CNN Exec Explains Photo Snafu, But Questions Remain

CNN senior editorial director Richard Griffiths called about the prior blog post, but not before I got a somewhat tearful call from a friend of the kid who CNN misidentified repeatedly yesterday as Jared Lee Loughner, alleged gunman in yesterday's Arizona shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

To recap, Don Lemon of CNN apologized at about 8:59 p.m. PT on Saturday for showing the wrong picture and then, about two minutes later, CNN showed the wrong picture again. I posted the video on YouTube:

So today I got some calls. The friend of the misidentified guy explained to me that CNN's use of the photo has caused major trauma and heartache. I'm going to call the misidentified guy "Dave," a Missouri kid who says he doesn't know Loughner in any way.

The friend begged me to remove the YouTube video and a side-by-side image of Loughner and Dave that appeared on the prior blog post. I felt bad for their crisis, but the video and images are part of a broader story about the very faulty way the U.S. media handled this news event. I couldn't commit to it.

Then I saw an email from Griffiths, left, asking me to call him about "our screw-up." I anticipated he would ask me to remove the video, but instead he just asked if I'd blur out the picture of Dave. That seemed like a reasonable compromise, so I have done that. (I also removed the side-by-side comparison photo because using a blurred image defeats the purpose.)

Having Griffiths on the record acknowledging the mistake makes it a little bit more palatable to doctor the video. But how the hell does a mistake like this even happen?

Well, there's some fuzziness in there, too.

Griffiths' version of events is that a law enforcement source told CNN the name of the suspect and pointed their reporters to Loughner's Facebook site. The front photo there, Griffiths claims, was the one of Dave, and he now believes Loughner just misappropriated it for whatever reason. Griffiths said that they looked at side-by-side comparisons between the image of Dave and other images they had of Loughner and decided that it was, in fact, a match.It was my screw-up. We looked at it, it was my screw-up.

I won't re-victimize Dave by posting my own side-by-side again, but anyone who looked at it while it was up on the blog knows the two images weren't really that similar. Any which way, Griffiths falls on the sword on this one, saying he called the shot so "it's my screw-up."

But why did CNN re-air the wrong image immediately after Lemon's apology? Griffiths said that it was in a segment of the show they were re-broadcasting from earlier in the night and nobody manually fixed it. After the snafu I saw, he said, it was fixed and Lemon's apology aired several times through the night.

Griffiths said CNN is on "good terms" with Dave's family and that "they know that our error was not something we’re proud of."

Fine. But then there's this other thing: Dave's friend insisted that the Loughner Facebook site where Dave's picture came from was not actually Loughner's but was a phony site posted after the suspect was initially put in custody. I asked how he knew this, and he said they have some time-stamp data to back it up.

If so, that leaves great doubts about Griffiths' version. They're saying law enforcement pointed them to the Facebook site, but the cops wouldn't do that if it was a fake. The more likely scenario is that some whiz at CNN found it and told his/her bosses this was it and they believed it. There's no reason for Dave's family and friends to contradict CNN's version but there's all the face-saving reason in the world for CNN to put forth this explanation.

I asked Griffiths if this incident and other problems from yesterday taught CNN anything about relying on social media for facts and images. His response: "Skepticism is a great, great virtue. Social media is a great tool for getting tipped off to stories, but as news organization, we have to check and recheck and check again."

Clearly that didn't happen this time.

By the way, I asked Griffiths if CNN also had Giffords as dead. He said yes, that they picked it up from NPR "and two other sources of our own."

Oh, and the network has "done an analysis of how many minutes we were wrong." That's interesting, but also a little weird. I mean, does it even matter if it was 5 minutes or 43 minutes? Is that really the analysis they ought to be doing?

VIDEO: CNN MisID's Giffords Suspect, Apologizes, Does it Again

Update: CNN and a friend of the kid whose photo was used both called, asked me to blur the non-suspect's image. So here's a new version of the video and a second blog post is coming. -sf

One of the most horrifying and irresponsible days in American journalism just got measurably worse when CNN, at about 8:59 p.m. PT apologized for airing a photo they said was Jared Lee Loughner, suspect in the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and slaying of six in Tucson. Lemon explained that the image they had shown of a young man at a sporting event was taken from Loughner's Facebook page archives and that CNN was sorry for the error.

Then, about two minutes later at the top of the hour, CNN showed the same erroneous image again. It's stunning enough that ripping something off Facebook and not bothering to check the accuracy is what's done in the highest circles of American journalism today. But to get it wrong, apologize and then do it again is absolutely unbelievable.

