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?”
Diane Sawyer has always been a liberal tool. Didn’t she work for the Democrats in congress during the Watergate investigation?
Roger Maris
The producer is responsible for everything that goes in the newscast...compiling reporters' stories and building them into the rundown, writing "voice overs", which are stories the anchor merely reads while the video is rolling, and finding voice overs from the network feed to run. Probably what happened here is some dumba** know nothing 25 year old who got their job at network because of nepotism, didn't think to check the date on the traffic jam story, because they needed a story to fit the international news segment, and that one fit the bill.
Anchors, like Diane Sawyer, are nothing more than talking heads. If you can get them to read their scripts before they go on the air, you're lucky. Their expertise is with filling time, and either speeding up or slowing down their delivery as the producer talks in their IFB (earpiece) from the control room, keeping them apprised of how much time is left before the next commercial break. Not that the anchors listen to the producer...they're far more important, you know.
In short, no one in the newsroom, except for a few grizzled old editors that people don't listen to anyway, know anything about what's actually going on. The FReeper who said the only real journalism going on these days are blogs and the foreign press, is spot on right.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Truth. She constantly looks like she needs to drink an entire bottle of laxative and spend some significant time on "da throne" (severely constipated).
I like ABC’s new ad campaign. “If you don’t watch ABC, you are uninformed. If you do watch ABC, you are misinformed”.
OOPS! I stand corrected.
News reporting in the US mainstream media consists of trolling LEFTIST WEBSITES ON the Internet for stories and repeating administration talking points.
Yeah, it’s harder to spout crap and get away with it.
Hence their efforts to curtail or control it.
I watch ABC news for about 3 minutes every week. And FReepers who watch at that same time know exactly what I am talking about.
Definitely appointment TV.
Now there was a true athlete. Played both baseball and football on college scholarship and was offered big league baseball and NFL contracts!
Nah. Three years to get news from China???
Even in the 1870’s a clipper chip could make it from China to England in one hundred days!
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I call them news readers, no more no less.
Sto Ree Ohld is in charge of fact checking at ABC.
When ABC claims to have a "News" organization, it is wildly inaccurate reporting.
In other words they reported something they read on the internet on a network newscast instead of getting their own crew there.
Why does network news still exist anyway?
Even if this story were not 3 years old, why does ABC give a Beijing traffic jam more news time than, say, the Benghazi scandal?
The medical term for the lady’s condition is: anal retentive. Behind those colored contacts, her eyes are BROWN.
It works like the sight tube on a coffee urn.
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