Wednesday, May 14, 2008

F-bomb has people paying attention to TV news (for a sec)

I have to laugh at the breathless coverage around the fleeting use of the f-word during a news promo featuring two old vets who I'm guessing are kind of sick of each other. One of them, Sue Simmons, said something many people have said: "What the fuck are you doing?" to her colleague, who was seemingly not paying attention to the task at hand (promoting the night's newscast). Apparently she didn't realize they were live.

What's funny is that the journalist who wrote this story no doubt works in an environment rife with "fucks." (The word, not the people ... OK, maybe both.) At least the newspapers I worked at were like that. Now I work for a respected Web retailer surrounded by people who went to MBA school and have engineering degrees and it's very different.

What's not funny is that Sue may be fired. That would be wrong, wrong, wrong. It was one TV news (or as my kids call our local news, "Seattle problems") is not so pristine a territory that it has been somehow sullied by a swear. In fact, it's increasingly irrelevant. Sue may lose her job because no one's watching. She shouldn't lose her job over this fuckin' thing.

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