| | |  Travel Writers' Resources | June 2009 
Newscaster, Once Mocked, Now Casts Mock News
 Tim Arango - New York Times
go to original
June 24, 2009
In the days before mock news became a genre in itself, Bobbie Battista, the ever-present face on CNN during the 1980s and ’90s, was often parodied in segments of “Saturday Night Live.”
These days Ms. Battista, 56, is in on the joke herself.
Nearly eight years after leaving CNN, the network that made her famous, Ms. Battista has resurfaced in the news game as an anchor for Onion News Network, the online video arm of The Onion, the satirical newspaper.
The topics Ms. Battista has tackled in her Onion spots are Despondex, a drug for those who are too happy — “a huge step forward in the battle against exuberance,” she deadpans into the camera; Franz Kafka International Airport ranking last in customer satisfaction (the average delay is 31 hours longer than the next worse airport); and the discovery of the fossilized remains of the sexually predatory dinosaur (“a pervatasaurus”).
“Odd jobs always seem to find me,” Ms. Battista said in a telephone interview from Atlanta, where she lives and where she hosted “Talk Back Live,” the CNN viewer-participation program.
Ms. Battista said she initially had qualms about how joining The Onion would be perceived by former colleagues.
“It occurred to me that some would say, ‘Oh, how the mighty have fallen,’ ” she said. “I thought about that, but I said, ‘Hey, why not?’ ” She also considered her (low) opinion of the state of cable news today and saw that the space between real and fake news was shrinking.
“You watch the news today, and you don’t know what is real,” she said. “When I was doing newscasts at CNN, people would come up to me and say, ‘That story can’t be real.’ Now the lines are really getting blurred.” She mentioned a recent segment she saw about “lingerie football” on a cable news show. “My mouth was hanging open. How does this belong on the news?”
Ms. Battista’s work for The Onion is not a full-time job. She will visit New York a couple of times a year to tape segments; her second trip will be in August.
Unlike Comedy Central’s “Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” in which the correspondents appear to be in on the joke, the effect the producers of The Onion videos seek is full-on earnestness from its anchors.
“We always like to make what we do as much like real news as possible,” said Will Graham, the executive producer of The Onion News Network. “The more plausible it is, the funnier it is.”
Ms. Battista said that wasn’t what she expected. “That was very hard, I originally thought it would be nice to give a really sarcastic delivery,” she said. “But they wanted it with seriousness and gravitas.
“It is so hard not to crack up. There were many takes.”
The Onion is something of a pioneer in the fake news industry, a precursor to the popular television shows like “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central. The Onion was founded in 1988, eight years before the “The Daily Show” first went on the air, then hosted by Craig Kilborn, Jon Stewart’s predecessor.
The Onion only began producing videos in 2007 and earlier this year won a Peabody Award. Mr. Graham said two of his staffers had gone on to jobs at real cable news networks: one to Fox, and another to CNN.
“At this point it’s like MSNBC, Fox and CNN are so ridiculous themselves, we just want to be on the other line of that,” Mr. Graham said.
Mr. Graham said viewers often mistake the news clips — especially when they are seen on YouTube — as real. One in particular was the story “Child Bankrupts Make-A-Wish Foundation With Wish for Unlimited Wishes.” Mr. Graham said he received a letter from the foundation saying that the story did wonders for fund-raising.
The Onion’s flagship newspaper has not been impervious to the financial troubles afflicting the industry in general. Earlier this year the company stopped distributing the paper in San Francisco and Los Angeles because of flagging advertising sales. It still distributes it in nine cities: New York; Washington; Milwaukee and Madison, Wis.; Minneapolis and St. Paul; Denver and Boulder, Colo.; and Austin, Tex.
Ms. Battista meanwhile is also working on a start-up, Next Step Media Group, that will produce reality shows. She spoke willingly about her former employer CNN, which she said was caught between Fox News and MSNBC.
“I’m always going to have a soft spot for CNN,” she said. “But I think they are in a real unenviable position. While they adhere to the core values of CNN, the competition goes to the extreme left and right.” |
|
| |
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us