News Should Be Accurate

In the recent rain we have seen that most of the people who are reporting the news should have a much broader education. I keep hearing obvious miss statements on some subjects and I wonder if the reporters in the field or the producers of the news programs really care about the accuracy of the reporting. I know that some of the things that I consider errors are minor and are not the most important part of the story that is being reported. The fact is that if a reporter cannot seem to get the simple parts of a large story correct how do I know that that person has done any work to get the major parts of the story correct.

It seems that most of the coverage of the last rain event was to see how much mud was flowing from the areas that had been heavily damaged by the Station Fire. They seem to call every piece of equipment that they see removing mud a bulldozer. I think that this term refers to a track driven large piece of equipment that is used to scrape earth. They show back hoes or similar equipment that is used to pick up dirt in a bucket and place it in a dump truck to be relocated to a safer area. What is the importance of this misstatement? The idea that they do not know anything about the topic that they are covering and do not ask questions shows a lack of professionalism. They need to ask questions of the people on scene, to give us the information we need to know in these situations.

If you are covering a story about an aircraft then you should know what type of aircraft is involved. If the story has a number of people then you find out how many. Many times a story will tell of people being transported to a hospital that is not named. If you plan on driving in that area you would want to know where the ambulance traffic is on the road, so that you can avoid that disruption. They may give an approximate location of an event to try to control traffic and people who want to watch the event, but the hospital destination seems to be one thing that is always vague. If it is a matter of security then OK. If it is a matter of the officials not knowing because they are not sure which hospital will have room for the people then, tell us that they are not sure and we will understand. When the officials just will not tell you then let us know. It is the vagueness that sounds very unprofessional.
Living in Los Angeles we know that the people reporting on radio and television are always coming here from other areas because of the prestige of working on stations in the second largest city in the country. That can lead to interesting mispronunciations of names of cities and also showing off their lack of knowledge of where some of our cities are located. We do need the correct facts but understand this situation and just laugh at them. Some of the best reporters on the air today started out with these errors. They learn and we respect them for making an effort to be accurate even though we know that they want to move to the network and maybe get a spot in New York or Washington D.C.