Truth, Trust, Sloppiness, and the News

Why Is It So Hard to Get News Right?

On Jan. 11, 2017, news viewers might have believed that two local Philadelphia anchors were performing a miracle reminiscent of Jesus and Lazarus.

That morning, on the “Good Day Philadelphia” show, the anchors wished boxing great Joe Frazier a happy birthday. They went on to report that Frazier would mark the occasion by going to City Hall to honor young boxers and their coaches.

One small problem: Joe Frazier had died six years before.

The anchors had even gotten Frazier’s birth date wrong.

Funny, not funny.

I remember that some people were shocked at how such a huge and embarrassing mistake could have been made at a television news station in one of the country’s largest markets. How could anchors, producers, writers, and crew all have missed such an egregious error?

I wasn’t surprised at all. I had seen the gradual decline in the editorial process at local news stations in my decades as an anchor and reporter. The cutbacks that accelerated with the 2008 financial crisis further eliminated editorial layers, and veteran journalists lost their jobs. The impact of the staff reductions has been especially detrimental to local morning news shows because they usually have the least experienced personnel and are often produced on a string and a prayer.

The problem of staffing (and quality staffing) of traditional print and broadcast news organizations has kept getting worse, with Pew Research reporting in 2021 that U.S. newsroom employment had fallen 26% since 2008.

Looking specifically at Pew’s report on broadcast television employment, it doesn’t seem as terrible at first glance. The number of total employees has remained flat over that period.

However, Pew doesn’t mention that the number of television stations carrying local news in the U.S. has soared, as have the number of local news shows and the total hours of local news content.

If you do that math, that means that far fewer people are producing a lot more news shows in many more places. In other words, broadcast news organizations are stretched to the breaking point, so mistakes, which should be anathema to journalists, are increasingly likely to occur.

Those mistakes range from the sloppy to the major whoppers that can move markets or sway elections.

This column is not meant as a comprehensive analysis of what ails the traditional American news media, but I’m getting fed up with TV news shooting itself in the collective foot. Some inexplicable errors by CNN over the past few days (maybe recent layoffs are having an impact) made me want to rant a bit.

Screen grab of CNN Senior Political Analyst John Avlon providing context to the 2023 election of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives on the Jan. 3, 2023, edition of CNN This Morning.

On the morning of Wednesday, Jan. 3, John Avlon, whom I don’t know but appears to be a very smart guy, tried to provide historical context to the election of the next speaker of the House of Representatives. Unfortunately, as you can see in the picture, Avlon told CNN This Morning’s viewers that the speaker was third in the line of succession to the presidency.

That’s not true. The vice president is first, and the speaker second. The president pro tempore of the Senate is third.

CNN has writers and multiple layers of producers. But none of them, including Avlon and the highly paid anchors who tossed to him, caught the error? To CNN’s credit, it corrected the mistake in the following hour, but did not acknowledge the screwup.

Screen grab of a CNN report on the morning of Saturday, December 31, 2022, with a nonsensical “lower third” that includes a misspelling.

Take a look at this other picture from CNN on Saturday, Dec. 31. During a report on the border crisis, the network put up a “lower third” that read: “Hundreds of Homeles [sic] Migrants Live On.”

The misspelling was bad enough, but what exactly did “live on” mean? CNN left the nonsensical language and misspelling on the screen for 16 seconds. With all those people in the control room and anchors on the set, it took that long to recognize the double mess?

These are obviously small mistakes, but when compounded with the huge gaffes and major journalistic errors of the past decade they increase mistrust in the news media.

A Gallup poll from October of 2022 shows that only 34% of Americans have at least a “fair amount” of trust in the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.” That’s just two points from the record low, recorded during the 2016 campaign.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote in his Jan. 3, 2022, Substack newsletter that “Truth has become a valuable and fragile animal these days, an endangered species in great need of nurturing and protecting.”

While I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, Kareem’s main point is crucial for American democracy. We need the media to tell us the truth, to give us the unvarnished facts, and to not manipulate reality for political and financial power.

Major fabrications are, of course, much more consequential than journalistic sloppiness. But the latter will also undermine media credibility and diminish trust that Americans are hearing and reading the truth.

Please, CNN and the rest of you, get it right.

Cover photo: Former boxing heavyweight champion Joe Frazier in 2010 ("File:Joe Frazier 2010.jpg" by Arvee Eco from QUEENS, USA is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0).

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