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请阅读Passage 2,完成第26—30小题。
Passage 2
It was a dark and stormy night. Somewhere, Gary Bettman was seething. All these events being cancelled, and not by him.
On TV, anticipation was so animated it was heatedly debated and, in the way that television is ghastly in its predilections, the coverage was both ghoulish and foolish. On CNN, it went like this——in the studio, an anchor lady talking to a weather guy who noted, "it will be onshore in less than three hours," at which point anchor lady declared, "and there he is, All Velshi! " Cut to All Velshi, barely upright and ankle-deep in water in Atlantic City, in a fierce, whipping wind.
"All, at any point in time we will yank this, if you are in any danger at all," anchor lady announced helpfully. Then, "what else do you see, All?" To which he answered, "There"s some siding flying off buildings. Unless you"re kinda like us and reporting, there"s no reason to be out here."
Too true. On channel after channel, reporters standing in howling winds and pouring rain to illustrate that, yeah, the storm was arriving and it was wicked, just as predicted. In case anyone thought it was a con "job.
Then the Hurricane Sandy devastation in New Jersey and New York. Footage of flooded
subways, as if massive waves of water finding an outlet in large holes in the ground was a surprise.
In Toronto"s east end, a tree fell. Power went out. CP24 savoured i_t all, at last some real, honest-to-God disaster effects.
For all the raw footage and dramatic scenes of flooding, fires, rescue workers waist-deep in water and darkened buildings lashed by wind, television struggles to convey the authenticity of disaster-inducing storms. The fallback position is disaster-movie cliche and panicked voices in a studio commanding viewers to look (just look!) at this footage of flooding! The term "weather porn" doesn"t do it justice.
Few live TV shows were taped in New York on Monday. But David Letterman went ahead and one has to wonder, why?The challenge, maybe, of doing a show without an audience and with only one celebrity guest available. Either that challenge, or a strange, terrible addiction to doing the TV show, as if some profound emptiness might result from cancelling it for a day.
On occasion, the footage reminded me of the great miniseries Storm of the Century, written by Stephen King, which played on a community"s deep fears of what happens after a raging storm passes. In the series, a stranger emerged from the devastation, the devil himself (superbly played by Colm Feore), saying, "Give me what I want and I will go away."
This led me to think about the U.S. election coverage. On Fox News, there was an air of peevishness that the storm was distracting from its relentless anti-Obama rhetoric. Not to worry,though, no opportunity was wasted. A report from Washington about "how the president is handling the storm crisis" focused, bizarrely, not on disaster relief, but on the president"s handling of "the Benghazi crisis." See, as Fox sees it, the devastating weather was absolutely an occasion to compare Barack Obama"s attitude during the storm to his alleged mishandling of the attack on the Benghazi consulate. The term "election porn" doesn"t do it justice.
The heart sank. Such devastation, such determination to make petty politics of the wreckage of cities, towns, lives. Such emptiness, never empathy, throughout, and across the channels.
The underlined sentence "Too true." in Paragraph 4__________. 查看材料
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