A busy day in Public Radioland as the 19 Minutes staff was tasked to cover a press conference held by the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, at which they sounded the alarm about proposed changes to the way parks are managed - concerns that air pollution would increase, and that enhanced motor vehicle access would further detract from the "natural quiet" the Park Service is supposed to protect. Pretty meaty story, even though the Park Service has, in part, diffused it by noting that the draft has already been discarded.
Here at 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters, we had two major complaints in covering this telephone news conference:
One was that the documents they were purporting to leak today were actually leaked yesterday to the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, which left the rest of us looking for a good second-day angle.
But even more annoyingly, we were requested to dial into it a few minutes early, which subjected us to five minutes of Muzak, which today consisted of a medley of "hits" from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. This means that for the 19 Minutes staff, the legacy of today's news conference is having the song "Rise" stuck in our head for the next 18 hours.
Thanks a lot, CNSPR. Talk about ruining the natural quiet...
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4 comments:
Hey, don't knock the coalition too hard. They're trying their best. There are a lot of organizations out there that wanted that document to get out, and I'm guessing they were simply beat to the punch. Don't let operational snafus obscure the message of what the Bush administration is trying to do to our national parks.--www.nationalparkstraveler.com.
As I say, it's a pretty meaty story - and it'll likely serve as a nice jumping-off point for a discussion about the future mission of the parks as a whole. I just wish it wasn't playing out with a Herb Alpert soundtrack. (I mean, was Grofé's "Grand Canyon Suite" too much to ask?
I'd even settle for Copland's "Appalachian Spring", and a close parenthesis on the previous comment.
Still, though, probably better than a muzak version of Gino Vanelli's "People Gotta' Move"...
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