Monday, January 5, 2009

JIZELLE WAS A 'ROLED' MODEL?

It seems that every tv reporter is their own producer and editor. Otherwise some of the presentation mistakes that are uttered on air would not be allowed to pass.
Take for example Miss Nadine Hackett of IETV. On Monday evening, Miss Hackett told her audience that Jizelle Salandy was a "roled" model. How that passed the editor we don't know.
Then in his story on Miss Salandy, Robin Morais said "...the young pugilist...". OK Robin. Kudos for using a big word for boxer. You have probably been waiting a long time to use that word on air. But do you think 90% of your audience figured out what you were talking about? They probably said to themselves, "A young what? But I thought she was a boxer!?"

Then Melissa Wong pronounced the shortlisted male DPP candidate's name as Roger "Gaspurd". Steups. Again, do you have a deaf editor?
And we can't quite recall who did the story on Riana Pariag, the young woman who was kidnapped (it was really forgettable), but the main impression of that story was that there seemed to be no indication that the body of Devika Lalman had been found.
Why do we say that? Well when we saw the same story on CNC 3, C News and TV6, the first thing they said was that Miss Lalman's body had been found, and all the stories included soundbites from the dead girl's sister. They also included secondary soundbites from Miss Pariag's mother.
But the IE story focussed solely on Miss Pariag's mother and did not carry any soundbites from Miss Lalman's sister, and there seemed no obvious clue that Miss Lalman's body had been found. Please correct us if we are wrong.

Otto Carrington of CNC 3, why did your cameraman ask the young woman from St Jude's home to pose with her boxing gloves in her school uniform and pretend that she was sparring with that hanging thing boxers practice with (do you Otto know the name of it?)?
The shot looked so staged, and especially since we caught the young woman glancing at the camera as if she was awaiting more instructions from the cameraman. Maybe he should take up movie directing.
And on the same issue, Vinod Narwani, please ask your editor to be more careful as the soundbites from Buxo Potts and Harry Ragoonanan were mixed up. Your intro to Buxo's soundbite was this: "So what will become of her belts?" Yet the soundbite that comes up is that of Mr Ragoonanan telling us Jizelle had a half glass of champagne.
Then you gave an intro to that soundbite, but Mr Potts came up telling us about the belts.
And your colleague James Saunders sounded only fractionally slower for his piece on foreign football, but unfortunately he said something about "fort round clashes".

Staying with sport...the game of media musical chairs has begun as Kent Fuentes (formerly of CNC 3's sports desk) is now reporting for C News. He's spreading his wings out from under Roger Sant. Well Kent make sure you ask Charlene Ramdhanie for some pointers on how to sound less staccato. Your story (on St Jude's?) wasn't bad, but every sentence sounded like a story by itself. Miss Ramdhanie had the same problem some years ago, but it seems that she's learned to read with a more conversational tone.
But then again we haven't seen or heard Miss Ramdhanie in a while. Is she still at C News? Anyway Kent you get the drift.
So Roger Sant who is left at your sports desk? Just Astil Renn? Wow, you and Mrs Sant need to do some hard recruiting, and fast.

As an aside, can anyone remember when Laura (her name was pronounced Abjornsen) by either Miss Maharaj at IE (or was it Golda Lee at C News?) was the weather presenter at TTT? Now she's got a big post as the Communications Director at Caribbean Airlines.
So there's hope yet for Eric Mackie, Ean Wallace and Damian Salandy?