A whole bunch of years ago I arrived home after working late to find a tv news car parked across my driveway, so I marched down the street and banged on the door of the van until the tech came out, and told him the car had better be moved immediately - his response was "we're doing a story" and I told him I didn't care, that I was calling the cops.Keith B wrote:The press felt they had the right to set up anywhere, with lights on their camera trucks and generators running at all hours of the night. The neighbors got feed up with it and their tolerance levels went way down.
Needless to say, you push them and they will push back, especially the media.
Moments later the reporter came out of a nearby house and moved her car, while mumbling imprecations about "doing a story" and then after I got into my driveway, she moved her car right back across it. I told her she had better get it out of there or I would call the cops, and she got all snotty but finally moved it around the corner and parked in front of a fire plug.
While she went inside and finished her story, I called the cops and they came and towed the car out of the illegal spot, I also prevailed on them to speak to the guys in the van about their illegal parking job, in an intersection across a crosswalk, so they had to shut down and move. When she discovered this perfidy she was suitably incensed and blamed me.
The story that was so important? The overcrowding of the houses on ours and surrounding blocks due to a recent demographic change where absentee landlords had been buying up properties and turning them into rentals for the college students, and the parking problems it was causing. The reporter never mentioned her own illegal parking.
Sometimes the press is just way too impressed with their own importance, and my incident was almost 30 years ago.
I could tell many other tales of being at fire, accident, and police scenes with the press deciding they didn't have to follow rules that everyone else did.