Examples Of Stupid News Reporting

[DMark]

Example of stupid reporting from morning news: (story changed only slightly)

Anchor: Next we have an amazing story of Billy Jones, who fell in a well and survived for 9 days eating insects. His parents and family was frantic. All hope had been lost. Finally, his cousin Burt and the family dog heard scratching at the bottom of the well and found him, cold, scared, but in good health.

(cut to picture of group huddled on sofa)

Anchor: So, Billy - you fell into the well?
Billy: Yep.
Anchor: And you were there for 9 days.
Billy: Uh huh.
Anchor: And you survived eating insects.
Billy: Yeah.
Anchor: Mrs Jones, you must have been frantic.
Mrs Jones: Yes.
Anchor: Mr Jones, had you lost hope.
Mr Jones: Yep.
Anchor: Burt, you're Billy's cousin and you found him?
Burt: Uh huh.
Anchor: Did you have the family dog with you?
Burt: Yep.
Anchor: So, Billy. Were you cold and scared?
Billy: Yeah.
Anchor: But you're in good health now?
Billy: (nods).
Anchor: Well thank you all for telling us your harrowing story.
Group: Bye.

[Sauron]

In a similar vein:

It's October, 1987. The U.S. stock market has just experienced its single largest one-day drop in history. The financial community is reeling.

The NBC affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama leads off the six-o'clock news on this day with a story about a police horse that got skittish downtown and kicked a car.

I was a journalism major in college at the time, and I was flabbergasted. My jaw literally dropped. The single biggest news story of the year, and you air it after a story about a crazed horse.

Second installment:

Sometime in the late 80s/early 90s, there was a bomb scare in downtown Birmingham. The same NBC affiliate had a camera crew on the scene, and for some reason the anchorman of the six o'clock news was the reporter on the scene. It's the lead story, of course (no wild horses that day), and they open the newscast with footage of the police cordon blocking off part of downtown. There's a group of people gathered at the police line, and one of them is the intrepid anchorman.

Here's what we hear on the video (remember, this is pre-recorded):

Policeman: Everyone please move back, stay back behind the line.

Intrepid anchorman: Are you saying you won't let us past to film this?

Policeman: Please stay back behind the line.

IA: You're interfering with our constitutional right to do our job!

What this had to do with the bomb scare, I'm not sure. As Albert Brooks said sarcastically in Broadcast News, "Let's never forget that we are the real story."

[Intaglio]

I think it is pretty stupid for Katie Couric to do an interview with the family of a kidnap/murder victim, and give fake/false condolences, then go into Well How Do You Feel That Your Son/Daughter/Wife/Husband (Whatever) has been missing/killed.

I wish the family would say "Well Katie, How Do You Fucking Think I Feel", "Thanks for you fake/false sympathy/empathy, and go Fuck Yourself".

[Lizard]

Taken directly from a similar but more specific thread I started ('http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=154001&highlight=Mass+idiocy+Columbus+Ohio'):


For those who don't know, Columbus is where Ohio State is located,which also happens to be my alma mater. For those who are even MORE clueless, OSU is playing Miami for the national college football championship Friday night.
Okay, I recognize this is a pretty big event in the history of Ohio State football. It doesn't bother me that it's received a thousand times more media than ANYTHING the state government has done (Columbus is the state capital) for probably the last 100 years. I'm not terribly bothered that in a state capital that has 850,000 people in its metro area, is the largest city in a quite populous state, and has major-league professional hockey and soccer teams (The NHL Blue Jackets and MLS Crew) that everyone is in a froth over a college football game.
No, I'm annoyed that our local media, which was never exactly award-winning to begin with, has dragged out their frivolity and ability to pander and put them on full display.
. . . . .
But consider the news broadcast I saw last night on CBS Channel 10. The centerpiece story? A feature piece on what great fans the parents of running back Maurice Hall are, and he isn't even a starter. Riveting sample quote from Hall's father: "There were only the two of us in the house, but you would think it was the whole stadium in there, we were cheering so loud!"
Also, a fairly lengthy piece, for television, on "How the turf the Buckeyes will play on in Tempe differs from what they're used to in Columbus!"


