I'm gonna tell you how stupid many of these MSM people are from personal experience:
In about 1985, a fellow dental school classmate of mine was involved in the production of a product which was purported to assist in the diagnosis of periodontal disease by sampling the fluid in the gingival crevice. That is the little space between a tooth surface and the gum which overlays it. Normally between the teeth this is a 3mm space under the gums.
The Philly Channel 6 people decided they wanted to do a segment on this so they contacted my buddy looking for a dentist who would explain this on air and demonstrate. Guess who got the call?
So the station’s official medical reporter showed up. I’d watched her for years report on everything from vaccinations to major surgery and she spoke from her script in knowledgeable language and assertive, doctor/professor-like tone.
I was not prepared for the sheer idiocy to follow. Before we went on camera, she asked me how this works. I explained using simple language that the kit requires a paper point -visualize the last 10mm of a toothpick but made of rolled paper - to be gently inserted between the teeth under the gums for two seconds and removed. I had to re-explain it three times. Then, she informed me that I was to perform this upon her and that she was scared to death
My practice included many dental phobics and so I used all my skills to explain to this six-foot tall, dyed blond, second runner—up in some beauty contest who I thought was extremely well educated and polished based upon my viewing of her reporting that it was gentler than using dental floss. Not only did she clearly not believe me but she threatened that if I hurt her, she was gonna do an exposé of me rather than the diagnostic method.
I put her in a chair, video camera rolling, touched her tooth and gum with the paper point, put the point in the vial provided and said, “We’re done.” She thought I was lying to her. I showed her the point which was clearly dampened with her gingival/sulcular fluid and she kind of accepted my statement as truth.
After she left, one of my staff at the time who was a really sharp South Philly lady said that I had to talk to her as though she were five or six years old. Of course they edited the video so that she was self-assured and confident and it was just another breezy day in her medicalesque career, slumming with a dentist that particular day. And again of course, when she handed off her segment to the anchor, there was the usual cliched dentist/pain/blood/misery/expense bull which is de riguer for any dental issue. As an aside, they don’t do that for podiatric surgery which hurts horribly post-operatively as well as the delivery of anesthetic in the foot.
I never watched her reporting the same way again. But nearly everyone in the Delaware Valley remained impressed with her knowledgeable frames of reference and of course, her dramatic good looks.
The male reporters are the exact same, but that’s a story for another day which I shall relate in the near future.
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...goes way back to the Winter Olympics in which speed skater Dan Jansen had so many heart-breaking falls. A reporter asked Jansen's coach how much of an influence the slipperiness of the ice was in these falls.
With a withering glare, and a voice dripping with contempt, the coach succinctly replied, "Ice is always slippery."
I eagerly await your next stories.
