This morning the news had a report about an aircraft that made a forced landing at a local airport. The plane was described as a Piper “Cessna”. This is like describing a car as a Chevrolet “Ford”.
Anyone else notice goofs by the local talking heads?
Along these lines, you should take any science or technology related news story with a grain of salt. Or better yet, the entire shaker. Most news people get S&T news wrong all the time. Take the GMC side-saddle gas tanks debacle. Anyone with an ounce of technicle know-how could see that the test was blatently rigged. The gas tanks were weakened and flares were taped to the underside of then tanks to make sure a fire occured. You could even see the sparks in the crash video, falling from the gas tanks well before the crash occured. The news people were clueless to the fact that they were being sold a fraudulent test. (BTW, inspite off all this rigging, the truck handled the crash remarkable well. The fire was out within seconds and would never have endangered the occupants of the truck.)
Also, in high school our band teacher brought in an article from a newspaper saying that some violin instructor had removed the “sounding peg” from his violins to stop his students from making awfull screaching noises when practicing. The sounding peg, according to the instructor, connects the bridge of the violin to the back, which is the largest vibrating surface on the violin. Stopping the back from vibrating would stop the high screechy notes. This was hailed as a new revolution in music technology. Except that stopping the back of the violin from vibrating would cut out the low-pitched notes, not the high ones, so the violin would become even higher-piched and more screechy! Our band teacher was happy that we figured out the flaw, even guys like me that were in the brass section. Later, the music instructor who made the “advancement” admitted that the whole thing was a prank to see if the newspaper people could see the flaw in the claim.
So, the moral of the story is that TV news reporters really are just “talking heads” who will say whatever is on the cuecards. Likewise, alot of newspaper authors are just “typing fingers” who tend to accept whatever claims are presented to them.
I’m not sure if this is a reflection of the police department in Burlington, or the news media.
Last summer, the lead news on all the local news shows was “Panther loose in South Burlington,” complete with grainy images of what appeared to be a large, black cat. The “Authorities” had no idea where the panther came from, perhaps someone was keeping it as a pet illegally. I doing laundry at the time at my parent’s house, and my mother laughingly said “THAT’S A CAT!” Turns out she was right. Domestic cat. Large in size, but not panther sized. Small dog sized at the MOST. It was a little kitty cat, and it dominated local news for three days. Where is the panther, we can’t find the panther, when will the panther strike again…
I was watching the Weather Channel when, instead of talking about tips for cold weather, the meteorologist mentioned “cold weather tits.” Needless to say, she couldn’t stop laughing and someone else had to finish for her.
They must broadcast those thirty second news “bumpers” that they play during commercial breaks live because I can distinctly remember one instance where the poor woman who fills-in on weekends saying “The vehicle involved is described as a ford flatbed f**k…”.
My favorites:[ul][li]Anonymous news anchor: “The space probe sent NASA stunning new images of Jupiter’s moon 10” (pronounced “ten”.)[/li]Paul Harvey, describing the first moon landing and how the astronauts broke a switch and had to poke a pen in the hole to get off the moon referred to the mission throughout the entire broadcast as “Apollo II” (pronounced “Apollo Two”.) I do not know whether the story of the pen is apocryphal - good luck, Mr. Gorsky.[/ul]
The best mistake I saw was last summer. I was watching CNN, and some pundit was talking about a politician from Arkansas, and described him as: “From the far right wing of the Republican Party; he’s anti-taxes, anti-gun control, and anti-life…” He went on, never noticing his mistake.
I know he meant anti-abortion, but I was much more amused by the possibilities if what he said was true.
I also saw an article in no less a source than the journal Science a few years ago (one of the news articles, not a research paper). It had a picture of the Asian Green Crab, an invasive species here on the west coast. The caption described the crab (an arthropod) as: “Mollusca non grata.”
This past year The Kansas City Star made national news after it mistakenly printed a picture of John Wayne Gacy (in full clown outfit) next to it’s article about celebrating “Clown Week”. Gotta be careful about what stock photos you use!
When I was working in a TV station, I saw these sorts of things happen all the time. Frequently, they were caused by the show’s producer changing the script in the TelePrompter seconds before it was read, or even AS it was being read, then not having time to scan the edits to see if they made sense. In that situation, the anchors are at the mercy of the producer; the script is not the same as the one they pre-read, so they have to trust what the prompter says. The anchor, being on camera, certainly doesn’t have time to think about what they’re saying – it’s just straight eyes-to-mouth at that point.
Once in my home town there was a caption on a picture in a newspaper article about the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead that read something to the effect of, “On the Day of the Dead, families leave reefs of flowers on their loved ones’ graves.” I come from a long line of grammarian-types. My grandmother used to correct the grammar and punctuation on the newspaper with a red pencil and send it back. It really grates on my nerves when I see a misspelled or improperly used word on the news or in a commercial. I’ve noticed a couple in those big-time Hollywood movie commercials. Mostly spell-checking errors. Which only serves to support my grandmother’s theory that computers will be the end of us.
I used to find so many blatant omissions, lies, distortions, and mistakes in the Star that I stopped taking it 8 years ago. And I’ve never regretted it.
And whatever disease of awful reporting the KC Star has must be spreading. Lately, it’s almost hilarious to listen to the news on KMBC 9. I especially love how Larry Moore (the anchor, for you non-KC’ans) can put that upbeat lilt into his voice when describing any atrocity you can imagine. (“She cut off her own son’s head, and now she could walk free. But first, can the Royals recover from a 64-game deficit? Len?”)