These rank as among the dumbest I can remember. I also heard once about a newspaper headline that said "50 Percent of the Population" was below average in something, but that could be an urban legend. Still, it's not beyond the realm of possibility.

As a former print journalist myself, let me point out too that in Jay Leno's weekly "Headlines" bit, he usually has far more items that are misprinted advertising than actual news stories. This bears out what I observed: the reporters are not the dumbest people who work in the media, by far.

[ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness]

Any time Southern California experiences an earthquake in the middle of the night, the local stations cut from Girls Gone Wild infomercials to stellar breaking news coverage. The first hour or so they're killing time until the CalTech news conference which reveals the epicenter and magnitude. Rather than admit "yes, you felt an earthquake. No, we don't know anything else yet" they take viewer calls on the air...

Anchor: Next Caller is from <southland location>
Caller: Yeah, I felt shaking.
Anchor: I see. Any damage?
Caller: I dunno, it's still dark.
Ancho: Thank you. Our next caller is from...{repeat for an hour until CalTech finally announces something}

I also get annoyed when a news story says something flat out wrong that makes you wonder if they do any fact checking at all. For example, when John Holmes died, KABC did a brief story which concluded with "Holmes was best known for..." I perked up thinking there's no way they're gonna say that on broadcast TV (This was the late 80s, when TV was still somewhat demure) "...his role in Deep Throat" Huh??? That was Harry Reems! Holmes wasn't even in Deep Throat!

More recently, when Joey Ramone died, KCBS did a brief obituary, and underscored the story with The Romantics' "What I Like About You". Huh??? First syllable starts with R, second with M, ends with S, so it must be the correct music?? Sloppy, and unforgivable since it happened to the Ramones. I'm glad I missed the TV news the night Joe Strummer died. Who knows what those clowns would have said.

[Marine_One]

My favorite is the K.C. reporter that covered a car wreck from about 2 miles away:

Newsgreek: "Yes, Wendell, the car involved in the horrible wreck crashed into a tree just like this one..."

And the camera zoomed in on a different tree, right by the Newsgeek!
Like people don't know what trees look like.

Not the same tree, but by God, it was still a disgusting tree!

[DreadCthulhu]

Didn't CNN's news bar say the Columbia was going 11 times the speed of light after it exploded?

[NutMagnet]

I've always told my young'uns that EVERYTHING on TV is fake. Nothing's factual. The History Channel - conjecture, Discovery Channel - opinion, commercial channels - forget it, and so on.

The only part they were still a bit skeptical on was The News.
Until Monday night.
There are residents of a neighborhood in town whose wells are threatened from a leaking gas station tank. They interview a woman, who gives her sound bite, and the voice-over continues with how much her house cost her, and how this town in particular is is vulnerable to water contamination (The town is 75% open land and reservoirs).
My kids observe:
The woman's neighborhood is not "adjacent to" the contaminated area;
The price of the house is overstated by $150,000 (my wife has the records for her job);
The camera panned across a section of town not even near the threatened area or the woman's property.

My kids are starting to think I know what I'm talking about. :eek:

[DaddyTimesTwo]

Most broadcasts on FoxNews would qualify.

:D

[Avumede]

Swear to God this actually happened in Champaign-Urbana, 1994, Aug. 14th. A brief news update:

"Local pawn shop robbed of 27 guns. Could they fall into the hands of criminals?"

[Lobsang]

Erm, are people either not aware of, or simply forgetting the classic?

I cannot remember the details but an anchor is interviewing the surviver of some accident. He asks

"Did you survive?"

[Middlea]

The latest 2 examples made me wanna throw a rubber brick at the tv:
1. Man on east coast diagnosed with Bubonic plague. CNN reporter says that plague is contracted by rat bites. This was never corrected and repeated several times during the broadcast.(fleas on rats carry the bug and bite humans).
2. Recent Duke transplant error claimed to be the result of transplanting the "wrong organs" into 17-year old girl. (They were the wrong blood type, but I'm sure they couldn't possibly screw up a lung for a lung, etc.)

