High (alert) anxiety!
I don’t bitch about work a lot here, or even in my work blog, because most problems that arrive at work are of the personality conflict or mismanagement variety, and I just don’t see a point in trying to fix those things by whining outside of work where they’ll do no good. But this is a case where something went screwy on the public airwaves, and I do feel like it’s an occasion where I need to acquit myself and explain things as best I can.
To boil it down to brass tacks (to mix a metaphor), it comes down to this.
What I wrote:
See why millions of active American servicemen and women are on high alert for identity theft.
What one of our anchors said on the air:
See why millions of active American servicemen and women are on high alert.
I don’t imagine I need to explain why this is a massively gross inaccuracy. The story in question was the discovery that the personal information (i.e. Social Security numbers, etc.) of millions of active duty U.S. service members was stolen in that same incident a few weeks ago when information on our veterans was stolen from a VA official (frankly, I’m really starting to doubt that side of the story too, but let’s stay on course here). But this makes it sound like we’ve jumped up to an even higher war footing than that on which we already – seemingly permanently – are now.
I have quite a few friends in the armed forces. I can only imagine what they and their families thought when they saw this on the air. I can only imagine how many calls their COs got.
Now, please understand – when it comes to the stuff I write at work, I have pretty much zero ego invested in it. If something I wrote needs to be changed for inaccuracy, I’ve told our anchors many time, by all means, change it on the fly. I’m not precious about my words – it’s rather hard for me to invest a lot of possessiveness in four seconds’ worth of news tease copy. But this is ridiculous. It materially changes the character of what we are promising to tell people about – or, to use some smaller words…it’s a lie.
News promo writers aren’t exactly well-liked, in the business or outside of it, because we have to take facts and somehow create an emotional appeal to make the viewers who are sampling Lost or George Lopez to watch our news instead of the other guys’ news. News producers and reporters don’t like it because that emotional appeal runs the risk of oversensationalizing their story, or implying a promise that we’ll show something shocking which simply isn’t a part of the reality of the story. Viewers don’t like it because it’s almost a cliched joke that we’re saying everything in your kitchen pantry will kill you – the gross oversell has made viewers cynical, which makes my job that much harder. And I’ve fought the urge to sensationalize the whole time I’ve been here; the tendency to do so has changed depending on who the creative services director, news director, reporter and on-air talent have been.
And I do get rewritten every so often if it’s felt that what I’ve written isn’t sexy enough. That’s fair enough – it’s out of my hands. But there’s a vast gulf between “millions of active American servicemen and women are on high alert for identity theft” and “millions of active American servicemen and women are on high alert”. But this isn’t a case of a rewrite – the identity theft element was still on the teleprompter. It just didn’t come out of the anchor’s mouth.
For any alarm this may have caused, I apologize, but ask you to keep in mind that it wasn’t read as written.
Is anyone getting even the vaguest hint of why I want out of this business?… Read more