The entire day has been appalling. First, of course, there was Reuters and NPR reporting the Rep. Giffords was dead. She wasn't, but all manner of credible news folk, including Ben Smith and Jon Ralston, retweeted it:


Next there was the bizarre spectacle of Fox, MSNBC and CNN going on all day about vitriol in politics and Sarah Palin's personal responsibility in this without having any specific information about the alleged gunman's motives. Also, if anyone is responsible for the vicious partisanship in this country, it's Fox and MSNBC first and second, with CNN in third for inventing the TV shoutfest concept with "Crossfire." Then, maybe somewhere down on the list might be Palin and other incendiary camera whores who are products, not the engineers, of this dynamic.

Speaking of camera whores and a lack of perspective, Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. went on the air to twice call the Arizona shooting a "dastardly deed" -- greatly offending the Joker, Dr. Evil and Lex Luthor, no doubt, because they figured they had the corner on the "dastardly" market -- but also claimed this was the worst "dastardly deed" he's seen in his lifetime. Apparently he shrugged off 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Mumbai attacks or Columbine.

I loved when he went on later to Tweet this:


Unspeakable, and yet there is he blubbering along on TV, huh? See, that's what I'd love to see, this guy tell Fox's producers, "No, no, I can't come on. This is just unspeakable. I cannot speak to it." Tee hee.

Finally, our local media in Vegas was utterly worthless. The Review-Journal sent out just a single news flash or Tweet about what was happening in Tucson:


You know what we got LOADS of info about from the Review-Journal's Tweeter today? Every frigging bowel movement by everyone on the Runnin' Rebels.

And nobody locally seems to have noticed the one Vegas-related connection: The owner of the Golden Nugget, Tilman Fertitta, flew Giffords' husband from Texas to Tucson on his private jet. Nicely done, folks!

Searchlight Or Bust, The Wrap

I'm not even sure what this lady is supposed to be, to be honest, except maybe ridiculous?

Well, I had quite a lot of snarky fun on Twitter about my Saturday adventure heading 50 miles south to Searchlight, Nev., to cover the big Tea Party put on on in/near Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's hometown. I netted 40+ new followers thanks to Eclectablog's citation on DailyKos.


For more straight-up coverage, check out the Las Vegas Sun and Review-Journal, that of my pal Kathleen Hennessey now of the L.A. Times. Also full of snark and insight was, as always, Jon Ralston. Who to ignore? CNN, whose anchor Fredericka Whitfield said "at least dozens" were there when any sane person could see there were thousands. And here's my entry for AOLNews.Com. The cops estimate 8,000 were there, by the way.

Anyhow, I had decided, rather than drive my piece-o-crap down there, to pay $20 for a seat on one of the charter buses being arranged by some folks out of California. I wrote to the e-mail that was heavily promoted in the Review-Journal and that massively popular (?) Nevada News Bureau site. I also got there early, figuring there'd be a big hoard. Turned out, there was, uh, one bus. And I was one of 13 people on a 75-seat bus. Apparently, everyone else decided to drive themselves.

That said, I did enjoy the ride, if only because I got to Tweet about the huge guy who ate a box of a dozen doughnuts by himself in about 15 minutes of riding and how useful socialized medicine will one day be for his diabetic ass. Here's the box, you disbelievers:


Doughnut Fatty was also reading "The 5,000 Year Leap," some 1981 book on protecting constitutional freedom that's No. 115 right now because Glenn Beck's been shilling it on Fox.

One stunner was that the bus driver declared his support for Harry Reid. He reasoned that a small state like Nevada needs his seniority and, when challenged about what Reid had done for the state from riders, he went into a whole thing about how he saved the state from Yucca Mountain. The riders were stumped but respectful. I was in awe of the driver's guts.

Once we arrived, though, there would be no dissenting opinions. Just a lot of signs and speeches saying essentially the same things:


Two thoughts here. (a) Texas, you're welcome to go at any time, and (b) Isn't it neat that Puffy's an animal lover?

Speaking of license plates, just wondering if I'm missing something. I hitched a ride home from Searchlight with freelance photog Isaac Brekken so I could get back faster and write, and we saw this and had no idea what it was supposed to mean. Anyone?


Lots of folks may mock these people -- including me, because it's in my nature -- but the event went off without any violent or racist incidents. My Tweets were merciless, but my report for AOLNews.Com, I hope, provided a fair representation of what happened: People got together to express their political views.


