For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about in the title of this blog, here’s a video to remind you. During the Penn State protests over JoePa being fired, there was a WTAJ news van on what appeared to be College Avenue. After protesters messed up its windshield and destroyed most of the exterior, it was time to flip the van! Also, if you watch that video, look at the phones people are taking the videos with. 2011 throwback!

Look at how messed up that thing is. kind of crazy how rioters would just go after a news van like that. Thank god it wasn’t reporting any news and was just kind of hanging out downtown.

Wait what?

Okay so WTAJ is my local TV News station. It’s about a four minute drive and I had to go past it every day on my way to school. That van had been replaced about three years earlier, so it was just sitting in the parking lot of the WTAJ station. So, they clearly put it downtown expecting something to happen. Now, maybe they just knew riots would break out in Beaver Canyon and wanted to be on the scene, but everyone knew that riots would happen. Realistically, they knew what was gonna happen and decided to put a van there to get flipped and they could get national coverage (they did).

Which is pretty shitty. People got in a lot of trouble for flipping this van. Which kind of shows you that in today’s “everyone has a phone environment” it’s hard to riot. Wear a bandanna over your face. I understand that the van was flipped and it’s vandalism, but come on. College students drink, riot, and study in that order of importance.

So if you, like me, are kind of pissed at WTAJ, tweet at them. I’d recommend @JoeMurgo, the weather man, because it’s an Altoona tradition to get blocked from his Twitter.