Occupational hazards of a reporter-type? Or how big a twit can Trump be?

What should we think about the trio of news people who on Wednesday were all over the news reports because of incidents that prevented them from being able to report the news?

RAMOS: Will this become ongoing feud?

There is one difference, Jorge Ramos, the lead anchor of the Univision network’s national newscast, is still alive and kicking – compared to a reporter and camera operator for a Virginia television station who were shot and killed while doing a live report Wednesday morning.

WHAT WOULD HAVE been a forgettable live interview about tourism on WDBJ-TV turned into news when someone pulled out a pistol and fired shots at the reporter and camera operator.

Early reports indicate the gunman – whose face the camera operator may actually managed to catch on camera in his final moments of life – was a former employee of the Roanoke, Va.-based television station. This incident could be some sort of bitter grudge connected to that station.

So personally, I’m not feeling any increased fears that I’m going to be picked off by a sniper while interviewing someone in and around Gary, Ind. (a ‘day job’ of sorts for the local daily newspaper I have to earn money).

Unless I feel the need to have a chat with my editor to see if he has any enemies I should watch out for.

I PROBABLY SHOULDN’T joke about this incident, which if anything is merely evidence of the randomness of life. And the fact that not everything that happens makes any sense. Some of it is downright stupid.

But it means that reporter Alison Parker (she’d been at the television station for about a year and was just starting in the news business) won’t have the bright future she may, or may not, have been destined for.

Parker and Ward (below) have become ...

And as for camera operator Adam Ward, he won’t be leaving the television station in the near future to follow his fiancée to a better job at a station in Charlotte, N.C. (which is what CNN reported Wednesday morning).

The pair will be tied into the local memory of stupid happenings – at least until the next idiotic moment occurs.

YET FOR AS freely as I toss about the words “stupid” and “idiotic” in connection with this incident, I actually don’t think this moment is the dumbest thing that happened during the 24-hour period of Tuesday night into Wednesday.


... an unwitting pair

Instead, you'd have to check out the behavior of presidential buffoon Donald Trump – who at a press conference made a point of confronting, then having ejected, Ramos. Who was trying to bolster his credentials as a legitimate news person by actually going out and reporting on the presidential campaign!

 

Trump on Wednesday was claiming that Ramos was “ranting and raving like a mad man.” He also pointed out that Ramos eventually was readmitted to the press conference, and got a couple of questions answered (albeit with lame, pointless answers by Trump).

Yet I can’t help but be influenced by the images I saw on television not of a “mad man” reporter, but of a candidate behaving like a pompous buffoon. I wonder if his presidential fantasies include being able to have White House press corps reporter-types ejected at his will. Or maybe he's going to single out the Univision network (owned by the same people who operate NBC) throughout his campaign.

THAT WOULD MAKE Trump more of an un-American tyrant than the conservative ideologues ever accused Barack Obama of being. Unless you think much of the fact that Trump says he won’t eat Oreo cookies any longer because the company moved to Mexico! Which would have been the Trump “story of the day” had he not singled out Ramos for abuse.


TRUMP: How unpresidential!

I’m actually more offended by this story (Trump’s behavior, not the cookies) than I am of the two news people being killed by gunfire while trying to do their jobs. Because that has the potential to turn out to be such an isolated incident unlikely to occur with any regularity. Nobody’s siding with the gunman.

While I’m sure there are going to be some people (mostly those of a xenophobic bent) who are going to try to claim some sort of ‘heroic’ status for Trump because he stood up to the evil (as they perceive it) influence of Univision.

Which strikes me as a gross overstatement for a network of television stations that my grandmother used to watch for some of the cheesiest, and steamiest, soap operas anyone could ever envision.

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