OK, with a healthy dose of media-bashing. Which is funny because, like other irrational hatreds, these people seemed to really like the reporter they got to speak to:


When I introduced myself to one sweet lady for an interview and told her I was with AOL News, she lit up: "Oh, I love your paper!" How, uh, nice!

Could this be why there was no violence?


But, seriously, how can people who do this...

...expect not to be teased? I mean, they took the song "New York, New York" and reworked the lyrics so that it went "These O-bah-mah bloooze, are melting away...". And they had KICKLINES, see?


There was a fleet of planes skywriting messages above and this was utterly distracting. GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Sandoval, who is actually the odds-on favorite to win at the moment, lost his speaking time to a crowd so transfixed by this...


...that they cheered to the heavens and chanted "Vote Reid Out" so loudly that all Sandy could do was pretend he was leading the chant.

Of course, nobody was distracted when Palin appeared:


She made the requisite jabs at Obama for using the TelePrompTer so much, then read her speech off a page as if that's actually different. She insisted that when she tells the crowd, "Don't retreat, reload!" that she's not making a gun reference. And she gave voice to the principles of her audience in support of lower taxes and smaller government and out-of-control health insurance company. Still, she was a vastly improved presenter than she was when I covered in the fall of 2008. And she even gets to keep the clothes now!

What was sort of amazing was that it wasn't Palin or Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons or even Vegas radio wackadoodle Heidi Harris who came across as nuts, it was self-described "middle-class media mogul" Andrew Breitbart. The guy was not only completely off the wall but totally into himself, blathering on about how he's offering $100,000 to the United Negro College Fund if the black House members who were called "nigger" last weekend could prove it. Breitbart, right, went on about how the Democrats were the real racists and that this is why he left the party in 1996 which is so strange because I don't recall any big racial scandals in 1996 surrounding the Democrats, do you?

And finally, one of the funnest parts to me was that several speakers insisted the racial taunts against the House members never happened but not a single one repudiated the homophobic slurs visited upon U.S. Rep. Barney Frank. That, evidently, is just fine.

Nicely done, Mr. Knapp!

I don't ordinarily wade into commentary about the local TV news because my partner, Miles, is the executive producer at KVBC, the NBC affiliate here. That makes it difficult and awkward and, happily, the Review-Journal's Steve Bornfeld has his "Mediaology" column analyzing the topic so I don't have to.

But it's a pretty big deal that George Knapp of KLAS, the local CBS affiliate, has won a George Foster Peabody Award this week for their special, "Crossfire: Water, Power and Politics," a hard-hitting analysis of the impact of growth on the southwestern U.S. You can view all seven parts via this LasVegasNow.Com link. Also honored was Knapp's photojournalist, Matt Adams.

To get an idea of what a huge deal this is -- it's the equal to the R-J winning a Pulitzer -- consider who else got Peabody honors this year: ABC for "Lost," HBO for "The Gates" and "John Adams," NBC for its Beijing Olympics coverage, PBS for "Washington Week With Gwen Ifill" and CNN for its coverage of the presidential primaries.

Congrats, Mr. Knapp. Let's hope your station can continue to spend this kind of money on this kind of journalism in these, you know, tough economic times.

We'll Never Learn

THIS...

...DRIVES...

...ME...
...BANANAS!!!

The AP, Fox, MSNBC and CNN have already called Vermont for Barack Obama and John McCain. The polls have only been closed for 13 minutes there and not a single vote total has been released. I know they've got their exit polls and all that jazz, but I really thought these TV stations had learned not to do this. It serves absolutely NOBODY'S interest to call races before ANY votes have been counted. And every single time these projections prove wrong, the networks promise not to do it again.

So pathetic. It's NOT OK, just because polling shows something to be so.

Live From, Uh, New York?

ABC News' billboard in Times Square, 1/25/08

How does one cover a fire in a city 2,000 miles away? Well, if the fire turns out to be less than a holocaust (look it up - a "holocaust" originally meant a devastating fire), it's not that hard. Also, if you're able to tap into a huge network of Vegas people from the blogs and list-servs, it's also doable. Not ideal, but doable.

Here's what I ended up with. I got quite a ribbing from my family for the idea that I could write a piece in this manner. As I said, it's not how I'd normally do it. But in a pinch -- evidently the Times simply could not find another reporter in Vegas -- it'll do.

My Las Vegas Weekly column will discuss this further, but there was something else about this experience. Since I wasn't there, I was glued to the TV. And, while I was thrilled to see that KVBC logo in the corner indicating that CNN was using Miles' TV station's footage, it was just sickening to realize that even in its hour of trauma, Vegas just isn't taken seriously.

