San Diego’s Fox affiliate put up a picture of President Obama as the lead-in graphic for a news report about a high-profile sexual assault. The station took two days to apologize.
On Friday, February 13, Fox 5 reported that a suspect in a sexual assault case was being released without charges. At the beginning of the report, a photo of President Obama appeared on the screen with the caption, “NO CHARGES.”
According to Times of San Diego, the Obama photo was noticed immediately in the newsroom. When asked why the error had not been acknowledged during the show, the assignment editor said that they didn’t feel the need to because it was a small, over-the-shoulder error.
Usually when a graphics error occurs, the graphic belongs to the story before or after the story in question, and appears with its heading for that story. The picture of Obama came with a caption relevant to a crime story. This was a pretty big error to be ignoring, assuming it was really an error.
Finally, yesterday, the station got around to apologizing. However, there was no explanation as to how the mistake occurred.
Normally, I don’t care about gaffes. They happen to everybody. But Fox’s affiliates seem prone to certain kinds of moments that suggest that the apple doesn’t fall far from the Fox News Channel tree. For example, an Orlando affiliate referred to white supremacists as a “civil rights group.” Also, a Baltimore affiliate aired a deceptively edited video to wrongly report that #BlackLivesMatter demonstrators chanted, “Kill a cop.”
Watch the two clips below.