As our recent cover story about local survivalists, or "preppers," was going to press, we learned that one of the main characters in the story, Hollywood-based agricultural consultant Chris Petrovich, had been interviewed by the CBS affiliate up in West Palm Beach.
So treat yourself to the TV station's three-minute CliffsNotes version, in which they interview Petrovich and a guy who has a really big truck and throw in some b-roll of the Twin Towers collapsing.
Of course, we won't let our bitterness about local media competition get in the way of fair coverage -- the preppers are happy to spread their message of readiness any way they can.
In the segment -- which CBS won't let us embed on our site -- correspondent Paul Lagrone talks to Petrovich (whose name they misspell on the screen) about stocking enough water (and booze), the pitfalls of living in South Florida, and "training others on how to stock up."
The segment seems intended to tap into the Doomsday Preppers mania sparked by the show of that name on the National Geographic channel. Originally, many preppers in the South Florida group were reluctant to speak to New Times because they had heard mixed opinions on the fairness of that show and other media outlets.
Prepping has actually had local media attention for some time now: In December 2010, CBS Miami aired a story featuring Tahnee Bodden, a blogger known as "The Survival Mom."
To its credit, WPBF doesn't delve too far into a "gee-whiz" dismissal of preppers as a bunch of kooks and cranks. It seems that popular sentiment might finally be shifting toward taking preppers, and their message of ambiguous calamity, seriously. Perhaps the signs really have gotten too dire to ignore.
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