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[Sam Cogley]

On a local level...the town where I went to grad school has an NBC affiliate that's owned by the university and is partially staffed by j-school students. One memorable night, they sent a foreign student with a very thick accent out for a remote broadcast...

First off, the student wasn't a great broadcaster (at least, not yet) to begin with, so she (I think it was a woman, but I don't remember for sure) was messing up a lot. This isn't too abnormal for that station. What really caused chaos was that between the flubs and her accent, it was quite literally impossible to understand what was being said - and this was one of those typical "pointless" remotes, where you just have someone bathed in light standing outside in the dark.

Realizing that this was all falling apart, the production crew cut away from the remote and went back to the studio...but didn't warn the anchors. One of them was laughing so hard that she had her head in her arms on the desk so you couldn't see her busting up. It was easily the funniest thing I've ever seen on a news broadcast.