You remember that game you played back in kindergarden? You know, that game telephone? Of course you do. It went a little something like this – kids are all seated in a circle, teacher whispers some “code phrase” to the first kid, they’re supposed to repeat the phrase to the person sitting next to them, and so on and so forth until the code phrase has come all the way around the circle to be repeated to the teacher by the last student. Typically the code phrase starts out as something like trucks and blocks, but by the time it’s made a trip around the room, it comes out the other end as something like monkey a** f***. You get the picture.
Now it’s expected to have such an extreme lapse in communication when you’re dealing with a group of 5 year olds. But it would be a little bit harder to picture amongst a group of professional adults. Or maybe not. From television station KTBS 3 in Shreveport:
“Rumors that [Terry] Bradshaw, a Shreveport native, had died of a heart attack swept through the area Thursday. One theory as to how the rumor got started was that a local radio station reported a wreck on the Terry Bradshaw Passway — part of the Inner Loop — and that was misunderstood to say Bradshaw had passed away.”
Regardless of how the rumor was started, we have come to find that Terry is alive and well (or however you describe him), and he was in fact playing golf somewhere in Mexico when all the rumors were started. Memo to media members: You have a lot of power. What you decide to broadcast reaches and effects the lives of millions of people. Is it too much to ask you to check the facts and do some INVESTIGATING journalism before you report things and cause a huge frenzy? Didn’t think so. As for the rest of this case…maybe we should examine what life would be like if Terry really had died?
