When it comes to live television, anything can happen. Stars can experience wardrobe malfunctions in front of hi-def cameras, interviewees can swear too suddenly for a bleeping, or a host can accidentally declare a wrong winner in an international pageant. Bloopers happen all the time, and one live mishap that certainly didn’t have the people in the studio cracking up occurred when an Israeli reporter donned a “knife-proof” vest and reluctantly agreed to be stabbed by a ginormous military knife. As it turns out, the knife-proof vest…wasn’t quite 100% knife-proof. Check out the video!
Reporter Eitam Lachover’s accidental stabbing on a live news broadcast was about as good as any live stabbing could go, really. Lachover remained admirably composed for a guy who generally works in a pretty stab-free environment. In fact, he remained so composed that we don’t really have to feel too guilty for laughing a little bit at the mishap.
Part of what makes the stabbing funny in a way that most stabbings really are not is the person who did the stabbing. Fortunately for those of us who don’t speak Hebrew, Independent provided a translation of Lachover’s conversation with stabber Yaniv Montakyo, who was not exactly just a random person recruited to do the stabbing.
As it turns out, Montakyo is actually the vice president of the company that manufactures the vest, and he's heard in the clip reassuring Lachover that he would be perfectly safe because the vest was designed to protect against knives even stronger than the one that he’d be using. It’s hard to say which of the men was more surprised when the vest gave way after only the third strike on camera. Either way, it’s a pretty big “oops” for the manufacturing company.
Luckily, Lachover hasn’t suffered any permanent damage from the “oops.” The wounds were superficial, and he only needed some stitches before being sent home. The vest failed him, but it could have failed him much worse. Montakyo wasn’t exactly being gentle with his stabs; Lachover would have been positively skewered if the vest had been a complete dud.
Eitam Lachover being stabbed on camera is definitely one of the more extreme examples of things going injuriously wrong on the news, but he’s not the only journalist to find himself in an unexpectedly dangerous situation. A South African journalist and his film crew were mugged for their cell phones during a live field broadcast, and a San Francisco news team was robbed of their filming equipment at gunpoint. A Mexican reporter even had the misfortune to be hit by a car in the middle of a live broadcast. Let it not be said that journalism is an easy gig, and Eitam Lachover deserves all the kudos in the world for holding himself together after being stabbed.
