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There is a always a vetting process in newsrooms before news are released, so either the levels of oversight are professionally incompetent or one or two of these racist employees decided to carry on the prank. Either way the result just highlights the callous nature of racists who would grab any opportunity to mock others who are different from them. The tragedy was bad enough in itself and now others trying to do their jobs have been smeared due to their mistakes. Name calling and mocking Asian names have been prevalent and a common racist practice so I am very surprised that the newsroom did not catch this prank when the population of Asians are greater in the SF/Oakland MSA. In any case, a proper investigation needs to be carried out and heads need to roll as this offensive prank will be nationally known and it just cuts a deeper wound to those hurt or killed in the crash.
There is no vetting process. The only process they have are the live viewer counts as stories run. The higher the viewer counts, the more the story develops and the more they can charge for commercial ad time.
Maybe Dan Rather could chime in on the topic. News is about the talking heads and has very little to do with the news. If they stick around long enough, disgraced talking heads delivering the "news" can attain the title of statesman.
People are human; they make mistakes, no matter how perfect they may be.
Radio stations and TV stations have made many mistakes before, and they will make mistakes in the future.
In this case, someone played a joke on them by supplying them with these names; it sounds like a teenager type joke. Many years ago, teens would call the airport from a white paging telephone and ask the operator to please page Mike Hunt, and when spoken fast does not come out as Mike Hunt. The joke became widely known and finally operators learned to not make that page.
The perpetrator of this pilot names joke was probably innocently making a play on words and not stopping to think about the fact that it could be interpreted as being racist.
Both the NTSB and the TV station discovered the error and made the appropriate apologies. End of story. Now lets watch for the next TV blooper. It's not a matter of IF it will happen, it's WHEN it will happen.
Location: About 10 miles north of Pittsburgh International
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Quote:
Originally Posted by KaaBoom
They read it off a teleprompter like this.
Ok. That doesn't address my question of whether they get to see it before they're reading it on live TV though.
Quote:
In this case, someone played a joke on them by supplying them with these names;
it sounds like a teenager type joke. Many years ago, teens would call the
airport from a white paging telephone and ask the operator to please page Mike
Hunt, and when spoken fast does not come out as Mike Hunt. The joke became
widely known and finally operators learned to not make that page.
I used to work as a zookeeper, and every April 1st, the switchboard would get flooded with calls for Mr. Wolf, Mrs. Fox, and occasionally, Mr. L. Efont. People are gullible. Professionals in the field of disseminating information should be less so.
The irony in the whole thing is that (particularly in light of the fact that the crew's real names had been public for several days prior), multiple professionals in their field were apparently totally lacking in situational awareness--which is seemingly the main factor in the crash itself.
"Ladies and Gentleman, we apologize it looks like this is some sort of prank in bad taste"
Are news readers allowed to do that? I don't know enough about how it's done, so I'm just curious. The joke got past the people who make the teleprompter text, the people who made the graphic, the director, editors, and others didn't it. It should have been caught long before it got to that point. The news reader isn't the only one who failed here like some seem to be saying.
I think you're over-reacting skipper, but my words were not as well-chosen as they should have been, you're right. It is, nevertheless, an interesting and pretty factual analysis of publicly available data that the press ignores, or distorts, in favor of a hot story. It shows what happened on the approach, not why. The causes of the rapid rate of descent, just prior to the landing, combined with the reduced power that put them where they were, when they were, in the last 30 seconds or so before impact need to be discovered; you're right about that. What this analysis shows is that the 777 was in the wrong place at the wrong time with no resources left to recover.
A student pilot told me that in landing, a plane should have enough speed to either land or go around. He called it conservation of energy. Unlike a prop driven airplane, a jet engine is a turbine that requires it to "spool up" to accelerate which takes time. The pilot flew the plane into the ground.
They see it on the teleprompter as they are reading it.
I'd like to chime in here as a long-time TV station employee. Sometimes anchors do read scripts off the prompter "cold," especially when it's a breaking story that happens during the newscast. The producer can add, change or delete scripts from the control room while the show is on the air, and these changes are transmitted electronically to the prompter. Normally, though, the scripts are written beforehand and the anchors will go over them before the show and even during commercial breaks.
Getting back to the topic, a flight instructor who is also a director at the station where I worked told me that there's never just one cause for an airline disaster. It's almost always a chain of events, each of which shouldn't have happened but did.
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Again I am just a lay man but
