Posted on 09/07/2013 8:59:22 AM PDT by Impala64ssa
Diane Sawyer and her ABC News team gave critics of the mainstream media even more ammunition after Sawyer reported on a three-year-old story as if it were current during “World News” on Thursday evening.
The story was about a massive Chinese traffic jam outside Beijing “now entering its third week.” After noting that traffic had come to a standstill and people were eating noodles on the roadside, Sawyer reported that the jam would end on around Sept. 17 following the completion of scheduled construction.
The huge problem? The original report is from August 2010 snip
Mediaite’s Andrew Kirell calls the gaffe “one of the goofier examples of sloppy journalism,” which may be putting it kindly. He explains how the mistake may have happened:
The only 2013-dated articles on this “traffic jam” appear on the India Times website and on The Daily Beast’s “Cheat Sheet” link dump. The former’s write-up says the traffic has been ongoing for only nine days, so clearly that’s not the source. And given the Beast’s popularity in America, this little blurb could be where ABC first spotted the story:
It seems as though the Beast mistook the story to be current, but later updated their link-out with a correction: “Editor’s note: The traffic jam described in this news summary occured [sic] in August 2010.”
So let’s assume an ABC producer found the story there, but saw it before the Beast updated to reflect the actual date. They would still have had to completely ignore the time and date on the actual CBC article containing many of the details Sawyer reported on air.
Further, given the multiple sources the report likely required, one of the show’s producers probably looked at several other articles on the traffic jam and somehow missed those 2010 time stamps as well.
Kirell concludes with one more fair, unanswered question: “Who obtained those photographs of the Chinese traffic jam without noticing they were from 2010?”
Tools for Obama.
Diane Sawyer is more embarrassing than Shepard Smith?
Well, I must say, her mascara looks better than ‘his’.
Does Sum Ting Wong work on the ABC News team.
Does Sum Ting Wong work on the ABC News team?
Tools for Obama.
no ,just Tools , LOL
News reporting in the US mainstream media consists of trolling the Internet for stories and repeating administration talking points. The only real reporting I see comes from blogs and foreign media.
They have to use old trivial news, since they haven’t yet figured out how to make Obama a hero over Syria.
Surprised they didn’t bring up Katrina.
Mickey Mantle, lol.
I actually saw this report yesterday. Way to go ABC.
Cutting edge journalism only 3 years old. In their defense they were
probably momentarily blinded by the twerking girl catching fire.
hey, stop being unfair to ABC. To save money and still get reports from far away places like China, they are using 1500’s sailing ships to courier messages, so it was actually very speedy - in fact, it is amazing it got through at all given the lack of navigation equipment and vulnerability to storms!
The thing is, people who watch the unwatchable network newscasts (and Diane Sawyer is probably the most unwatchable of the bunch) will never have any clue that the puff piece they saw Thursday night was 3 years old. People who watch network news are the kind of people who tend to vote for people like Ubama. That is, they are mostly the elderly dregs of the ignorant chattering class.
So, it is nice that The Blaze pointed out this latest piece of eye-rolling, network news idiocy, but nobody who matters cares.
I am glad to know ABC has more sources than just the White House.
I can’t stand Dianne Sawyer’s pseudo-homespun attempt at familiarity.
Ho Lee Fuk
Wee Tu Lo
No on except low info’s watch the MSM “news”, so as hitlery so astutely stated “what difference does it make?”
She’s been schnockered on live news events in the past. This doesn’t surprise me.
The three nets should end the pretense of journalism at this point. They don’t do entertainment OR journalism well any more.
Sports is something they don’t do well anymore either. Contrast Pat Summerall with Jim Nance doing the Masters. No contest. Unwatchable, except on mute, which means you don’t hear the swipe of the club, the impact of the ball on the green, the sound of the wind, and other elements that make golf coverage good.
How many ex-jocks or coaches does it take to provide coverage of football? Fox has six, sometimes seven people at a desk, and the exchange is, well, thank goodness you can go to the internet for scores.
Bloated, drunk, f*cked out, past their prime, and in their fear of decline, defensive and taking themselves way too seriously - that’s network TV in 2013.
So, yeah, I can see them not doing the homework necessary to figure out whether what they are putting on the air is actually happening, or something that happened three years ago. Makes perfect sense to me.
There’s no news without Gary Gnu.
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