Originally posted by McColl:
Anything can happen, and you never know what you're dealing with until you check it out.
That's a good point, and I've had a couple of those that didn't sound that bad that I checked out for the hell of it, then found that there was something weird or unusual about them that made it newsworthy.
HOWEVER...
The problem comes in the newsroom, where the idiot producer puts the wreck into the rundown before you even get there to check anything. When you call in to tell them it's nothing, they want you to shoot it anyway because they're already counting on it. What you get is a meaningless story about a fender bender written to sound more serious than it really was.
For example, I was once dispatched to check out a wreck that the desk
thought they heard involved injured children. When I got there, there were no kids, just a couple of adults who had bumped their cars into each other. When I called it in, the producer first gave me the third degree about whether I had asked the emergency personnel on scene about the kids (I had, of course) and even suggested that I went to the wrong place and was at the wrong wreck (which I had also asked the firefighters, who told me that was the only wreck in the area). Then she told me to shoot it anyway.
When I got back, the line in the rundown was "child injured," and she wrote in her copy that "early reports of the accident indicated that children were involved." She didn't correct that information, but just left it hanging out there. I questioned whether that was misleading and was basically just told to shoot the video and leave the writing to the professionals.
THAT is why a "no car wreck" policy makes sense. Even when it's a fatality, it's rarely really earth shattering news except for the victims' families. Meanwhile, such a policy would help protect the integrity of the newscast from the stupidity of its own "journalists."