“The bubble-headed bleach-blonde comes on at five,
she can tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye…”
Meh.
Anyone who works crime long enough has to get hardened to what’s happening to survive. The photos might be a bit tone deaf but I’m more interested in whether they did solid reporting on scene than whether they took a selfie. I think being obsessed with appropriateness of a few incidental selfies is the kind thing that is in the opposite direction of sound reporting and nuance. We need to concentrate on substance and not on goading people into instant outrage over trivialities.
When it’s a job, it’s not so horrific anymore.
Lapse of judgement, because it goes out to people for whom it is not normal.
The night before his wedding, an uncle-to-be shared photos of my aunt with me. They were in medschool together. He went through the photos one by one, very lovingly, very detailed: “That’s the heart in her hands. Over here on the tray is… well, that’s a liver, already filleted.” etc etc etc.
We were both a little green around the gills, but for different reasons. It was all completely normal for him – they were pictures of his betrothed in her natural environment, and he loved everything about it and her.
But, yeah, don’t put those up on Facebook.
Beyond the 150 people you actually know, people arn’t real, and we shouldn’t expect all 9 billion people to directly care about one another.
This is a tragic story. If you make me cry over this one, then I’ll certainly be inured to that actual violence.
Which story is tragic? The reporters who post selfies at work, or the pictures of my aunt doing an autopsy?
They aren’t reporters but…
People took selfies in front of man’s attempted suicide as LA freeway was shut down
You really do have to become somewhat desensitized to those kinds of things if you’re dealing with them regularly or they’ll destroy you. While going to college in Arizona my neighbor was an EMT and worked a night shift and would get home in the morning around the same time I was getting up for school. We would often each sit out on our decks off of our apartments right next to each other and eat some breakfast and shoot the bull before I took off for classes and he went to bed. One morning I came out on the deck to eat some cereal and he was sitting on his deck smoking a cig and eating some eggs and bacon. I asked him how the shift went and he told me they showed up to a suicide where someone had put a shotgun in their mouth and pulled the trigger. While I’m eating my cereal he looks over at me and without a hint of emotion and mentions how the shotgun blast cleaned out nearly everything in her head. He then said “Hell, you could of sat your bowl of cereal inside the back of her head and eaten out of it.” Needless to say I was done with breakfast for the morning at that point. Yeah, that was my lesson on how desensitized one can get to atrocities around you when you’re dealing with them day in day out. He was a good guy, but he had so many of those kinds of stories that all I gotta say is thankfully there are people like him out there that can deal with that kind of stuff day in and day out and not lose it, because I don’t think I have the kind of constitution needed to deal with those kinds of horrors on a daily basis and not have them eventually overburden me.
By definition it’s not a selfie if someone else takes it.
People in the thread are talking a lot about becoming desensitised to horror and it becoming a “new normal”. I actually think that the original tweet goes one step further than that - the whole point of her tweet is to sarcastically say “Isn’t it great working in the news? I spend my Friday at the scene of someone’s death! Smile!”. The hashtag also indicates that the tweet is about something unpleasant, which is ironically juxtaposed with the smiling photograph.
It’s not an insensitive lapse in judgement, or the result of desensitisation; it’s a deliberate use of irony to make a point about the unpleasantness of news reporting. Maybe that’s a charitable interpretation, but it’s there.
I watch the local news here in Orlando everyday and I wonder why the hell they put every reporters twitter handle the screen. First, how may people give a shit. Second do you really want this barely functional airheads free to represent your brand online.
And people move the fuck on from the desensitized bullshit. She’s a vapid on air reporter who is only out to promote herself.
my thoughts exactly. I notice people that like to create a bigger scene than the original issue was to begin with.
The reality is that there are many things to be upset at in this world and many people casually glance over them once and move on.
Oh also the locla media down here loves jumping all over politicians and other officials for every little thing they do on social media so my sympathy for this dumb move is nonexistent.
