MMM # 122 : Mistakes

 "McCarthy was acting like this was Selma, Ala., in the '60s and he was Bull Connor."

     That geographic misplacement occurred in an AP story in today's Washington Post about a small upstate New York town where a Muslim mosque and cemetery caused a fuss. The story was not wrong...they accurately quoted the town official who was wrong.

     But mistakes make it into broadcast and print media every day.

     The PBS News Hour once identified Birmingham as the Capitol of Alabama.

      I've personally made some doozies on air over the years, and been called on them.

      People aren't shy about calling a newsroom and complaining, but a study a few years ago found that TV News errors aren't always a simple matter of a fact being incorrect. Sometimes the facts are correct but the story is wrong because it is out of of context, or because the station made the story bigger than it really was.

     I maintain that the very fact that a story is included in a TV newscast makes it bigger, and perhaps bigger than it deserves to be.

     How many times have you seen a fire or accident story on the evening news, only to see it reported as a paragraph in the morning newspaper website?

     And it's the constant need for "teases" and promos for stories that frequently get stations in trouble.

     The drama in a promo for a TV news story is intended to build it up..sometimes beyond what the story deserves. And the tease "Coming up! Dogs on the attack in East Alabama!" is frequently going to go too far as well.

     Newspapers have a corrections column, in which misspellings and other errors are acknowledged. But there's no such regular place on TV...the error has to be truly significant to merit an on-air correction. And even then, the audience watching when the correction is made is usually vastly different from the one that heard the error in the first place.



[PLUS: Words matter. FOX News reportedly insisted on specific language on-air to describe the "Public Option" in health care in a way that would convince the network's audience not to support it.]



[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]