It’s been a while since we took a major TV network to task for producing less than stellar online content. So it’s time for a short update, spurred on by two error-filled items we spotted on ABCNews.com within the last 24 hours.
This morning, one of the five rotating features atop ABC News’s Web site was a package on the Christian Science Monitor‘s Jill Carroll headlined “Insurgents Sought Global Jihad.” Read the blurb: “During her more then four months of captivity, U.S. reporter Jill Carrol gained a unique understanding of the Iraq insurgency’s motivations and goals.”
As the linked story correctly notes, Carroll was held “captive for 82 days in Iraq.” Any way you compute the numbers, that’s not “more than four months.” Oops — make that “more then four months,” in ABC’s grammar.
And while we’re at it, “Carroll” has two L’s. That’s three errors in one sentence, front and center on a leading news Web site — just a little embarrassing.
Our second example was the second-billed story in the International section of ABC’s homepage this morning, headlined “Look Who’s Blogging Now: Iranian President Hits the Web.”
Posted yesterday, the piece originally misspelled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s last name in its lede, so it read “Ahmadinefad” — the spelling that still stands in the second graf.
Elsewhere, the story mentions “Iran’s nuclear programm” and “anti-American proganda,” and that Ahmadinejad “went on to send a warning the president” (there’s a word missing). Like the Carroll blurb, this text could have used some more attentive editing.
More substantially, the story, while carrying an ABC News byline, mostly summarizes and repurposes information initially reported elsewhere, from AP and Reuters reports to Mike Wallace’s splashy Sunday interview with Ahmadinejad on 60 Minutes. ABC did not do any reporting of its own, and it did not add anything to the coverage.
In that respect, it was similar to another ABC-branded piece, “Light for Liberia” (the second-billed International story yesterday afternoon), which reported 19 days after the fact on the partial restoration of electricity to Liberia’s capital — summarizing and generalizing to such an extent that there was not even a full quote to be found.
ABC should not be a wire service; indeed, it already runs plenty of AP and Reuters dispatches on its site.
Instead, ABC should give us more — taking the reporting manpower that was devoted to churning out the two unsuccessful above rewrites and putting it toward, say, actual reporting.
Crazy, we know.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.