Parrots, reporting live

The other day I suggested that if news organizations want to use dead reporters, the venerable Edward R. Murrow might be a good choice. But today I've found an even better suggestion: Monty Python's dead parrot. Because it seemed the whole press corps was made up of parrots today, parrots reporting live.




I could tell they were parrots because all they did was parrot, all day long. "...but Rice said it was unprecedented for a National Security Advisor to testify before a congressional..." (that's a composite, not a direct quote from any one of them). They offered no other side to that story, they just squawked and squawked the same line over and over all morning. I didn't expect to be complimenting the man who pompously declares, "Stand by for hard news!" every day at 5 p.m. (on a channel broadcasting same all day and all night!), but finally around noon, CNN's Wolf Blitzer was the first TV news personality to do anything but parrot that quote from the reluctant witness. He must have gotten around to reading last Saturday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial, which called the National Security Advisor on that claim before she even made it on the Sunday morning news shows or 60 Minutes.
  ¶ 6:36 PM |