Photo by Tom.

Photo by Tom.

Nothing brightened my day quite like this series of tweets from Mic reporter Sage Boggs, highlighting the best television newscasters who have somehow never made it into The Situation Room.

He says he found them all on Newseum Archives, a Youtube channel dedicated to collecting all of the versions of the Newseum’s “Be A TV Reporter” exhibit, from classic correspondents like “Ben Dover,” “Long Tits,” and “Turtle Dick.”

The exhibit works like this: visitors stand in front of a green screen that’ll project their chosen background, which comes with a pre-written script on a teleprompter. But as you can see from the videos, some people choose to go off-script, and we’re all better for it.

The exhibit actually pre-dates the Newseum’s current location on Pennsylvania Ave., says museum spokesperson Jonathan Thompson. Even back when the Newseum was in Rosslyn, you could stand in front of the green screen and give it your all, though “you were handed a VHS tape at the end of your experience, so this ‘Be A TV Reporter’ thing has evolved through the years,” he says.

While no aspiring reporter has used the clips in a sizzle reel en route to gainful employment, to his knowledge, Thompson says that there have been a number of wedding proposals.

When the Newseum opened up shop near the National Archives in 2008, the exhibit was there, giving people the option to upload their segments onto Youtube, though not onto the Newseum’s official page, Thompson says. Right now, the museum is upgrading the exhibit, he adds, so while visitors can still take the mic, they don’t have the choice of putting it directly on the internet. It is unclear whether that function will return.

The trove of already-posted clips, though, is a delight. Thompson adds that every six to eight months, “someone will rediscover the video archive and it tends to spark interest and laughter. We’re going through them right now and chuckling pretty hard in the office.”

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