December 01, 2004
A waste of air time
With the American President visiting Canada, I suppose it was inevitable that newsrooms here would waste their resources covering the American networks' coverage of the meeting. The whole annoys me nevertheless.
One Toronto TV station ran footage at noon showing a series of mistakes made by CNN in their coverage of the morning's festivities in Ottawa. It pointed out that a graphic had misspelled "Ottawa" and that Bill Schneider had a brain cramp and couldn't remember our Prime Minister's surname. (In the interest of fairness I should point out that Toronto Sun reporter Bill Rodgers got it even more wrong - his article this morning suggests it was President Bush who forgot.) A Toronto radio station also ran a piece last evening nit picking every slight error made by CNN and others.
Apparently journalists critiquing their foreign colleagues passes for news in Canada.
To the reporters and assignment editors who thought this was worthy of their time and mine, I offer this reminder:
Every day, I could produce a story about the silly little errors you make in your coverage of the day's events. Until you are as hard on yourselves as you are on your colleagues from South of the Border, spare me your smug indulgences.
Posted by maxthecat at December 1, 2004 09:04 AM
http://www.maxsmewsings.com/mt/archives/2004/12/a_waste_of_air_time.php