining whether alcohol was a factor in the crash.”
How in the world am I going to be a journalist? Our job is to condense “just the facts” into cold, impersonal little snippets that even the most simple minded of people can comprehend. Our job is to tell people about the world, without really telling them about the world. Our job is to check our opinions, compassion, and sometimes morals at the door. Just the facts. The cold, hard facts that the public needs. But that is not me. No. I am too full of passion, verbose sentences, love, and sprawling adjectives. [I get off on alliterations and pathetic fallacy, for God’s sake.] “The accident on I-40, just west of mile marker 218, resulted in the death of one Greensboro man, James Talbert. Authorities are still determining whether alcohol was a factor in the crash.”
No. No.
James Talbert isn’t just a name scrolling across the teleprompter. That wreck isn’t just a 20 second story on the six o’clock news. The viewers will never know that James Talbert had greenish blue eyes that his fiancé adored or that he cooked the best lasagna ever, or that he hated his job at the bank and secretly dreamed of being a pilot. They will never know that those strategic camera angles of a mangled car they just saw on the television forever changed so many lives. That wreck wasn’t just a filler story the producer threw in out of desperation when the new school story didn’t pan out; it was the end of a life. The viewers won’t know a brother sobs himself to sleep every night or that a broken hearted girl is sitting on her bed with a bottle of pills shaking in her hand.
I cannot be a part of this madness. I cannot paint my face into a mask of camera appropriate makeup and fluff my hair to epic proportions. I cannot take out the faint southern drawl that emerges when I drink or flirt and turn my voice into a non-regional robotic one that reads sentence after sentence of meaningless phrases. I cannot watch as the power hungry higher-ups in the network force me to twist and tweak the truth into stories that our advertisers will be satisfied with. I cannot watch as the world around me is quite literally falling to pieces and all I am doing is telling people about it with a thirty second VO.
Actually, I can. I can do all of that. And I hate myself for it.
I hate myself for seeing an ambulance and wanting to follow it in hopes of a juicy wreck. I hate myself for secretly praying the mother whose son just left for Iraq breaks down into sobs in the middle of the interview because that would make an awesome sound-bite in my package. I hate myself for mindlessly reading headline after headline and not really absorbing any of what I’m saying. Oh, the AIDS rate is up in Africa? Should I put my enunciation on ‘epidemic’ or ‘government’? Hmm, an office building collapsed in Russia? Should I say ‘close to 2,000 people were killed’ or ‘more than 1900 people were killed’?
But that’s what I am supposed to do. Deliver the facts. Just the facts.
Keep your opinions, compassion, and morals tucked safely away in your pocket. Only let them out in the safety of your home, when you’re watching a foreign version of yourself droning away on the screen.
Only then you’re allowed to feel.
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