Want to know why most TV and radio news anchors and reporters do a really lousy job — which is the reason you can hardly remember anything they say after the broadcast?

Here's the answer. Most broadcast journalists secretly believe that their real selves, their real personas, are inadequate. That the way they communicate in real life isn’t good enough.

So instead of trying to communicate like human beings talking to other human beings, they imitate other anchors and reporters they regard as professionally successful.

Instead of communicating, they pretend. And act. Badly.

They confuse speed, volume and bad acting with energy, authority and sincerity. It doesn’t work. They hardly communicate at all. And they don’t fool anyone except, maybe, their mothers, stoned teenagers and the people in charge of broadcast journalism.

These anchors and reporters seem to think they’re addressing large crowds and behave appropriately to addressing large crowds.

But TV works best when the performer talks to just one person about things that matter. Someone who the performer knows and respects. Someone to whom the journalist tries to bring knowledge and the understanding of that knowledge.

Even in the worst TV sitcom, performers are expected to try to see the scenes, think the thoughts, feel the emotions in whatever the hell they’re talking about.

But most broadcast journalists just read. Usually loud. And usually fast. And reading loud and fast at people is the least efficient form of communication humans have ever invented.


(Samantha Jones is the Canadian TV journalist who wrote the erotic memoir "My Life In The Great Sexual Window" on sale at www.lulu.com and Amazon.)