As we mentioned briefly in the roundup, Adrian “Mr. Personality” Fenty resurfaced on WRC/NBC4 early this morning, during the mayor’s regularly scheduled Thursday appearance on the local news channel.
Anchor Eun Yang got the ball rolling with a pretty standard question. Maybe she could have been more nuanced in how she phrased it, but this is the early morning TV news — you’re looking to bottom line it. So she asked, “When is the last of the snow going to be cleared, and when should things be back to normal?”
Fenty responded first by laughing, then twisting his face into a cartoonish, incredulous expression, before finally answering that, “It’s kind of a question that doesn’t make any sense. Forgive me. The snow has fallen, and it’s not going to be gone until the temperature can get warm enough that it can melt.”
You see, instead of taking the opportunity to reassure viewers, aka voters, that their lives would indeed be getting back to normal soon, the mayor was punishing Yang for not being more specific in her question. “There’s only so much snow you can move,” Fenty insisted. But surely he must have known very well that Yang meant, “when should the streets be back to normal?” In fact, he clearly did, because right after that, he said so:
“We’re moving it out of the street, which is I think what you guys mean.”
No kidding.
Later in the segment, Yang brings up the question of garbage, asking the mayor to clarify whether residents will really get their trash picked up if they just leave it in black plastic bags in front of their house. Now here, Yang somewhat foolishly insists she hasn’t been told what the process is for garbage this week. But again, instead of just reassuring the viewers, the people actually watching this show, that garbage is indeed getting picked up curbside, Fenty goes after Yang. “We have probably had 24 press conferences,” he said, noting that details on trash procedures were offered at the last 20 of them. “I don’t know how in the world the reporters covering this couldn’t have gotten that information to you.”