TV Anchor Duped into Airing Obviously Fake Pilot Names is a Teachable Moment
I spent the better part of yesterday late afternoon sharing this video on social media and it’s making the rounds this morning (h/t to NowThisNews where I first caught it yesterday). So you may have seen it by now, but I bring it to your attention here as a reminder of something slightly more serious.
A news anchor with television station KTVU in California was duped into reading off the names of several purported pilots from Asiana Flight 214, which crash landed on a San Francisco runway on July 6th, killing three and injuring over 180 passengers.
The “pilot names” were so painfully obviously fake, it’s hard to believe that this segment ever made it to air. I mean, with names like “Captain Sum Ting Wong” and “Ho Lee Fuk” – really?
The worst part about it is that the TV station did at least try to do some legwork and reached out to the National Transportation Safety Board for verification. The NTSB confirmed the names.
KTVU later aired a correction and apology.
So did the NTSB, which blamed the error on a summer intern who “acted outside the scope of his authority.” Of course.
The names were thought offensive by some, when you consider the endless speculation over whether or not culture played any role in the crash. And some argue that it was insensitive to victims of the crash. Others view the stunt as simply being funny.
Folks can have the “I’m offended” versus “C’mon it was funny” side debate, but that’s not why I bring the story to your attention.
This stunt is yet another illustration of just how easy it is to punk the media these days, to bait them into airing or publishing something that is inaccurate. And as I’ve written here before about hacking and hijacking the news and injecting hoaxes into the news cycle, the potential exists for more nefarious people to use the media to do far more malicious things.
And I’m talking about more than just what outlets like MSNBC pass off as “news” on any given day.
While funny to many, offensive to others, I think this stunt is a teachable moment here. Just as white hat hackers break their way into company systems to find companies’ security flaws and embarrass them when the companies don’t take steps to correct it, so soon will be our broken news outlets and government agencies if they don’t get with the program and clean up their acts.
Comments
About eight minutes before George Zimmerman said he would not take the stand and testify, I tweeted:
BREAKING: George #Zimmerman will not testify #ZimmermanTrial #news
Then I listened for when he actually said it. Eight minutes later, there were thousands of RT’s BEFORE he said he wouldn’t testify.
I was testing out newsjacking and it worked. It was a true story but I didn’t know until he said so. I scooped the media and George Zimmmerman himself!
Ho Lee Fuk!!
These news people are idiots!
Did they make it past second grade?
I feel sorry for the intern at NTSB who lost his/her job by “confirming” the names.
There are at least even odds that the kid answered the phone, heard the phony names, and thought it was a prank and said, “Yeah, right, that’s them.”
That anyone whose job is fact-checking could read those names out loud on the phone and not figure out it was a hoax just underlines the unreliability of so-called “mainstream” media these days. Decades of cost-cutting has resulted in the closing of most bureaus, and the vaunted “editors and fact-checkers” have also been laid off for the most part.
Most media outlets rely on AP or Drudge for their news now. Accuracy isn’t in the top five concerns for a story for broadcast.
If those really were the true names of the pilots, someone needed to decide it would be in bad taste to air them because they coincidentally translate into lowbrow hilarity in English.
The #1 problem with media is EGO. Only the media gives a damn that they got the story out first. Only the media gives a damn that their interview was exclusive. I know I couldn’t care less about these details.
Wi Tu Lo! Ha!!!
When you get paid to read the teleprompter, that’s what you do.
When you get paid to sight read music, as part of wht you do when you’re in a band, that’s what you do.
When the music director doesn’t see that you and a cheer leading flag twirler are going to end up in the same spot … what you do is exaggerate the walking part. So the band director notices the snafu.
Here? We got to learn, yet again, that HOW you look on TV is more important than the words you’re just reading on the fly.
Glad it happened. Not that I watch TV news. But REDDIT posted this “mistake” up high. And, I’m glad to see it here, too. (I think Drudge also gave it a mention in his headlines.)
News is news.
It’s all an elaborate publicity stunt for Anchor Man 2.
Comedy gold
I thought something was fishy here. Originally I thought that Ho Lee Fuk was the author of a book on the Asian Population Explosion I read years ago, but I was in error. That was Wee Fuk Em Yung.
It’s being reported that Asiana airlines is considering sueing NTSB and KTVU TV station over the “damage to their reputation”
[…] covered the whole ordeal here at Legal […]
[…] since California TV station KTVU erroneously aired the fake names of four pilots falsely purported to be those of Asiana Flight 214, the story has gone viral and left many […]