Thursday, July 21, 2011

New York Media Ephemera: Inside City Hall and the Political Rundown

We live in South Brooklyn, of course, so we get Cablevision, which means that NY1, Time Warner's flagship 24 hour local news station, is on Channel 8 (there is no Channel 1 on Cablevision.)  Anyway, one of the more delightful aspects of NY1 is the evening Inside City Hall program (aka Road to City Hall during election season) with Errol Louis, who has added a lot of style, panache and critical analysis to New Yorkers' evening news habits. If you are a New Yorker, despite its occasional foible and stumbles, NY1 remains a major part of your TV viewing diet in keeping up with the 24 hour news cycle.

And, of course, Inside City Hall, every Wednesday night, features the Political Rundown where "two very opinionated people" give their take on the news of the day in one minute segments. Gerson Borrero of El Diario, also a news analyst for NY1, and Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, who also co-hosts with Borrero,  a daily radio program, mix it up, with a lot of camp and theater, roughly, but not always, adhering to a liberal versus conservative stance. Last night, in one sequence commenting on the Rupert Murdoch testimony in the UK on the phone hacking story, Sliwa hit himself with a cream pie. In reviewing the clip on the NY1 website, in viewing it to the end, there is an outtake which took me by surprise (thank you,Johnny Thunders, for the headsup).. You can see the clip here, the outtake is at the end.

Haven't re-watched the whole clip, but when Sliwa threw the pie during the earlier broadcast, host Louis, in surprise, exclaimed "Jesus Christ!" A decision may have been made to replace a portion of the tape with the outtake to clean up the language for the otherwise unflappable host. Hard to tell -- it sounds like the exclamation, at the very least, was toned down in the edit. That's not the most interesting point, though --  What was most notable for this viewer was to realize,  in the outtake, how produced the show actually is, although it presents the versimilitude of being a live, unreheased program. New York and our media - ya gotta love it.

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