Local Celeb Spotlight: Joe Mazan

Mr. Mazan is one of the most obnoxiously smug sounding and irritating of any local news reporter I have seen. His job at KSTP consists primarily of live, on-the-scene coverage, inter-spliced with pre-recorded segments with him providing the usual voice-over reading. I guess what I really find aggravating about Mazan is his unnecessarily 'theatric' hamming and nauseatingly dramatic story structure. His bits will usually show him standing or sitting on something - a bridge, a billboard, waist-deep water, etc. - which is fine, but the camera is always positioned below, above or far away from him, so a nice pull-back can be used as Mazan mugs for his carefully mapped out reporting. Then it'll get into the voice-over - typically accompanied by more unsympathetically dramatic camera angles - where Mazan and his Ray Ramano voice "sets the mood" with that kind of sickeningly soulless news-man poetry; along the lines of "A child's tricycle; once a source of joy and merriment, now sits... unattended. Just a symbol of young innocence tragically stripped from this earth... Far too soon."

-Flotsam