Everybody reports the same news about the Alamo

So I was flipping through stations on the radio yesterday afternoon and heard a blurb-like variation on this story:

BRACKETTVILLE, Texas — Time and Mother Nature are threatening to dismantle the Alamo. Not the original, but the replica 18th-century Spanish mission and Old West movie set John Wayne built for his Oscar-nominated 1960 movie and that for decades was a tourist mecca and film production site.

So I went to Google News to look for a link to the story to mention it here, since it certainly is movie-related. Amazingly, there's a surprisingly large number of items all pretty much saying the same thing. Somebody has a good PR firm putting this story out there.

Well, technically, there are two different but related stories. In addition to the lament that the old sets are rotting away, there's also a listicle called "5 Things to Know About Alamo Village". One of the upshots is that we should probably all be a bit more skeptical of how today's news outlets actually get their news.

But that's not why I blog. It shouldn't be a surprise that John Wayne had to build custom sets in the middle of nowhere to make this movie. Just like Alfred Hitchcock couldn't film on Mount Rushmore or the Statue of Liberty, there was no way anybody would be able to filmi in the Alamo. Never mind the fact that the inside of it is probably much too small for the movie cameras of those days to operate. That, and even 50 years ago when San Antonio had about half the population it has now, it would have been much too built up.

Of course, what I've always found more interesting is how the United Nations didn't want Alfred Hitchcock filming establishing shots of the UN headquarters for North by Northwest, and Hitchcock had to do it surreptitiously.