Some TV news people’s confounding gaffes

This past month, we witnessed some disappointing and depressing gaffes being committed by some TV news people, including so-called award-winners for “superior” broadcast journalism.

It all just goes to show how lazy some of our news people have become, and how the entire TV news field has to be rehabilitated for the simple reason that televiewers deserve better service.

First gaffe: A TV news reporter did a news feature on the British parliament and identified the prime minister as “David Blair!” Now, we know that Tony Blair was the prime minister way back when Princess Diana was still around, so the booboo was embarrassingly obvious. Sadly, the reporter didn’t even know that he had made a mistake, and no correction was made. The UK prime minister today is David Cameron.

Next major gaffe: A “famous” news anchor recently declared that the number of Ebola victims in the world doubled every day. Huh?! So, if there are 10,000 victims today, there will be 20,000 tomorrow? Given that rate of increase, there would be millions of Ebola victims by the end of the year—so we should all just give up and wait for death to come knocking at all our doors!

Fact is, the news anchor should have read the news text correctly as every month! Thank God, there’s hope for the world!

Instances of less-than-professional news service abound on TV every day: All too often, we hear TV news people or commentators citing an important person but “forgetting” his name, talking about a bill but not being clear about what it’s all about, or getting the date of a historic event wrong.

In all of these instances, the erring speakers lamely say they’ll get the facts right “later.” They fail to realize that it’s their job to get things right the first time around, because that’s what responsible TV people are supposed to do. (If this happened on US TV, they would be laughed out of the TV screen—or fired!)

Which is not to say that all US TV news people are pluperfect professionals all the time. Even the icon of NBC News, Brian Williams, was once unable to correctly read a tongue-twisting line of news text, and apologized profusely for the “shocking” error.

The point, however, is that he apologized, unlike our erring TV people who blithely dismiss their gaffes as proof that they’re “tao lang.” The nerve! They make mistakes constantly, so viewers don’t need to be reminded about how all too “human” and flawed they are.