Everyone knows that live TV can be equal parts blessing and curse, and no one learned a bigger lesson in that today than Andrea Mitchell and her MSNBC news program Andrea Mitchell Reports. The show was covering an incident at LaGuardia airport earlier today in which a Delta Air Lines plane skidded off the runway, and a prank caller pretending to be New York Giants tight end Larry Donnell made things a little more colorful. Check it out below, but be warned that the caller uses some pretty foul language.
This entire clip is enough to have me shaking my head for the rest of the day. For one, I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard a prank call that was as weak as this, at least on the Internet. (I used to be a 911 operator, and the level of immaturity I heard there was enough to last a lifetime.) This wasn’t even up to the level of radio shock jocks and Howard Stern interns, although it admittedly still made me laugh; less for the message passed on and more for the lack of response from host Andrea Mitchell.
For those who didn’t watch, Mitchell asks the Donnell impersonator where he was on the plane, and here’s what he said.
Uh, I was sitting in the, uh, fuck her in the pussy.
It sounds like he disconnected immediately after – another sign of an amateur pranker – and Mitchell apparently wasn’t listening to what he was saying at all. Granted, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition for someone to answer a location-based question with a lewd sexual description, but that should have been the point when she immediately moved on to another aspect of the story.
Instead, she asks what happened when they were landing, and what the pilot did. I can only imagine that the answer would have been, “Uh, the pilot, uh, pissed in a butt,” or something dumb like that. Mitchell calls for journalist Tom Costello to step up, and he’s the one that lets her know it was a prank. There were probably some mighty wide eyes in the studio at that point.
MSNBC is a frequent target of callers with ulterior motives. Let’s not forget this call last year on The Cycle, in which a man posing to be a member of the U.S. military offers a strange reason for a plane crash.
Prank calls can be fun sometimes, and they can be criminially disgusting other times. In the scheme of things, lying to MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell about being a football player on an airplane is pretty innocent.
