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Media lies Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/4071560.htmhttp://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/4071560.htm
Posted on Sat, Sep. 14, 2002
COMMENTARY
TV dots airwaves with inaccuracies
GLENN GARVIN
TV critic
''It seems like everyone connected the dots here,'' WSVN-Fox 7 anchor Christine Cruz said during the sixth hour of the marathon coverage of Friday's bomb scare on Alligator Alley. ``It seems like everyone did what they were supposed to be doing.''
Like a lot of what was said during the coverage, that was about half right. Television reporters were certainly connecting dots -- lots of dots, some of them seemingly from another planet -- but if journalism is about facts and not hype, then they definitely weren't doing what they were supposed to do.
Friday's coverage was the source of a staggering amount of misinformation. Among the inaccurate reports:
• Several stations reported that a woman in Georgia told police three Middle Easterners were coming to Miami to blow something up. (That's not what she said.)
• Several also said cops spotted the men after they roared past a tollbooth on I-75. (One car rolled by at a normal rate of speed; the other stopped and paid the tolls for both.)
• The cops used explosives to detonate a suspicious knapsack found in one car. (They didn't.) Channel 7 reported that explosive ''triggers'' were found in one of the cars. (There were no ''triggers'' or anything else to do with explosives.)
• Channel 7 also reported that cops were searching for a third car. (They weren't.)
It was a wretched performance -- worse yet, a wretched performance that dragged on for eight hours, terrorizing South Florida and smearing the daylights out of three medical students who can be counted on to contribute heavily to the next edition of the travel guide What Sucks About South Florida.
''This is what is wrong with local news,'' said Bill Pohovey, news director at WPLG-ABC 10, one of the two stations that kept their perspective on the story and stuck with regular programming. (WLTV-Univision 23 was the other.) ``This is why viewers get disgusted with local news.''
My only quibble with Pohovey is the word local. The worst parody of journalism Friday was actually on CNN, where the high-paid-low-rated anchor Paula Zahn speculated, without a jot or tittle of evidence, that the three men were coming to Florida to blow up the Turkey Point nuclear reactor. Now you know why CNN promotes her sex appeal rather than her news judgment.
Local stations at least had the excuse that when you go live for six to eight hours, you've got to fill up the airtime with something -- especially when the pictures are dull shots of cops standing around empty automobiles. At best, that means stuff will get on the air without being as thoroughly checked as it should be; at worst, it means your telecast devolves into rampant speculation and hype. We had plenty of both Friday.
The most egregious offender was WSVN 7, where it sounded like the staff had to hold anchors Christine Cruz and Tom Haynes back from storming onto the causeway and personally administering lethal injections to the three detained men they'd already tried and convicted.
Over and over, the cops and public officials interviewed by the station's reporters cautioned that there was no physical evidence against the men (WSVN's false report of explosive ''triggers'' notwithstanding), they hadn't been arrested, and they weren't even being called ''suspects'' yet. Over and over, Cruz and Haynes ignored them.
''This story started as Sinister Plot,'' Cruz warned darkly. ``Now it's become Attack on Miami.''
Haynes wondered whether ''these guys, apparently on their way to Miami to do some harm to the city of Miami,'' were tied to al Qaeda. ''This looks like some loosely pulled together plot,'' he added. Later, he called them ``three men apparently on their way to Miami with some ill intentions.''
Sometimes I seriously wondered if Haynes was listening to his own station. At one point, WSVN aired an interview with the Georgia woman who reported the three men to the police. She described overhearing one man ask, ''Do you think we have enough to bring it down?'' and another answering, ``If we don't have enough, I have contacts. We can get enough to bring it down.''
Seconds after the interview ended, Haynes summarized like this: Three men ''talking about driving down to Miami and using some sort of explosive device to blow it up.'' How he read all that into those two simple sentences, I'll never know. Though I'll bet Paula Zahn can tell us.
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