Saturday, September 12, 2009

Not Even Close

During Friday's story about the H1N1 virus (which Brian Williams is still calling Swine Flu), we saw an excerpt of a briefing by Dr. Anne Schuchat, Asst. Surgeon General and Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control. Unfortunately, a Nightly News on-screen ID line spelled her name as "Dr. Ann Schuchet". Incredibly, Nightly News managed to misspell both of her names despite the fact that during the briefing she was wearing a name tag! Well, at least they managed to spell "Dr." correctly. If anyone at Nightly News had bothered to google "Dr. Ann Schuchet", they would have been asked "Did you mean Dr. Anne Schuchat?" Then they would have found 69,500 entries under her correct name--including a transcript of a May 12 CDC Telebriefing on Investigation of Human Cases of H1N1 Flu in which a CDC moderator actually spells out Dr. Schuchat's name for members of the press. Is anyone at Nightly News even trying?

No comments:

Post a Comment