As I was watching ABC’s eleventh special on Michael Jackson on Tuesday (yes, I mean there were 11 Michael Jackson specials on ABC on Tuesday), a strangely familiar panic pounded my temples. For the first time I’d ever seen on an ABC News program, the “lower thirds” (person/place identifiers) on the screen had the same Chyron typeface that I’d checked for 5 years on Channel One News.
Of all the stimulating stresses that comprised my Fact Checker/Editor job, the one which most resembled tightrope walking on slippery shoes was spell-checking the Chyron operator. (Getting anchors to properly pronounce world leaders was a worthy second.) These days, most programs have dropped the middleman: the info goes straight from a computer (with its OWN spell-check) to the screen. Our tired-and-true method – and we were tired, since this was just about our last daily duty - involved his manual input and my mental output.
Fortunately, both Donnie and I had been spell-checked, um, forcibly, by slap-happy sisters – the only digital discipline we had had was a ruler rap to our digits. Unfortunately, Donnie took a lot of days off, and I was often at the mercy of operators more on to orthodontia than orthography.
Not that I was perfect - I once forgot to buy a vowel during an Anna Kournikova exercise segment (don’t know how I got distracted). But I always remembered my Rule Number One: Never Leave the “L” out of “Public.”
And so I turned off my TV after I started lecturing it (“No! Gary I-N! Don’t spell out Indiana!”). And I wondered, as I was saying good night to the Man in the Mirror, whether I would wake, for old times’ sake, needing a shoulder to Chyron.