Read My Clips

[[L A U G H A B L E]] * Television news is all about brevity: keep the stories tight and punchy in order to keep the action moving, so that viewers won’t surf away to something more interesting. But concision can have unintended consequences--sometimes humorous ones. As Snopes.com’s Urban Legends page tells it, Britain’s Sky News, reporting on the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, captioned--with inadvertent candor--a video clip of George W. Bush declaring that the August 29 storm was “one of the worst disasters to hit the U.S.” But whoops, some caption-writer forgot the all-important quotation marks:


The funniest thing about this may be that Sky TV is owned principally by Rupert Murdoch, the arch-conservative, Australia-born media mogul who also happens to own America’s ardently pro-Bush FOX News Channel.