[Tars Tarkas]

At Mizzou, there is a big j-school there, full of future unemployed idiot reporters. One required class makes them give a report on the local news channel that partners with the school. These reports range from meh to "What the @$%$ was this kid thinking?" The worst example was during finals week one year, they were rushing to get all the students in, so we had to put up with three terrible stories in a row, capped with the worst i haad ever seen, a feature story on BREAD! And not anything interesting about bread in current events, just information on bread! and then the moron was in the grocery store saying "There are many types of bread" and started grabbing them off the shelfs and reading their names! We were watching this in the lounge of our floor and everyone started MST3King the guy.

[JohnT]

"Man dies, eats self."

Here in Knoxville we have a couple of classics. On the day after the House voted to impeach Bill Clinton, the lead story in the K'ville newspaper was about a local high school football coach who announced his retirement the day before.

Just this evening, the local news led off with the ground-shaking development that "two teen boys" got into a fight at the local high school! :eek: Imagine that!

[Sublight]

In live sports, the reporters often feel obliged to fill any and all air time with chatter, which can lead to some interesting results. WCVB-TV in Boston managed to earn the Sports Illustrated Heidi Award for Boneheaded Sports Reporting (they had also earned it the previous year for inadvertantly demonstrating why if you're going to have a live feed from a locker room, you shouldn't put your camera near the shower entrance :eek: ) for doing this during their coverage of the Boston Marathon.

News Anchor Susan Wornick was working herself into a panic because she couldn't find perennial favorite Joan Benoit anywhere in the pack of runners. Something must be wrong! Did she fall? Is she injured? Will she be able to catch up? Um, Susan? Joan isn't running today! Not only that, SHE'S YOUR GODDAMN CO-ANCHOR! She was just giving you a live report from the starting line, you dumbass!

:rolleyes: sometimes you wonder how some people have enough brains to wake up in the morning.

[Lizard]

Originally posted by NutMagnet
The price of the house is overstated by $150,000 (my wife has the records for her job

In fairness to the reporter, most houses have two different dollar values attached: the value reported for tax purposes, and the actual market value of the property. The latter is always MUCH higher. Why this is legal I'm not sure, but I've written about enough houses to know it's that way in many parts of the country. One reason is property is appraised for tax purposes sometimes just once in 20 years, and the value may have risen tremendously in that time. Even so, the owner pays taxes only on the value listed with the county government.

And some people have remarked on how ridiculous it was for TV stations to report some seemingly minor local news story when massive things were happening on the national level. It is a common principle of news reporting that people care most about what affects them most directly, therefore local news is more important to more people than national news. This is not always true, but the rule is drummed into reporters' heads so thoroughly both in school and by the management of small media outlets that few ever bother to question it, even when a national story is obviously bigger.

[Sauron]

Originally posted by Lizard
And some people have remarked on how ridiculous it was for TV stations to report some seemingly minor local news story when massive things were happening on the national level. It is a common principle of news reporting that people care most about what affects them most directly, therefore local news is more important to more people than national news. This is not always true, but the rule is drummed into reporters' heads so thoroughly both in school and by the management of small media outlets that few ever bother to question it, even when a national story is obviously bigger.

To a certain extent that's true. When I studied journalism, the rule of thumb for ranking stories was determining how many of your readers/viewers would the story affect or interest. In many cases, a local story will trump a national story based on that criteria.

However, the local coverage given the 1987 stock market crash by the NBC affiliate still floored me. At best, a police horse kicking a car in downtown Birmingham would interest or affect maybe a handful of people in the market. But the stock market crash affected everybody.

The proper thing to do for the six o'clock broadcast (which was the second evening news broadcast of the day; the first occurred at five p.m.) was interview local stockbrokers and political leaders about the effect the crash would have on the local economy. That's "localizing" a national story, and it's done all the time for the second evening news broadcast. In the five o'clock hour, you cover the national story; in the six o'clock hour, you localize the national story.

