Local TV Station Gets It All Wrong, Chucks 'Tee Zielsdors' Down the Memory Hole!

A couple of days ago I wrote an article describing how a local television station (KEYT) interviewed my father, a mere bystander at a local tax day tea party, and later in their newscast attempted to portray him in a light converse to his well-known nature, sub-scripting his visage with the title “Anti-Tea Party Demonstrator” and choosing a segment of audio that would seem to indicate that he was worried about Tea Party-initiated civil disobedience. Ironic, considering he was primarily concerned that such activity was going to emanate from potential adversaries who, to my knowledge, never even materialized at this particular event. But quite possibly the most confusing aspect of all was the fact that the segment displayed his name as “Tee Zielsdors.”

How my father earned a name befitting of an axe-wielding dwarf from a medieval fantasy world is still just completely beyond me. And if there really is a “Tee Zielsdors” out there, God bless you, I don’t mean to poke fun, but I will just never forget calling my father and saying “So, I saw you on the news tonight – they said your name was Tee Zielsdors,” only to be followed by about five seconds of stunned silence and the only response that anyone could give after just learning that they were transformed into a fictional character:

“What?!”

Well, I regret to inform you that after nearly four days of being posted on KEYTs own website, the legendary Tee Zielsdors footage is no more. This story resided on Big Journalism for a period of barely five hours before KEYT decided to break out the magic eraser and render their inaccuracies null and void. After reading through a suspicious block of comments posted to my article defending the station, I began paying attention to the KEYT footage and sure enough, after not being altered since its inception days ago, I started to notice changes in the edit history and observed the results:

“Story Updated: Apr 20, 2010 at 2:22 PM PDT” (video link killed, as noted, not too long after seeing a block of several KEYT defenders).

“Story Updated: Apr 20, 2010 at 2:37 PM PDT” (video link once again working, but footage drastically different. “Tee Zielsdors” name and “Anti-Tea arty Demonstrator” subtitle respectively replaced with his real name and “Thousand Oaks Resident” subtitle).

So what’s to make of all this? Who knows? Some have claimed that the original 5 p.m. newscast did indeed have the correct information, while the 6 p.m. replay was subjected to some sort of “editing error,” in which a mislabeling occurred and subsequently carried over to the online segment. Seems a little weird that so much could get screwed up over the course of one hour, with the anomaly instantly achieving online prominence.

Entirely possible I suppose, though I’ve yet to find anyone who personally witnessed a non-Zielsdorian version of this segment. Interesting to note, however, that the reporter did tell my dad to look for himself on the 5 o’clock newscast (with no mention of other time slots), so was it possible that they deliberately played the ole’ switcheroo in later segments because they really needed more opposition interviews and they figured this guy was some idiot who would never follow up?

Of course we’d all like to think not, but at this point the Fourth Estate has become so dilapidated you’d be foolish not to question the probity of any product that passes through its doors again.

You can decide for yourselves whether you think this occurrence resulted from an act of deliberate manipulation or incredibly careless and unprofessional post-production sloppiness. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for KEYT because the outcome was irrespective of the means — for four days a man was portrayed online in a video as something he was not.

What’s even more troubling is I can’t say I didn’t laugh every time I watched it. Let’s be honest,”Tee Zielsdors, Anti-Tea Party Demonstrator.” I can’t even say that with a straight face because it sounds so overwhelmingly fake. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I got this much mileage out of a joke, period.

Herein lies the point: I should not be obtaining priceless comedy from a source that should be doing nothing other than objectively covering a hard news story! Has the generic media cascaded so far down the drain that we now need look no further than the local news station for the ultimate source of comedic inspiration?

I’m pretty sure I know how Tee Zielsdors would answer that question.