Microphone check, micro, microphone checka.
The press has deservedly been called out for dumb shit and, as BBD once rap-sang, “Ain’t nothing changed.” Unfortunately, white folks gonna white. This time, it was a reporter so doggedly trying to get a soundbite that she failed to see a family’s real suffering.
Well, one mother in Houston—a black mother, of course—shut that shit down immediately. After the very well-meaning stupid ass CNN reporter asked her how she and her family were faring—during one of the deadliest rainstorms in recent memory—it went left. On the air.
Danielle, a woman who had just arrived at a Houston shelter in the middle of Hurricane Harvey, was obviously distraught as she spoke about being in a house for five days without food or lights. She then recounted having to venture out into a storm with her children to get help, and was clearly growing more and more upset.
But this reporter just kept pushing.
“Now, you’re with your children. We’ve heard stories about mothers trying to save their children from the rushing waters,” the reporter began. “Can you tell that—”
The clearly exhausted woman, after initially explaining that she “had to go through 4 feet of water to go get [her children] food on the first day,” with her young daughter holding on to her, just lost it—and it was bombs over Baghdad.
“Y’all just sitting here seeing people at their worst, like, that’s not the smartest thing to do. People are really breaking down in here, with cameras and microphones trying to ask us what the fuck is wrong with us,” she said, her voice cracking.
The reporter started to apologize. “So, so sorry. Sorry,” she mumbled.
“Are you really trying to understand with the mic still in my face and me shivering cold?” the woman asked incredulously. “With my kids wet, and you still have the microphone in my face?”
Cut to studio. The reporter’s equally clueless co-anchor, trying to smooth things over, laid out this worthless platitude: “It sounds like you have a very upset family there.”
Tales from when the live news gets live. ’Cause they got a live one.