I remember part of the discussion we had in class the next day about that. Our professor was just as amazed as we were at the way the coverage was handled.

[NutMagnet]

Lizard:
You're right, of course, but IIRC the reporter indicated it was the amount the woman paid for the house, but was no doubt referring to the market value. The reporter, I'm sure, didn't check the records, but probably got the amount from the homeowner.

[archmichael]

I'd have to agree with Chock about the absolute pointlessness of the earthquake roll call.

Along the same lines is when there is a storm blowing into LA, and they'll send some poor schmuck reporter out to Ontario or something, to stand there in the rain telling you it's raining.

My favorite was just before Desert Storm. The air war had started, and there was a press conference with Schwartzkopf. The reporters just continued to ask him question they should have known he couldn't answer. It went something like this.

Reporter: Can you tell us exactly when the ground war will start?
Schwartzkopf: (Sarcastically) Since we like to maintain the element of surprise, that information would be classified.
Another Reporter: Can you tell us what day?

[Lizard]

Originally posted by NutMagnet
Lizard:
The reporter, I'm sure, didn't check the records, but probably got the amount from the homeowner.

Well, if they were a television reporter, of course they didn't. (TV people are the favorite whipping boys at newspapers. They don't get much respect; partly because they don't understand most complex issues as well, and partly because they rip off the in-depth reporting the local paper did, more often than not.)
I'd be surprised if that reporter even knew there was a public record that gave the appraised value of the house!

[ivylass]

Originally posted by archmichael

My favorite was just before Desert Storm. The air war had started, and there was a press conference with Schwartzkopf. The reporters just continued to ask him question they should have known he couldn't answer. It went something like this.

Reporter: Can you tell us exactly when the ground war will start?
Schwartzkopf: (Sarcastically) Since we like to maintain the element of surprise, that information would be classified.
Another Reporter: Can you tell us what day?

Sometimes I wonder why they even give press conferences. They should instead give statements, say what they're allowed to say, then walk away. Why waste anyone's time with, "Sorry, I can't answer that," "Sorry, that's classified," "Sorry, I will not reveal that information at this time."

I saw a lot of this at the press conference the Utah police gave right after Elizabeth Smart was found. Since all they could say was she's found, she's alive, and she's back with her parents, why go into the whole duck and weave with reporters?

[Baker]

Here in Topeka, back when some local soldiers were returning home from Desert Storm, a local reporter stuck a microphone into the personal space of a married couple that had just gone into a big clinch "Do you have any plans for this evening?"

[Raygun99]

In either the 1992 or 1994 winter olympics, a reporter here in Canada (Rod Black) asked a player from the Canadian team, right after they'd just lost the gold medal game about his father. You see, he'd recently died and the player had promised that he'd win the gold for him. The reporters wording was something like, "You promised your father you'd win the gold. Do you feel like you've let him down?"

The player who I don't think was more than 20, immediately started welling up and Black looked horrified when he realized what he'd just said. He pretty much ended up being 'banished' to covering figure skating after that.

[Barbarian]

Originally posted by DreadCthulhu
Didn't CNN's news bar say the Columbia was going 11 times the speed of light after it exploded?


Naw, it was only going 5 times the speed of light ;)

I'm in TV News, and I'm often appalled by the shoddy quality that leaks across the border. But I recently discovered that most US stations have about 1/4 the number of employees that work in my newsroom, and that reporters average 1.8 packages per day :eek:

Where I work we've often got 10+ reporters working on any given day, and at least two of them will be on research days.

[Gangster Octopus]

The doctors who operated on Mickey Mantle for a new liver were holding a press conference. Naturally it was covered by a few sports reporters, one of whom asked the Doctor if the donor would get a chance to meet Mickey.

[YiBaiYuan]

My all-time-favorite involved not a local but a national reporter. It occurred many years ago during an evening news special on one of the big networks. I can't recite it verbatim now, but I sure remember the significant part.

Highly acclaimed news reporter Barbara Walters was interviewing long-time news anchor Walter Cronkite shortly after his retirement from broadcast news. It was a long interview that lasted at least 30 minutes so they covered a lot of ground about his career and personal life.

