Media: Mistakes aplenty from the News Cable Network
Posted in On the Media with tags CNN, errors, journalism on January 31, 2009 by Billy DennisSeveral people emailed me with links to this article from CNN:
Suddenly, this city’s motto rings hollow: “It’s Better Here” doesn’t match the mood in a place where the recession hit late but is now hitting hard.
“I just felt, I thought I couldn’t lose with this company” is how Chris Gwynn described his motivation for moving his wife and two children to Peoria from Las Vegas, Nevada.
There was a job waiting at Caterpillar, the 80-year-old heavy equipment giant, and “It was a company that you could just retire with, great pension, retirement, 401 and so on.”
Gwynn is one of 20,000 workers Caterpillar will shed by the end of the first quarter of 2009, a decision the company announced this week. The company says the job cuts are necessary because of a decline in orders that it attributed to the U.S. and global recession.
Now, Gwynn is enrolled at classes at Central Illinois College, grateful his wife has a full-time job at a local call center, and was nervously waiting to find out not if but when his last day would be.
I’m sorry for Grwynn and his wife.
I’m annoyed that the writer of this article thinks “It’s Better Here,” is the city’s motto. It’s not. It’s the name of a public service ad campaign that features the mayors of other cities as well. And he got the name of Illinois Central College wrong too. That’s two fact errors in the top five paragraphs.
Robert Heinlein once wrote that every single time he read a newspaper of magazine article about a event in which he participated, the article would get the facts wrong to some degree. I think some of this is due to different perceptions. But it also points one think that lessens the public’s trust in journalists. The cure is transparency and mechanisms that let the public comment on and make corrections, something that’s not available on this particular CNN page.
At least he didn’t use the “Will it play in Peoria” cliche.