There I was, near tears watching the apparent destruction of a major structure and worrying about the pandemonium of thousands of guests and employees having to get out. I assumed that there were tourists in the upper floors who were trapped and possibly dead. That it all worked out OK does not minimize what it looked and felt like in the beginning of the crisis.

But the folks on cable news? They thought the fire was entertaining. One CNN reporter actually wondered jokingly in the earliest stages whether the Monte Carlo buffet comp he’d recently received in the mail was still valid. FOX News Channel, which carried every O.J. Simpson press conference live, didn’t bother to pick up its local affiliate’s feed from the briefing by Las Vegas Fire Chief Steven Smith. And, yes, some bozoette on one of those stations – can’t recall which – really thought she was clever muttering, “Like Paris Hilton would say, that’s hot!” Can you imagine such irreverence if this had been the Sears Tower?

Just as amazing was how quickly the story died the minute it turned out that no humans had. Were I not on vacation, I would be pushing editors to let me do the obvious follow-up: A 32-story building containing 5,000 or so people caught major fire and everyone got out calmly. And alive. Imagine that.

The Strip is LIVE at 7:15 pm PT!

We're doing things a little out of order because Miles has to stay at work till 7 but our interview with Michelin director Jean-Luc Naret cannot be moved from 7:15 pm. SO... I'll do that interview, then we'll start the show properly at 7:30.

Come on down to LVROCKS.Com and join the chat! Or listen to the podcast in its proper order when it's posted on Thursday. The celebrity guest is a somewhat crabby Joy Behar of "The View."

Next week: Ellen DeGeneres and Wolf Blitzer.

Greetings from the luxurious Minden Best Western!

I landed in Reno last night having made my flight with about five minutes to spare. Then I wrangled mightily with the Hertz folks to get a car with an iPod jack -- oddly, I've found, the desk clerks never have any idea whether their cars have them and they usually do. I ended up with a Chevy Cobalt which is a cute little glorified golf cart that does the trick. I've been getting them a lot lately and, while they don't meet the standards of my car-nut partner, all I really care about these days is that auxiliary jack!

All I know about Minden thus far is that US 395 is well-signed with indications of where it is and, at 11 pm, the only things open are a McD's and an AM/PM. And that is likely to be all I find out. Not looking good for finding a Starbucks around here.

There are two versions of my Fossett work from yesterday available, one here for Wired News and the other is here for the New York Times. They're not terribly different except that Wired did let me deal with the flowering conspiracy theory issue involved. I just watched CNN's report from the Minden Air Field and they had nothing new to report today. But the Associated Press' excellent Northern Nevada correspondent Brendan Riley had this terrific backgrounder on what the Flying M Ranch is.

Mark my words, and I've been saying this since the beginning: The Steve Fossett disappearance will eternally be fodder for conspiracy theorists. And you know why? Because this is Nevada!

Stay tuned -- I hope to update throughout the day here and post some pix when I can. Now would be a really good time for me to have one of those air-card things, huh? But thankfully, the Best Western has free and reliable Wi-Fi and is only about 4 mins from the air field.

OK - gotta go get my complimentary breakfast!

CNN's Nutty O'Brien: Fossett Conspiracy!

I'm covering the disappearance of Steve Fossett for the New York Times right now from Vegas. He's missing in remote western Nevada around 90 miles south of Reno.

Since I'm stuck following this case by phone calls and by watching the TV coverage, I'm sitting here amazed by the misinformation and awful speculation coming from CNN's Space & Technology Correspondent Miles O'Brien, who is phoning in his "expertise" from an undisclosed location.

First, he gets uppity about a question that reporters on the ground in Minden, Nev., didn't ask about a beacon the plane might have had that might be accessed via satellite. The reporters did ask whether that had yielded any info but the officials didn't know. "Shame on them," he barked at the reporters for not knowing the make and model of that transmitter.

Then, about an hour later, he's on the air with totally off-the-wall conspiracy theory that is based entirely on O'BRIEN'S LACK OF KNOWLEDGE OF NEVADA GEOGRAPHY. He refers to something in the press conference about "electronic evidence" and then says:

"It is possible that Fossett flew into some restricted air space in that area. Nellis Air Force base is nearby, that's the home of the Thunderbirds. Not far also from Area 51 which everyone knows a little something about. It is possible that there was some sort of electronic radar information which the military might have had associated with that restricted air space."

Hey O'Brien! Nellis Air Force Base is more than 350 miles from where Fossett was flying. Area 51 is more than 300 miles.