Toward the end of the interview Barbara asked Mr. Cronkite, that since he was so well known, highly respected, and well versed in current events and world politics would he ever consider running for president of the United States; he answered No, and went on to explain that he felt he probably couldn't get elected by the people once his political views became known because they were so controversial.

At this point, the natural follow-up question to ask would be, "What exactly ARE your views that would be considered so controversial?" I know it was the question I was dying to have answered. But instead, our illustrious journalist looked at Mr. Cronkite and asked (no, I'm not joking), "Imagine with me for a moment, If you were a tree, what type of tree would you be?"

Hunh!?!?! I was so stunned by the lack of the question I wanted to hear and the insertion of an absolutely idiotic question, that I didn't even catch his response. To this day I don't know what kind of tree he would be or, more importantly, what his controversial views of politics might have been.

[HelloKitty]

Another one here in KC. Last night we had a thunderstorm. Your run of the mill, late evening thunderstorm, complete with lightning and thunder, if you can believe that.

Well, of course we had our regularly scheduled program interrupted by the weather team, which isn't such a bad thing, but they went waaaay overboard when they brought in the reporters who were sitting in their cars phoning in things like: "It's raining so hard you can't even see in front of you. Several drivers have pulled off to the side of the road until it blows over."

People...it's a fricking rain storm, it's not news! We can all hear the thunder and rain, we don't need reporters explaining to us what a rainstorm is like!! I don't mind the weather guys showing the radar, but the reporters have got to go.

I wonder if they got overtime pay for reporting on a thunderstorm...?

[japatlgt]

Originally posted by Intaglio
I think it is pretty stupid for Katie Couric to do an interview with the family of a kidnap/murder victim, and give fake/false condolences, then go into Well How Do You Feel That Your Son/Daughter/Wife/Husband (Whatever) has been missing/killed.

I wish the family would say "Well Katie, How Do You Fucking Think I Feel", "Thanks for you fake/false sympathy/empathy, and go Fuck Yourself".

Bravo! Exactamundo! I hate that shit! And there's a tendency to mimic this sort of "journalism" as if it is a model. It's insipid!

[pepperlandgirl]

I noticed the news in CA is particularly insipid. I put up with it until one day one of the top stories was about an elementary school in Pennsylvania that was raising a brood of ducklings.

:blink:
:blink:

I turned off the news and haven't watched the local news since.

[Rilchiam]

Originally posted by ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness
I also get annoyed when a news story says something flat out wrong that makes you wonder if they do any fact checking at all. For example, when John Holmes died, KABC did a brief story which concluded with "Holmes was best known for..." I perked up thinking there's no way they're gonna say that on broadcast TV (This was the late 80s, when TV was still somewhat demure) "...his role in Deep Throat" Huh??? That was Harry Reems! Holmes wasn't even in Deep Throat!

What title did you think they were going to say? Just curious.

[Rube E. Tewesday]

Rilchiam, I don't think a movie title was what he had in mind for what John Holmes was best known for.

Think about it....

[Rilchiam]

Okay. I thought ChockFull might have been anticipating Dickman and Throbbin', or some other title I didn't know. But yeah, it wasn't specific titles he was known for!

[Greywolf73]

Our local news is so inane that I can't think of any specific examples--there are just too many. One station recently ran an undercover expose on prostitution in a local park. Their title? "Sex, Slides and Videotape".

I was watching Fox News the morning after the Grammys. A reporter was giving the rundown of the award winners. He stated, "John Mayer won Best Male Performance". The Fox anchor chimed in with, "Is it true he's only 16?"
Without hesitating, the reporter shot back with, "Why yes, he IS only 16 and is one of the youngest recepients of the Grammy Award in the whole show's history...he has managed to balance both schoolwork and his musical career...blah, blah, blah..." and rambled on for a minute about how young John Mayer is.
Trouble is, John Mayer is in his mid-twenties.
The Fox reporter not only got his age blatantly wrong but he continued to babble on about it, apparently making up stuff as he went along! :eek: