Tom GantertSacramento, CA – A TV reporter was fired after he filmed a disastrous segment which featured him jumping on – and damaging – classic cars at an international car show on Sunday (video below).
KMAX’s Angel Cardenas was covering the Sacramento International Auto Show when he started to interact with the classic cars that were parked as exhibits.
“Standing in the middle of some classic Ford Thunderbirds, cars that owners spent thousands of dollars and man-hours restoring, Angel leaps onto the trunk of a Yellow Ford Thunderbird, the entire weight of his body pressing onto the classic sheet metal,” Tire Meets Road was the first to report.
Generally speaking, car show etiquette does not permit people to touch or get inside the vehicles on display, but Cardenas proceeded to show a ridiculous amount of ignorance with regard to the rules as he pranced through the international car show.
The broadcast video has since been removed from KMAX’s website, but not before the ridiculous episode was captured and shared on social media by a horrified audience, the Sacramento Bee reported.
“No one is out here to tell me which car I can’t go in because some of these are off limits so I’m just going to live on the wild side, tell me what you think about this pose here?” the reporters asked a woman off-camera as he climbed on top of a yellow convertible 1950s Thunderbird and struck a pose with his shoes touching the paintjob of the valuable, classic vehicle.
Cardenas then opened up the driver’s side door of a pink 1957 Thunderbird into the side of a yellow classic Thunderbird parked next to it in the video.
“Oooh. Oooh. I hit that other car,” he squealed. “Oooh, baby. Nobody’s looking.”
Then the video showed he asked the cameraman to zoom in the spot where he nicked the other car.
“Hold on, zoom in. It’s not dented, is it? There’s no paint?” he asked.
Next, Cardenas approached a Ford employee and chatted her up before continuing to violate the vehicles on display, the video showed.
He noted in the video that there was a sign that said “Please keep off displays.”
Cardenas asked the Ford employee if he could pose on the hood of a roped-off SUV and she joked that she would look the other way.
But again, the video showed the reporter took things way too far.
“OK. Nobody’s looking,” he said, looking dramatically in both directions.
Then Cardenas stepped over a railing and jumped up onto the hood of the SUV, making a horrible sound as he hit the vehicle’s metal surface.
At that point, security intervened off-camera.
“Oh, he told me to get off,” the reporter joked. “I’m gonna get in trouble.”
The car show’s producer, Stacey Castle Bascom, said the auto show officials were outraged over Cardenas’ behavior, the Sacramento Bee reported.
Bascom said KMAX claimed to have fired Cardenas on Monday, the day after he showed blatant disregard for the valuable machines on which he was supposed to be reporting.
“This was an isolated incident with a rogue reporter and fortunately neither one of the cars was damaged,” the car show’s producer said. “I reached out immediately to the management of the station calling for an apology to all involved in the incident.”
“I received a call from KMAX yesterday and was informed the reporter in question was no longer in their employ,” Bascom told the Sacramento Bee.
Watch the bizarre news report in the video below: