Insanity Plates

Sometimes, trying to be funny can get you thrown off an airliner--or a bunch of tickets that you don't deserve.

Danny White of Washington D.C. thought it would be funny to get vanity license plates for his Chevy that said NO TAGS. Seemed harmless at the time. The DMV must have agreed, because they issued the plates. But then the increasingly hapless Mr. White began to get tickets--many, many tickets--issued to cars without license plates. Why? Because police officers in those cases wrote NO TAGS on the citation in place of the license number.

The NBC station in Washington did a story about Mr. White and his unusual legal problem.

Discussion of this Medianote should be pretty brief. Thinking back to the communications model we recently went through in Chapter 1...

•Who is the source of the NBC story?
•Is it interpersonal communication or mass communication?
•Of the three types of noise mentioned in the communication model, which type did Mr. White cause with his NO TAGS license plate?
•Why is Mr. White's unusual problem a news story?