News

In the 1987 movie Broadcast News, Aaron Altman, played by Albert Brooks, has one shot at the anchor's seat, only to be beset by a rabid case of flop sweat.

William Hurt's character, the slick but shallow Tom Grunick, later describes Altman's moist meltdown as unprecedented, "unless you count 'Singin' in the Rain.'"

Nowadays, there's much precedent. Video-sharing sites like YouTube are ensuring that every TV anchor mishap is preserved and distributed. No, the onset of online video has not been kind to television personalities.

Reporting for a Ball State University news program, Brian Collins ran through the day's sports news in such awkward fashion that even Ricky Gervais would squirm watching.-millions have now witnessed Collins' disaster and his catch phrase "Boom goes the dynamite" has become part of the lexicon.

Nearly 400,000 people have watched a compilation of TV news bloopers on YouTube. Among the videos included are the now infamous local news woman who falls hard while reporting on grape stomping, as well as Michelle Kosinksi's canoe paddling in ankle-deep flooding in New Jersey — as seen on The Daily Show.

Verbal slips can make a big splash too, like one news anchor who introduced a segment on a blind mountain climber by accidentally saying he was gay. An anchor for Sky News misunderstood breaking news on playwright Harold Pinter. She announced he had died when he had in fact just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What a comeback!

Some mistakes can look like outtakes from Will Ferrell's Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Stephanie Soviar, reporting live for an NBC affiliate in Indiana, crashed an ATV in just seconds.

Cheryl Stewart for NBC's Portland affiliate attempted an ollie on a skateboard during an interview with an extreme sports athlete. When her trick didn't go quite as planned, she received scant assistance from the BMX bike pro.

Still others are remarkable for their peculiar tangents. NY1's Roger Clark was caught doing a James Earl Jones impression from Coming to America.

And then there are the weathermen. Gesturing blindly at their green screens while attempting to predict the future, they have long been the most parodied figures of any nightly newscast.

King of them all is a Miami weatherman. A cockroach's seemingly innocuous decision to crawl up this man's leg during a live broadcast resulted in the glee of hundreds of thousands.

Still, you can't help but feel sympathy for the thousands of anchors, reporters and weathermen that populate the morning shows and local news programs. Without their pratfalls, flop sweats and catch phrases, YouTube would be a less joyful place.