Newscaster Speak

Lately, I’ve noticed that all the newscasters on the radio speak with the same inflection. Is there a hereditary pre-disposition towards vocalizing in this way or is it learned behavior?

———- from Tom Kammerer of Lake Charles, LA

Neither. Almost all news is dubbed at a secret government facility and the voice you hear is a trained chimpanzee who’s been genetically engineered to approximate human speech. If you listen closely you’ll notice that sentences like”We’ll be back with the weather, right after this”, are devoid of any real information. In certain markets, even the newscaster is simply a computer modeled virtual character. Remember Max Headroom from ten years ago? Well, simulation software has gotton a lot more sophisticated since then.