Breaking News for KCAL (CBS) Anchor: a Tall Ship Differs from a tall ship

Coast Guard works to rescue a three-masted, Tall Ship or a three-masted, tall, Tall Ship in distress off Long Beach, California

A newsreader on KCAL, a Los Angeles CBS television affiliate, reported a happy ending for a chartered vessel off Long Beach in choppy Pacific waters in recent "Breaking News."

(note: The quotation below is punctuated according to the pronunciation and cadence used by the news reader.)

Newsreader: "A three-masted, tall, ship with forty people aboard has managed to re-enter Long Beach Harbor after taking on water about seven nautical miles from the coast."

The problem here is that as she read the prompter, either the newsreader failed to understand that the text referred to a Tall Ship, or the text itself steered her off course. A Tall Ship is a "large, traditionally rigged sailing vessel. Popular modern Tall Ship rigs include topsail schooners, brigantines, brigs, and barques." Wikipedia.

According to the way the news reader, a Ms. Lee, read the piece, we are forced to ask the question: Was it a three-masted Tall Ship, or a "three-masted, tall, Tall Ship" she was describing?

Since all Tall Ships are fairly long and tall, a tall Tall Ship (a "cumulative adjective" see below) would be redundant, needlessly repetitive. Yet by the way she said it, this is what she was describing, whether she intended it or not. If the text she read from on the prompter read: "A three-masted, tall, ship..." (a "correlative adjective" see below) then, the copy editor is at fault. Either way, the copy should have been read: "A three-masted, Tall Ship...."
Three-masted serves as a derived, attributive adjective--it is not a pure adjective, it is made up of a number of words. Nevertheless, it is providing a description, an attribute of the Tall Ship. The confusion comes with the phrase Tall Ship. In this compound noun phrase, the word "Tall" is itself describing "Ship." Whose fault was it, The news reader or the copy editor?

From EnglishPlus.com: The rule for punctuating: Commas go between everything except attributive adjectives that are cumulative or have a modifier.

Coordinate Attributive Adjectives:

If two adjectives modify a noun in the same way, place a comma between the two adjectives. These are called coordinate adjectives.

There is a two-part test for coordinate adjectives:

(1) Can you replace the comma with the word and?

(2) Can you reverse the order of the adjectives and keep the same meaning?

If you can do both, then you have coordinate adjectives.

Correct: Did you read about Macomber's short, happy life?

Test for Correctness: Did you read about Macomber's short and happy life?

Did you read about Macomber's happy, short life?

All three sentences say the same thing, so the adjectives are coordinate adjectives and separated by commas in the original.

Cumulative Adjectives (a type of Attributive Adjective)

If the paired adjectives fail the two-part test, then no comma is used. This shows that they must remain in a certain order to make sense. These are called cumulative adjectives--they must maintain a certain order

Incorrect: The former, overweight woman told us how she lost fifty-five pounds.

Test for Correctness: The former and overweight woman...
(Makes no sense)

The overweight, former woman...
(A former woman? At best the meaning is changed.)

Clearly, no comma is needed for these cumulative adjectives.

Correct: The former overweight woman told us how she lost fifty-five pounds.

A device to help remember this punctuation rule is to keep in mind a common expression like Christmas tree or fire truck. We say, "green Christmas tree," but not "Christmas green tree." We say, "red fire truck," but not "fire red truck." Such cumulative expressions take no comma.