Saturday, April 09, 2005
Royal Wedding Coverage Roundup
Source: New York Times
> Like children released after hours of sitting up straight at a school assembly, news anchors moved from the Vatican to Windsor Castle wriggling and giggling in relief. CNN sent a veteran correspondent, Walter Rodgers, to a Cornish village to glean the reactions of the locals to their new duchess of Cornwall. "Bloody trollop, isn't she?" an elderly villager replied.
> Before the ceremony at Windsor's Guildhall, MSNBC diabolically rebroadcast, in its entirely, the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer as it was covered by Tom Brokaw and Jane Pauley on NBC. The network's live commentary on his second marriage was a little less glowing. Tina Brown, who hosts a talk show on MSNBC, noted that the bride looked quite a bit like the governess who raised Prince Charles as a boy, but explained that there was nothing abnormal about it. "Englishmen always marry their nannies," she stated briskly.
> Fox News spent so many minutes on Prince Charles's choice for the traditional wedding dessert: a fruitcake.
This from an e-mailer: "Even the NYT can be wrong if they indeed did say that Tina Brown hosts a show on MSNBC. Tina Brown hosts a show on their sister channel, CNBC."
UPDATE: 4/10
Source: Baltimore Sun
> No one was more consistently aggressive or came closer to mocking the proceedings than Anderson Cooper, who was co-anchoring CNN's coverage. It was as if he was trying to imitate the tart, satiric tone of Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's Daily Show rather than anchor coverage of a news event for a global audience.
As police were shown leading away a streaker shortly after the civil wedding ceremony, Cooper commented: "I'm convinced he's a member of the wedding party, and he's being taken back to the party."
In response to an on-screen commentator noting the queen's absence from the civil ceremony, Cooper offered: "Ah, but she was there in spirit. Her portrait was hanging in the room." The sarcasm was a setup for more discussion about how stern she looked in the portrait.
Then, as the CNN cameras focused on a statue of the queen (holding scepter and globe) outside the Guildhall where the civil ceremony was held, Cooper kept on: "That's a large statue of her presiding with her staff and, what is that, her big ball? I'm not sure, but it's a symbol of something."
> "I feel so functional now," Fox News co-anchor E.D. Hill said in response to a report on the queen's family. "Compared to that family, everyone is so normal."
Commenting on Parker Bowles' former husband's attendance, Fox co-anchor Jon Scott rhetorically asked Hill, "Wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall in that receiving line?" After a brief silence, he added, "Though I'm told there won't be a receiving line."
> No one was nastier than MSNBC analyst Victoria Mather, who responded to a question about the possibility of Prince Charles kissing his bride in public after the civil ceremony: "Would you want to see two old people kissing?"
In describing the kind of lipstick and makeup Parker Bowles was wearing, Mather said, "It's sort of like making up an old wall with metallic paint."
# posted by ATN @ 3:04 PM 
