Fair & Accurate

[A. Joseph Ross]

On 3 Apr 2005 at 0:20, Scott Fybush wrote:

> BillO reports having heard such a report on CNN Radio. I was flipping
> back and forth among CNNMSNBCFNC Friday afternoon and heard the Fox
> News report, in which an overeager, overly aggressive young producer
> (the kind of "newsperson" who drove me, screaming, out of the TV news
> business) was heard off-camera misunderstanding the translation of an
> Italian news conference and shouting, "Pope is dead! Hellooo...Pope is
> dead!," which led Shepard Smith to launch into a full-fledged obituary
> for the not-quite-dead-yet Pontiff. It took about half an hour for the
> misunderstanding to be cleared up and for Smith to apologize. (Which
> is, I'd note, more than he's ever done to the freelance reporter who
> was working for my station during the 2000 recount in Florida when he
> ran her over while trying to grab a parking space in which she was
> standing, but I digress.)

This rather reminds me of the false story that came out in April 1964 to the effect that 
Khrushchev had died.  It happened on an afternoon when I was the news announcer on 
WMUA at UMass.  The teletype reports said that there had been an unconfirmed report that 
Khrushchev had died.  At one point there was an elaboration that Khrushchev had died 
suddenly at some function or other.

I used the reports that said it was unconfirmed, but when I did my newscast, I had someone 
stand by the teletype, to come in with anything new that came in while I was on air.  As it 
happened, the guy was a wise guy and simply stood at the studio door, yelling at me some 
nonsense.  Of course, I just ignored him and continued the newscast.

By the evening newscast on television, it was clearly an erroneous report, and Radio 
Moscow had denounced it as a deliberate provocation.  Eventually, it turned out that Tass, 
the Soviet news agency, had been sending the text of a Khrushchev speech and suddenly 
stopped midway through.  When someone at the receiving end called the sending site to ask 
why they had stopped, the reply was "It is dead," meaning that the line had gone dead.  The 
person receiving had misinterpreted the statement as "He is dead."

-- 
A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                           617.367.0468
 15 Court Square, Suite 210                 lawyer@attorneyross.com
Boston, MA 02108-2503           	         http://www.attorneyross.com