Today I was browsing Ninemsn’s news page, and saw that there has apparently been flooding in the English town of Cornwall. Upon reading the article I find the flooded town called Boscastle, but it’s in North Cornwall. I guess they were half right.
I recall seeing some howlers on the CNN site (among others) from time to time. I wondered if anyone else has any favourite news stuff-ups they’d like to share. My all time favourite is when our local paper announced that police didn’t expect to recover the stolen goods unless the thieves tried to porn them. Hmm, kinky! Guess they needed video evidence or something.
A few weeks ago I was watching the local news (BBC Northwest Tonight) and the newsreader started to repeat the exact same news item he’d just read. You could see on his face an expression of “I am f***ing this up aren’t I”.
That was likely the fault of the autocue person.
P.s. thinking of Cornwall as a town is a pretty unsurprising mistake.
It was either the late Jerry Dunphy (“From the desert to the sea, to all of Southern California, a good evening”) or his co-anchor (a woman whose name I don’t recall, but which I’ll recognise as soon as someone says it) who once said, “A man was shot to death seven times…”
A pretty amusing one that happens sometimes is when an anchor forgets his own name or gets the names the wrong way round e.g. a male anchor’s closing sentence “That’s the news, from me, susan jones…”
There was a famous one a couple years ago when ‘Jenny the Block’ came out. I can’t remember what the newscaster was trying to say but he ended up accidentally saying that the people from J. Lo’s old neighborhood would like to give her a blowjob.
He ended with “I don’t know how that happened, but it won’t happen again.”
This one goes back a few years before a lot of the flash computerised graphics that are so commonplace now, and in the days when newsreaders were shown just from the waist up sitting behind some kind of desk in front of a backdrop and not showing the entire studio/newsroom etc. (Just setting the scene.)
They would always show some kind of slide to accompany the story. The camera was always positioned off centre so that the slide could be video-mixed so that it would appear in the boring space slightly above and to the side of the newsreader’s shoulder. Sometimes on the right, and sometimes on the left. (A bit of variety for interest sake I guess.)
Anyway, this one evening it got very interesting. The newsreader began his story and suddenly this accompanying slide was superimposed directly over his head. Hmm. Realising a major stuff up, the cameraman slowly panned to the altenate position so that the slide appeared in its correct place above his shoulder. Problem was that the video mixer also corrected the error a few seconds later and moved the slide, once again directly over the newsreader’s head. It stayed like that for a good ten seconds – presumably while they swore at each other through their headsets. Eventually the camera panned back to the original position just in time to go to a video clip.
The BBC likes to get things up pretty fast and they’ve made some interesting errors. I remember one time I opened the site and a small blurb was talking about some DNA bank (or something like that) and praising British ingenuity. But the title read “US opens world’s first DNA bank.” A few hours later it was changed to the proper “UK opens world’s first DNA bank.”
Speaking of the BBC: the World channel a couple of months back was showing footage of an Indian (I think) orphanage while the voice-over was about Michael Jackson’s court case – a Freudian Slip perhaps.
One headline I’ve always liked was “The Teenage Sex Problem is Mounting”. Poor kids keep sliding off.
A local broadcaster attempted a serious peice on breast cancer in men. But completely cracked up when he said “Large breasts”, and kept cracking up for a good couple minutes while he tried to finish the peice.
A few years ago when we lived in Green River, WY our local paper had a front page head line informing us that we had had a HOMOCIDE in town the previous night.
If I remember right one guy beat another to death with a boot. I just hope the good Transportation Safety folks don’t hear of this, they’ll be confiscating boots at the airport.
My most recent favorite was on CNN at the end of the Democratic National Convention. Kerry had finished his speech, and I guess a bajillion balloons were supposed to come down from nets in the ceiling. Through some technical error, we could hear the stage manager (or whoever) giving directions to the convention staff – apparently, he thought the balloons weren’t coming down fast enough. This went on for a good 2-3 minutes, with the guy getting more and more pissed off. You knew he was going to start cussing any moment, and then he did: “What the fuck are you guys doing up there!?”
The commentators came on pretty quickly after that, and apologized all over themselves. It was pretty funny, I thought.
Friday morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, the woman doing the story on the original Greek games: first she said they took place around 770 B.C., and then a few sentences later said, “in the hundreds of centuries since the first games…”
I had to run it through my calculator just to be sure I wasn’t screwing up something that basic.
One of our local television stations often promotes their late night news program with quickie announcements between commercials. These generally consist of a brief “teaser” and a promise for more information later. The most memorable one for me was, “An alarming number of rapes in the city today… We’ll bring you more at ten o’clock!” :smack:
In the late 70’s, John Chancellor read a story about the banning of red dye #6, saying it would decimate the nearly six billion dollar maraschino cherry industry, according to the Maraschino Cherry Association of America.
He was trying to control his laughter reading “six billion dollar Maraschino Cherry Industry”. Who could have thought that the maraschino cherry industry could be so huge? But when he got to the line “Maraschino Cherry Association of America” he could hardly contain himself at the thought there could be such a thing and barely finished the sentence.
He handed over to David Brinkley for the next story. Brinkley started reading, but the sight of Chancellor giggling off screen was too much and so he started laughing too.
