Giddy Up and Go!
Summary: A reporter profiles a traveling exhibit now featured at Carnegie Museum of Natural History -- The Horse. Reporter: Dave Crawley, KDKA Channel 2 Airtime: 1 minute, 55 seconds on March 6 Visuals: * Film of galloping horses on the horizon, underscored by soft Western music. * Some cool fossils, models and dioramas. Highlights: * When anchor Kristine Sorensen sets the piece up: "Horses were domesticated in western Asia more than 5,000 years ago." * When Crawley waxes nostalgic: "Long before the first man ever set foot on earth, there was the horse. And that's the name of a new exhibit at the Carnegie." * When Crawley says of exhibit curator Sandra Olsen, "[She] knows the history -- make that prehistory -- of horses. She led a team of archaeologists who found evidence of their earliest domestication." * When Olsen asserts, "And we feel like we've nailed it." * When Olsen explains the exhibit harks back to much earlier times, and points out, "Three species here from Nebraska that lived about 10 million years ago ... the smallest horse ... which was the first horse, 55 million years ago." * When Crawley interjects about another feature in the exhibit: "Magnificence in full gallop is captured on video, 1,000 frames a second." * When Olsen enthuses, "This exhibit's really exciting and dynamic because it covers a whole range of horses through time. Not only how we shaped the horse, but how the horse shaped us." * When Crawley continues, "The horse has been a partner in work and in war. Cavalry horses wore gas masks in World War I. And armor in the days of knights. The old saying 'Get off your high horse' apparently refers to medieval knights who looked down on the common folk. And the phrase, 'Come off it?' Well, that's pretty much the same thing." * When Crawley tells us as he signs off, "You can also measure your own horsepower ... with an exhibit that makes a lot of, yes, horse sense." What We Learned: Horses are way older than us -- no wonder they have more sense. Unanswered Question: How soon can we get there? News Value: 7. Crawley was a little corny -- that's to be expected -- but it totally worked on me in this report. He did justice to this exhibit without selling it too hard, in a Kelly Frey-from-WTAE-fingernails-down-a-chalkboard-kind of way.
