Conservative News-speak, Unplugged. (Do we laugh or cry?)

[The Backlash Cometh]

Writers who understand the power of active verbs will cringe when they read this. But it's important to understand because it explains the grunting style that we've come to learn from Fox News.


"News Reports for Ultra-Short Attention Spans."

At 5:30 p.m. last Monday, Shepard Smith, the 40-year-old host of Fox News Channel's "Fox Report," was hunched over his computer in the company's bustling Midtown headquarters, poring over the script for his evening broadcast, and searching for verbs. Mr. Smith, let it be known, does not like verbs. Whenever he finds one, he crinkles his brow in disgust like a man who has discovered a dribble of food on his tie. He taps furiously at his keyboard, moves the cursor to the offending word and deletes it, or else adds "ing," turning the verb into a participle and his script into the strange shorthand that passes for English these days on cable news:

"Amazon.com celebrating a birthday! The Internet company 10 years old."

"Texas! A school bus and two other vehicles colliding in Dallas. The bus rolling over on its side."

"Outrage in the Middle East! A vow of revenge after an assassination and reportedly threatening the United States. Tonight — how real the threat?"

Shepard Smith! Explaining to a reporter, why not the verbs?

"We don't communicate in full sentences anyway," Mr. Smith said as he continued working through his script. "We don't need all those words. And it allows us to go faster."

Mr. Smith is all about speed. He typically blasts through 80 or so items of news during his hourlong broadcast, which, with its zooming cameras, swooshing sound effects and Mr. Smith's jokey, frat-boy delivery, acquired while he was a student at Ole Miss, resembles a broadcast of ESPN's "SportsCenter" more closely than it does "NBC Nightly News." He seldom does interviews on his program, fearful that slow-talking guests might gum up the works, and dispatches from correspondents are always ad-libbed, for freshness. During commercials, Mr. Smith obsessively scours news sites on his laptop, looking for any breaking nugget. Jay Wallace, Mr. Smith's producer, said he wants the program to seem perpetually as if it might veer out of control. "I want it to be like a train that's about to come off the tracks," he likes to say.

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http://nytimes.com/2004/03/28/fashion/28SHEP.html?8hpib

[Catfight]

1. I couldn't finish this article

it's more than 3 sentences....

[theoceansnerves]

2. ugh

that prick ran over someone in a parking lot back in 2000 when the election was being stolen...and he still has a job on tv. nice!

[Ohio Dem]

3. Don't you mean . . .

that prick running over someone in a parking lot back in 2000, election steeling...and still having a job on tv. nice!

What a moran!

[The Backlash Cometh]

7. Lol!

*

[The Backlash Cometh]

8. Did he verb when he mis-spoke about Jennifer Lopez?

I can't remember what he said exactly.

[DBoon]

4. From 1984..

"It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in the true sense: it made a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck."

[Cat Atomic]

5. Oh my god. Shepard Smith is Parsons from 1984.

[bushbegone04]

6. Shep Smith on ET last week

I beleive it was Wednesday that Entertainment Tonight did a feature on him - they filmed him in his loft (which I must admit was beautiful) and then followed him around a typical day. If he wasn't working for Faux I could like the guy, he's kinda funny sometimes.

I had no idea he hit someone with his car?