On Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:03:09 -0600, Gig601XLBuilder wrote in :

Matt Whiting wrote:

Marty Shapiro wrote:

There was an newscaster in the Bay area many years ago who
read an report about a GA incident on the air. This report contained
several factual errors about the incident, among which was the picture
of a twin for the single engine aircraft involved. The irony was he
was a well known local pilot. About a week later, he MCed an all day
safety seminar. The first question asked of him was about the factual
errors in his report. His response was "I receive a 7 figure salary
for reading the news that is handed to me by the editors. If they
give me advance copy and I notice an error, I'll point it out to them,
but when I'm on the air, I am not going to jeapordize my salary by
altering what they hand me."

I find it amazing though that any TV news anchor would say that in
public or even in private. Not that I question Denny's story at all I
just find it amazing.

From the snippet we have--which is probably not from a transcript,
but from memory of the event--there is insufficient evidence to
condemn the newscaster.

The big questions are "What did he know and when did he know it?"

There is no reason to think that he saw the wrong picture being
displayed while he read what was handed to him. Chances are good
that he was focusing on the text, not the image. I'll be it was
a 15-to-20-second piece, at most, and that he had to be thinking
about lots of other things than fact-checking at the moment the
picture came up on screen. Who knows what other information he
may have had in his mind about the accident at the time that
the segment came up in the show? (Not us, I'd venture.)

... Also, I'd like to add that that comment alone would have jeopardized the
7 figure salary of any anchor that ever worked for any news director I
ever worked for. But then I've been out of the business for, damn, 20
years now.

There is a chance that the talent did not say what the OP says
he said. Memory can play funny tricks on us, and we tend to
see what we want to see, to hear what we want to hear, and to
remember what we want to remember. I just proved to myself
that my recollection of a post from 2003 was false, even though
it SEEMED to me to be an accurate memory.

I'm not upset by the discrepancies between what appears in
immediate news accounts of accidents and incidents and what
is technically correct from the standpoint of trained pilots.
"Knowledge maketh a bloody entrance." It seems to me that
the reporters and readers are, on the whole, well-intentioned
and do the best they can to understand what they are hearing,
distill it, and present it to their audience. That they could
do a better job if they had the motivation and training that
pilots do goes without saying. I don't blame them for making
other choices in their lives.

Marty
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