Sheesh. Shame on YOU.

My Awesome Little Bro

I'd been meaning to post these and this holiday-weekend lull seems just the time.

As many of you know, I have a Little Brother (from Big Brothers Big Sisters), Jamie. I "got" him when he was just 6 and this August he turns 17. He's graduating from high school next month (a year early) and he's always been really into dance in addition to the more typical teen-boy pursuits of skateboarding, video games, odd hairstyles and girls.

This is a unique, amazingly self-possessed and easy-going kid and I'm incredibly proud to have been a part of his upbringing. He has also, over the years, been a fixture in my writing, whether it's when we snuck into 21 pools on the Strip and graded them for the L.A. Times or when we went backstage at the Boom Boom Huck Jam for the Boston Globe so he could meet his motocross and skateboarding idols. He and his family were also incredibly supportive of my need to speak out when some religious right nutjobs attacked Big Brothers Big Sisters for allowing gay adults to be mentors, which I did in an op-ed piece that ran in several papers around the nation and led to a CNN appearance.

Last weekend, I joined his family at the historic Boulder Theatre (owned by Desi Arnaz Jr.!) in quaint Boulder City for his recital. Here are a few pictures of him doing his moves. I wish I had a program so I could tell you what's what in here:

Christiane, CNN and Calamity

It was strangely comforting, on a day of such national tragedy, to accidentally find myself watching CNN's Christiane Amanpour collect a high honor and admonish the TV news industry to take itself more seriously. Too bad nobody at CNN evidently listens to her. But I'll get to that in a moment.

As the bodies were being counted on the bloodsoaked campus of Virginia Tech, Amanpour, probably the best television journalist of our age, was in Las Vegas to receive the Paul White Award for lifetime achievement at the Radio and TV News Directors Association (RTNDA) convention. The RTNDA is the journalism component of the mammoth National Association of Broadcasters convention that is occupying the entire 3 million square foot Las Vegas Convention Center as well as parts of the neighboring Las Vegas Hilton. I had been at NAB to do some interviews for a forthcoming New York Times piece that has nothing at all to do with Las Vegas, and I was about to leave when I saw the notice about Amanpour's honor, which had gone in the past to Edward R. Morrow, Walter Cronkite and others. So I stayed.

Amanpour gets most of her airtime on CNN International, where I first fell in love with her and her British brogue and severe bangs while living in Beijing and writing for USA Today in 2001. She's on often enough on CNN Domestic and her "In The Footsteps Of Bin Laden" is her latest brilliant output, but she's not on even enough for her to be a household name in America and that's a shame.

Amanpour railed tonight against the sort of journalism that caters to the lowest common denominator, insisting that the public hungers for higher-brow fare and exhorting her colleagues to do better. I don't believe that; I think our sated, overly secure and frivilous culture gets exactly what it "hungers" for, but it was nonetheless especially delightful to hear her toss off clever chestnuts like "Do we really want our generation ot be defined by the travails of the likes of Anna Nicole Smith?" or "Is our great debate going to be about Britney Spears' pate?"

What was strange was that at the very same time Amanpour was beating this drum, her colleagues were on the air churning out some of the most embarrassing and shallow coverage on the Virginia Tech campus. I caught about an hour shortly after the speech and what I found was Jon King trying to keep the wall-to-wall coverage going by standing on a deserted, dark campus grabbing random people to ask that idiotic "how's this feel?" question. He also announced the name of one dead student -- even as he admitted the police weren't disclosing it. Now, what the hell is that about? If the cops aren't saying, could it be the family hasn't been notified yet? Why would CNN need to give out a dead man's name -- just because they had it? Is the public that desperate for names of people they've never met? Would you as a viewer think, 'Ooh, they're the best! They gave out a dead guy's name! I better stick with them so I can find out the other dead people's names?"

CNN's coverage of this horror was Exhibit A of the sort of journalism Amanpour was rightly attacking. There was this extended piece where they interviewed some creepy criminologist named James Alan Fox (that's him to the left) with bad hair and crooked glasses who actually tried to imagine why the gunman killed 32 people today. He has no clue, we don't even know the killer's name, and CNN is happily pretending they have an "expert" who can divine the motive for this disaster.

Oh, and one more thing. Amanpour spoke to a crowd of mostly news directors of local TV stations. They weren't the ones who overplayed Anna Nicole. Sure, they may get into the crime and weather to excess, but Christiane need only turn to her own bosses if she wants to take on the dumbing down of TV journalism.