We're not ganging up on KTVU but its post-gaffe behavior following one of the most embarrassing and humiliating acts in TV News history continues to boggle the mind. Instead of moving forward with acts of transparency and level-headedness, the station has, instead, reverted to sticking its head in the sand. In addition to this site, others are aghast too.
The latest case of concealment was reported by Matthew Keys of The Desk; is KTVU kidding? Do they really think this type of action is pro-active? In the Internet age, it's impossible to remove the evidence. That may or may not be such great news but it's the reality of the times.
KTVU has been the gold-standard in news presentation in the Bay Area. Its "10 O'clock News", once the envy of local shops and TV newsrooms across the country, is still top-notch, but in recent years has lost a lot of its luster. That's not an indictment on the fine people at the station, just indicative of the changing business. It's a shame, then, that such a treasured brand would taint its meat and potatoes with actions like trying to conceal something that ain't ever going away.
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News 101 If we Pull all the Video. There is no way Muslim Terrorists,flew Hijacked Aircraft into the Towers. KTVU Must think if they can't prove it it never happened.
ReplyDeleteIf he thinks this will stop the story, he is dead wrong. It will inflame it even more. Who is running the store over there at KTVU? This siege mentality never works Time for grown-ups to take charge and stop this inane behavior.
ReplyDeleteUm, err, I've already downloaded it to my computer. As has everyone else.
ReplyDeleteWhat morons. The Soviets tried rewriting history books and couldn't do it, and THEY owned the printing presses.
You've got to be kidding me. KTVU should be ashamed.
ReplyDeleteRather than attempting to bury this embarrassing incident and the public's reactions to it down a rabbit hole, KTVU should be reporting on itself. It should be aggressively pursuing it as a legitimate story. Rather than wait for corporate to do the investigation, KTVU's news managers ought to show backbone and do their job by assigning a reporter to cover the hoax until it finds out who did it and why.
I speak from experience about reporting on your own organization. When the owner of a daily newspaper I co-founded was alleged to have physically confronted a city councilman, my newspaper reported on the story: week after week after week.
In fact, I eventually assigned two reporters to the story: me, as the editor, writing the stories to protect my reporters from any potential retaliation, and my most veteran reporter.
We earned the respect of the councilman involved.
We ran headlines regarding the incident on the front page, in bold, huge headlines because that is what we would have done had another prominent local businessman and councilman been involved in such an alleged incident.
I lost friends over the coverage, but I did my job. KTVU should do its job: report on a major story. Just because it happens to be the subject of that story is no excuse to ignore it. It has an ethical responsibility to do so.
How can KTVU reporters and editors demand, say, transparency from local governments, for example, when it is engaging in such immature antics? When it is not aggressively pursuing a story that everyone, in local and national media at least, is talking about? Not to mention interest in the general public.
Instead, they want You Tube videos removed? Does KTVU, or its corporate master, really believe that an international sensation such as this will be wiped from the public arena?
I believe it will be referred to in broadcast journalism schools well into the future.
Such ill-thought-out actions by KTVU reflect poorly on the hard-working journalists at the station, which risks losing its hard-earned credibility that it has garnered over decades of solid reporting.
Hmmm...
ReplyDeleteJust what do you recommend they do Rich?
Your PR playbook for dealing with criticism consists of censoring, name calling, and insults.
They have their self interests just as you do, to each his own.
The RL "PR PlayBook" Works well. I have used it a few times myself.
Deletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfBuvRk1thQ
ReplyDeleteThere's this thing called FREEDOM OF SPEECH.
ReplyDeleteThere's something else called ACCOUNTABILITY.
How ballsy for someone to call for pulling the posts. KTVU can't call on marketing spinners to weave their "we need to save our jobs" magic by trying to brainwash the public into thinking that it didn't happen.
Guess what? It did.
I'm tempted to post the infamous boner in as many places as possible just to further soil what's left of their good name.
