Live television news is the best. When things go wrong, there's no turning back, no edit button, no jumping to commercial before the damage is done. Generally speaking, it's reporter gaffes behind the desk that are the most common, a slip of the tongue that morphs a regular word into an inappropriate one. Not this time.
The American Northwest has been hit with a ton of snowfall in the last week, and that means people in places like Seattle and Portland are getting chances to participate in activities like sledding for the first time in a while. And when crowds disperse to the best hills in the city, reporters will follow. Seattle KING 5 reporter Meg Coyle was just doing her job at the base of one of those hills. Then things got uncomfortably awkward when a sledder confronted her.
Now, maybe we've lost our sense of the pulse of the people, but isn't the sledder overreacting a bit? Sure, no one's rushing out to grab helmets for sledding, but Coyle is making a perfectly valid point. There are clearly cars driving by at the bottom of the hill, and ice does tend to make any activity more dangerous. It's not as if Coyle marched to the hill with a police force and demanded all sledders without helmets vacate the premises immediately.
At best, it would be fair to call Coyle a bit of a worrier, but "killjoy" seems a bit excessive, no? She was hardly a black cloud hovering over a joyous occasion. Most people within earshot would have probably ignored her anyway. Now, in the sledder's defense, maybe something was said off camera that we don't know about. But if not, hello over-reactor, go back to sledding and let the freezing reporter get back to doing her job.
Max Thompson is the Senior Editor at ThePostGame. Follow him on Twitter.
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