News Bloopers That Actually Happened On Air

April 2024 ยท 2 minute read

Back in the halcyon days of enormous hair and fuzzy VHS recordings, in a time before "local news" meant "terrible graphics," two reporters from News 4 Reno managed to wreck three whole stories with uncontrollable fits of the giggles. The hilarious thing that got them so worked up they nearly collapsed? Uhh ... the plague.

Yeah. That plague. The one that killed over a third of medieval Europe and still infects several Americans a year. For whatever reason, it triggers a bout of laughter in the video above, one that then infects the entire studio, passing from Patient Zero Laura Stephenson to co-host Jeff Moore with all the virulence of government-engineered super-Ebola.

It doesn't help that poor Moore's follow-up story includes the line: "right now, no one seems to know whether or not the truck driver was meant to run over the inmate, as he was trying to escape," which triggers a fresh fit of giggles. Impressively, Moore manages to keep a straight face while apologizing, before collapsing again the moment he returns to the story.

While the laughter in the News 4 Reno studio is seemingly inexplicable, one YouTuber has a pretty convincing theory. Plague is also known as "beaver fever" because it infects a number of beavers each year. "Beaver fever" is also slang for someone who really, really likes beaver and, yup, that is totally a euphemism. Realizing this in a high-pressure news environment could have been enough to make both Stephenson and Moore crack up.

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