To diffuse the situation, KTVU just needed to apologize, suggest plans/methods to minimize future errors and move on. The event-centrific public would've put this incident in the backs of their minds. If KTVU is indeed calling for YouTube to pull the posts, all they're doing is putting more fuel on the fire.
Looks like insecure marketing people, and not PR pros, are running the ship here.
As Col. Jessup said in "A Few Good Men," KTVU "can't handle the truth."
KTVU is officially over the top with their reaction. They didn't shoot the Pope.. On a positive note; everyone in the world knows KTVU. About three billion dollars worth of exposure..
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking the very same thing 12:51! KTVU got terrific publicity on this. I was kinda proud to see them on Colbert....
DeleteAnd as you say, they didn't shoot the Pope. It's not like Michael Richards' public meltdown. It's funny (not to those directly involved with the Asiana tragedy, however). It's done; it's out there; get on with it!
Doubtless they could get all the youtubes pulled and even if they did, there's the Colbert footage and all the rest.
They apologized. Now just accept that it's going to be public fodder for a while. I once fell down in a classroom of 6th graders--I just had to stop the class and say, "That WAS funny! Let's all have a good laugh for 5 minutes." You have to laugh at your own foibles.
@12:51 I assure you, there's about 33% of San Francisco, 22% of Oakland and 32% of San Jose's population that don't think this is funny at all.
DeleteMan in a wheelchair just exploded a bomb in the Beijing airport. KTVU reports the name of the suspect is We Go Bang.
ReplyDeleteWhere's Tori? She may want to report that!
DeleteI think he was named just the other day, look at the article, by any chance is his name Boom-Boom BOOM!?
DeleteIt's not going away...no matter what KTVU does. Bill Maher got in on the act last night, although it's just the slide of the names.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BhwUbEAYzqk
What makes this story so horrible is that the San Francisco Bay Area has, I think, the largest concentration of Asian-Americans in the country, and KTVU has always positioned itself as being a station with strong ties to the diverse Bay Area community. If this had happened in, I don't know, Boston, this would not have been so horrendous.
ReplyDeleteIf this had been in Boston, could've been one of two ways; with the Irish, they would've just laughed it off as :those impish elves speakin their blarney yet again!", if this had been with the Newer Bostoniansl i.e. the immigrants from Somalia, the majority would let it pass, but there would be a tiny group braced for all out Jihad, I'm sorry to say. Not from all Somalian's or Yemens, but from a very small, very loud and rebellious group of traditionalists that have no intention of assimulating or recalibrating their cultural reflexes to mirror ours.
DeleteThe Italians would've laughed it off or gone to the court room with a tort report. Some groups would easily excuse a slip-up so long as it was followed with a 'generous donation' to one of their favorite charities. Many American Asians have a delightful sense of humor, but they are often quite realistic and ready to move on to the next truly important matter.
KTVU's new promo motto, "We 2 Low!" Sorry, I don't speak Chinese, otherwise I would translate!
ReplyDeleteRIP Helen Thomas
ReplyDeleteEnough on this story Okay Rich? You're beating it to death and boring people like me who are among your most loyal readers and posters!
ReplyDeleteIf you don't want to read it, don't click on the post. Problem solved.
DeleteIt always cracks me up when some self-appointed censor declares "Enough on this story" on the assumption that he/she speaks for "loyal readers." Yet those same loyal readers keep posting on the topic!
DeleteI just showed the clip to my mom and she said "Did anyone notice when they we're reading it."
ReplyDeleteHow naive can Lee Rosenthal be?
ReplyDeleteThe minute you let others know that you disapprove of a certain gaffe, your opposition becomes emboldened.
Rosenthal did you honestly believe you could remove this video from the world wide web?
The less said about this gaffe, the quieter and quicker a death it would have had.
At some future point someone at KTVU will have the job of erasing any and all evidence that Lee Rosenthal was once ND at the station. After all, they should take care of ALL of their embarrassments, not just ToriGate.
