Faking it

I’m running a bit late this week, although there’s not much of an excuse. I’m obsessing over a little house in Monticello and have been doing way too much research on that. It’s a long shot that I follow through with it, so it’s really not healthy.

Anyway, we’ve finally had two days of sunshine after an eon of rain. Steve rigged up some kind of pump to pump out the lake so, overnight, my RV went from lakefront to swampland again. At this point, it’s hard to keep up.

Last week, I helped out at a disaster drill put on by the county. It was a pretend plane crash at the airport. I was media. Afterward, the airport director (the real one) pulled me aside and said it looked like I'd known what I was doing. He said I asked real questions. Yup.

Heck, I even asked for titles, spellings of names and all that. He, along with the PIO and incident commander, was pretty much shocked to have been put through a realistic news conference.

The others portraying media were kind of nitwits. We'd been given a list of questions and one person was so focused on one of them (phone number for families) that she was obsessed with it. Every person she tried to talk to she'd say "But what about the FAMILIES!!??"

It's like, sweetie, chill out. That's important, but it's going to be the last line of the story. Let the PIO tell us first how many people are injured, killed or whatever (we ended up with six critical but no deaths, so her question was even less important) and, well, you know ... what happened. Everything he started to say, she'd cut in "What about the FAMILIES?"

It's like, what about them? Thirty pretend people on the plane, none killed; more people will be interested in if the airport is closed and if fake terrorism is involved.

It was kind of funny, really. There really always is one (at least) in the scrum. (And Dana, I bet you’re thinking of the same name that I am thinking. Rich, isn’t it?) But I was asking all kinds of stuff, like that would show I'd done research on it and was gathering information from elsewhere, like asking the specs of the plane and all that.

It's supposed to be a live drill but I walked right up to the “plane,” through the “contaminated area” and could have gotten on if I wanted. No one told me to stay back.

When I mentioned that in the hot wash (the review right after on how everyone thinks it went) after, the first responder said oh, but in the real thing you wouldn't have been there. I said maybe, but I was and no one did anything.

He got really belligerent, saying no way would media get that close. I said again, well, I was. That was, after all, the point of the drill -- for it to be real. In real life, someone should have pointed me to where I could be safely. As it was, I wasn't interfering, but I was clearly not supposed to be there, but none of the responders asked me to move.

Later, the other pretend media were traipsing all around the “triage” area – where they had NO business, because they were interfering with rescue operations – and again, no one asked them to leave. Lessons learned - set up your perimeter!

But, even though it was a drill and I really didn’t have to write a story, it was a rush. I really do miss reporting, researching and writing.

I got to write one story this week, on one of the teams that came through. It’s on the website (www.hopevillagend.org) but I have a hard time pushing it on anyone else except the local paper.

The media is funny here. The local flood writer at the paper is absolutely awesome, but the rest of its staff, with few exceptions, isn’t full of crack journalists. The paper itself does, probably, as best it can with the resources it has, but news-wise, it’s kind of lacking.

There was this huge news conference about two weeks ago about a downtown project and the front-page story – with a jump – was a straight play-by-play of the newser. No analysis whatsoever. Just “X said that it would be good. ‘It will be good for the city,’ X said. Y also said it will be good for the city. ‘Yes, it is a good thing for our city,’ Y said.”

A straight report of what they said (in order of appearance, or, in the case of Z, non-appearance: “Z, who was not able to attend, had his remarks read by V.’” But nothing about what it really meant to the city.

Sometimes, I am thankful for the paper, though. I can send a news release and the paper will run it verbatim. Without checking a fact. To me, the fact-checking copy editor, that is just so very wrong, but for my purposes it’s very helpful.

We have two TV stations. One has had amazing coverage of the flood, including, at the time of the flood, broadcasting something like 80 hours straight – even as the homes of the news director, anchor and other reporters were flooding.

Their ongoing coverage has been phenomenal as well. We had a story today that was just well done. http://www.kxnet.com/story/22554644/hope-village-milestone  It was close to two minutes, which, really, is unheard of. (It was a good milestone, though. Very newsworthy.)

The other TV station is more of a starter station, but most things I get on there go to Bismarck, too. But I rarely get more than 30 seconds, no matter how much film they get.