{"id":35383,"date":"2005-06-08T08:57:37","date_gmt":"2005-06-08T08:57:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2005\/06\/08\/can-you-trust-the-man-on-the-street-interview\/"},"modified":"2005-06-08T08:57:37","modified_gmt":"2005-06-08T08:57:37","slug":"can-you-trust-the-man-on-the-street-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20050608-37\/?p=35383","title":{"rendered":"Can you trust the Man on the Street interview?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Occasionally, in a news story, the reporter will ask for comments or opinion from a passer-by (nicknamed “the man on the street”). Greg Packer has created a second career as that man<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the last 10 years, he’s been quoted at least a dozen times by the New York Post. He’s been quoted at least 14 times by the Daily News, most recently just last week. He was quoted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution two weeks ago. And Packer has been quoted or photographed at least 16 times on separate occasions by the Associated Press. … <\/p>\n

[H]e checks the newspapers for concerts, sports games, parades, book signings – anywhere media trucks might be camped out. Then, he requests time off from his job as a highway worker on Long Island and shows up early, scanning the crowd for reporters. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It got so bad that the Associated Press issued an internal memo instructing reporters not to talk to the guy any more!\n That story from On the Media<\/i><\/a> reminded me of a related incident back when the hype surrounding Star Wars: The Phantom Menace<\/i> was building. The New York Times<\/a> sent a reporter to cover the people who had been waiting in line for months<\/a>. The first person interviewed is Sangay Kumar, who claims to have flown in from Bombay just to see the movie.\n A friend of mine read the article and started laughing.<\/p>\n

Because my friend knows Mr. Kumar, who it turns out is not actually from Bombay. He’s from Baltimore. He was just waiting in line with everybody else and saw a reporter coming and decided to put on a campy Indian accent and make up a nutty story. And the reporter bought it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Occasionally, in a news story, the reporter will ask for comments or opinion from a passer-by (nicknamed “the man on the street”). Greg Packer has created a second career as that man. In the last 10 years, he’s been quoted at least a dozen times by the New York Post. He’s been quoted at least […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-35383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Occasionally, in a news story, the reporter will ask for comments or opinion from a passer-by (nicknamed “the man on the street”). Greg Packer has created a second career as that man. In the last 10 years, he’s been quoted at least a dozen times by the New York Post. He’s been quoted at least […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}