ReplyDeleteKTVU will be taught in Business 101, Marketing 101, and Journalism 101 for what not to do in handling a public embarrassment crisis.
ReplyDeleteSurely the Cox family is smart enough to know that the toothpaste cannot be put back into the tube - but, maybe not.
Maybe KTVU can use a tactic of your president and have a beet summit. I think the Chinese and their South Korean cousins are pretty adapt at making rice beer. Don't know the brand name.
ReplyDeletePoint #2. Rich, can you make it a little easier to "Prove I'm not a Robot"? I can just barely read those fuzzy looking dark grey numbers on top of the black backgrounds. Are there really that many generated responses sent to similar Blog sites?
Why not use trivia questions, such as, Who's Related? John Lennon, Vladimir Lenin, The Lennon Sisters quartet, Don Lemon Self-Outted Gay News Anchor.
if it's a beet summit, better invite the Russians.
Delete"The Lennon Sisters quartet." Good trivia.
DeleteWriter at 10.13pm has just won the Trivia Contest, on "Who's Related?" Congratulations!! Your prize is twofold; a porcelain platter of pickeled prawns with sesame garlic sauce at the Main Table Restaurant in Seoul, South Korea, you will be mailed two round trip tickets to visit us. You will be flying Asiana Air. Sea you soon(?)
DeleteThey will never live this down. I get so sick of their self serving promos about how wonderful their reporters are and all the experience they have. If that is the case how could anyone read this and not know it was a joke? Tori comes off as uptight and out of touch with the real world. Just shows that she is a just an overpaid teleprompter reader
ReplyDeleteI would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that meeting at KTVU. Probably went something like this:
ReplyDeleteThe Boss: "Team, we've got a crisis. We screwed up those Asian names and now that clip is the hottest thing on YouTube. What should we do?"
Jr. Executive #1: "Well, we could do a promo saying 'We were first to report our screwup' and point out that our competitors only reported on our mistake AFTER it happened. Nothing beats live coverage..."
The Boss: Hmmm, factually speaking, that would be true, but...
Jr. Executive #2: "I know! Let's pull the video from YouTube. Then stonewall like crazy and act like it never happened."
The Boss: "What about the gazillions of people who've already watched it?"
Jr. Exec #2: "No problem. We just say 'Hey, if it happened it would be on YouTube.' After awhile they'll all question their sanity."
The Boss: "Brilliant! Give yourself a raise. We'll lay off 3 news people to pay for it."
Mr. Lieberman, thank you for supporting the Asian American community. YOU'RE THE MAN! Since we compose about 5% of America's population, our opinions are generally overlooked. It's easy to say no big deal when 9 of ten people around you are white and think it's funny. I can tell you that one person, standing alone, really doesn't think it's funny. If the situation was reversed, then you would fully understand.
ReplyDeleteHow would Mr. Rosenthal react to anti-Semitic jokes?
Your sarcasm is duly noted.
DeleteHere is is again. Download quick and save. The name reading begins at 2;25.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzoalxCH4eQ
CNBC did the same thing with an embarrassing interview with Sen. Elizabeth Warren:
ReplyDelete"CNBC looked like a sore loser this week when it told YouTube to take down on “copyright grounds” videos from a Squawk Box interview with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). She was on to defend the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, which would tighten regulations on banks, that she’s co-sponsoring with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and others. She forcefully, and gleefully, swatted away challenges from CNBC’s Brian Sullivan, Joe Kernan, and Amanda Drury. A clip went viral — with more than 700,000 views — after it was posted by video aggregator Upworthy as well as on Warren’s YouTube site. “It’s maybe the best example of the sort of matter-anti-matter reaction that happens when someone who actually knows some history and policy makes first contact with a gaggle of ignorant CNBC yakkers,” Talking Point Memo‘s Josh Marshall wrote...."
http://www.deadline.com/2013/07/cnbc-pr-blow-orders-youtube-take-down-elizabeth-warrean-embarrassing-clip/