I love that you complain about desensitization in one sentence, and then pass judgement on a total stranger based purely on a decontextualized news story in the next. She’s “only” out to do any single given thing in your highly stereotypical presumptions about her because you can’t conceive of her as a real human being any more than she could those murder victims.
I misread and thought your uncle was showing you pictures of him doing an autopsy of your aunt…
No she’s a real human being, who makes money of others misery and posts to her Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram account about “hey two people murdered, but thank god it’s Friday.”
And again if a local Democratic politician had done this what would FOX 35 Orlando being doing right now?
They jump all over this kind of crap if the mud slinging fits their agenda.
Oh I should also point out that Fox 35 Orlando runs full on TMZ promos and live feeds from the TMZ newsroom as news stories.
Woman smiles inappropriately. Public shaming ensues. Our not liking her employer has nothing to do with it.
You aren’t really convincing me with that tu quoque argument.
Granted, you may be able to make an argument that in the aggregate that the reporter and the news station are terrible, but I’m not going to jump on a single twitter post and get all outraged over tone. We really need to back down from the instant, knee jerk outrage reactions and get back to thinking things through.
When I think about inappropriate behavior, I think about MASH:
Hawkeye: What do you mean observation? The only thing I want to observe in Tokyo is what a good time I’m having.
Sherman: You need tests.
Hawkeye: Oh, come on! You know I was only putting you on about Frank Burns.
Sherman: Of course. But you have done some pretty bizarre things.
Hawkeye: Gee, I can’t imagine why. I’m 12,000 miles away from home, sewing together soldiers who aren’t old enough to shave, while people I don’t know keep dropping bombs on the building where I work, which has a big red cross painted on the roof. Maybe I should just hire a band and have the whole thing catered.
That’s pretty much what the show was about.
I never worked in a newsroom; I worked production in various small-town newspapers. But did I see and hear inappropriate humor? Oh, absolutely. When a particularly heinous child porn case was going through and our devoutly Christian editor–along with the rest of the courtroom–was inadvertently exposed to CP, you bet there was some black humor afterward.
When one of the local factories shut down and the inevitable unending Domestic Dispute calls kept coming over the scanner late at night, and I was working a late shift with a reporter, after one particularly dangerous-sounding one she said, “Well, sounds like a good times at [name of town!]” Then we made the mistake of having a serious conversation about it… 
Even though the news people aren’t first responders, they still have to respond to it. And sometimes they get to see the same thing the paramedics and cops get to see. It’s either laugh it off, or go crazy and/or blow your brains out.
I cannot say what was said when someone burned to death in a fire and they could be smelled during the fire. Nope nope nope. Some things should not be repeated. At least my love of bacon survived unscathed.
Going to medicine, the day my father-in-law was taken off of life support, a young lady in scrubs came in the room with a mop bucket and made a really off-color joke. I started to get mad, until I found out she was there to clean up, well, after. Another came in, they exchanged another off-color joke; the next one was removing the feeding tube. I went from angry to sympathetic in nothing flat. I’m sure they were just there to make a living, and knowing they were playing an active part in someone’s death must tax a person in a way I hope I never know.
Freakin’ amen. All this story seems to have generated is a lot of sympathy, a couple of misogynist comments, a non sequitur and a tu quoque.
EDIT: Predictable YouTube comments, on the first video I found about it:
Stupid Puertorican CUM-DUMPSTER!!
I’m going to her rape/murder scene to snap a Smiling Pic with the Homiez!!
Or Take a Growling Shit on your Mama & Papi’s Grave & post it on Google+
“There’s something wrong with the world today,”
what a fucking filthy mexicunt whore. And we allow these jewish cocksucking pawns to enter the border just to please the multiculturalism agenda of the jewish cancer?
This one again proves these modern day women are nothing but sluts who dont give a fuck but for likes & comments on their social media accounts. These hoes aint loyal.
Thank you, Boing Boing, for at least not lowering yourself to Youtube’s level. You got that, at least.
