12 August, 2008

Rath's Rants Redux

Something was amiss at POST last night. After following a link at The Daily Page to one of Jay Rath's rants that had disappeared in June, I discovered that the prodigal post had returned on Sunday. (It can be found here sans most formatting.) In addition, the Recent Posts column was populated with material from about six months ago. Refreshing the page brought up current stuff including the Rath's early summer defense of James Madison Park as well as a new one on some living stereotypes that populate our local TV.

I find this morning that history has repeated itself as another of his wonderful rants has undergone an extraordinary rendition. It was posted yesterday and had to do with certain blonde hostesses of a local TV station's morning news program and their general airheadedness.

Emily Mills found Rath's first rant which had disappeared in Google's cache but, unfortunately, it doesn't seem as if this second one got scooped up for posterity. A Google search brings up a hit at this link but, as of now, it returns "Story not found". All that remains is "I am far more uncomfortable when the weekday blondes make jokes about common…" I think the sentence finishes with something akin to "…words on the teleprompter that they don't understand". He criticizes these women for reveling in their ignorance and he also draws a distinction between reporters and presenters who merely read a teleprompter. I looked for blonde morning anchors at the websites of Madison's TV stations and I presume he was referring to Christine Bellport and Sarah Carlson of our NBC affiliate but I'm not positive. I believe he did mention the name of the meteorologist of the station which gave it away but, alas, I cannot recall.

Did anyone else catch it? Emily, do you know something about Google's cache that I don't?

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