TV station makes correction after showing picture of wrong firefighter involved in Facebook controversy
There’s plenty of good news after my friend Willie Wines Jr had his picture shown on TV in Ohio as being a local firefighter who resigned over a Facebook controversy. There’s also some significant bad news.
Willie, the publisher of Ironfiremen.com, is a captain in Roanoke, Virginia. Other than a very large mustache, Willie looks nothing like former Jefferson Township, Ohio firefighter Jeff Jones. Unfortunately, Jones had Willie’s picture on his Facebook page which brought about the mistaken identity.
The first bit of good news out of this is that, immediately after being sent my story about the photo mix-up, WKEF-TV pulled the video from its website and apologized.
The picture below is NOT the firefighter who resigned in Ohio
Let me repeat, the picture above is NOT the firefighter who resigned in Ohio
The second and most important bit of good news is that our friend Curt Varone of firelawblog.com, a real firehouse lawyer with an equally large mustache, called the station on behalf of Willie. This brought about the third bit of positive news, the videos you see below where WKEF-TV announced the photo error on two of its newscasts. The station made the videos available for us to share with you.
Curt reports his dealings with the TV station were very good and that there was an effort to make this right. That’s nice to hear. So, now onto the bad news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59guc_qMNsg
Previous coverage of this story
What happened to Willie has happened to many others across the country. Because humans are involved, there have always been mistakes in the news business and there always will be. But in recent years, the mistakes seem to happen much more frequently.
I’ve made the case many times that pressures from social media have changed the order of what reporters do. Instead of confirming information first and then reporting, many “so called” journalists, now report, confirm and then correct later.
Major news organizations have used the wrong picture or mistakenly identified the wrong person as a suspect in some very high profile incidents, including the Boston bombing and the Newtown massacre.
I am aware of one poorly trained local news person who was responsible for at least two different wrong picture situations like the one involving Willie. In one incident, a picture of a police officer was rushed on the air to illustrate a story about a man with the same name who was arrested for a multiple shooting.
Some very recent evidence doesn’t give me hope this will change. Last night, one of the best TV news broadcasts ever, “60 Minutes”, also put the wrong picture up in one of its stories.
It was a profile of Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau. The story included a picture that producers thought was Trudeau’s parents. The picture did show Justin Trudeau’s father, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. But the woman in the picture is not Justin Trudeau’s mother Margaret. It’s former “Sex and the City” star Kim Cattrall, who dated Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the 1980s.
If one of the top TV news organizations in the world can’t tell the difference between a then hot young actress and the former wife of a major political figure, what does that say about the likelihood of a small market TV station telling the difference between two ugly firefighters with very hairy lips?
‘@60Minutes I have a son who is the Prime Minister of Canada? I couldn’t b more proud. @CBCTheNational pic.twitter.com/EiqzzJJjOl
— Kim Cattrall (@KimCattrall) March 7, 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0LhPuGxUsg
