CCTV apologizes for gaffe ... with second gaffe
- Source: Global Times
- [23:35 June 10 2009]
- Comments
By Deng Jingyin
As the public bombarded China Central Television’s (CCTV) “fake image” on Sunday’s 7 pm daily news program, a wrongly dated apology letter caught the public’s attention again Tuesday.
During a report about this year’s college entrance exam, a bus carrying a banner that read, “63-day countdown to the 2008 Olympic Games” drove into the shot. As a result, websites and online forums were flooded with claims CCTV had created “false news.”
The station apologized for the mistake Tuesday on its website.
Unfortunately, the letter released at 4:01 pm was dated “June 9, 2008.”
The mistake was corrected 79 minutes later.
The news was compiled from video footage transmitted by local TV stations. The video with file image was from Jiangxi TV, CCTV said in a statement.
The station had been reporting on a new car parking scheme that day in Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi Province, but “because of bad weather and limited time … journalists asked the local traffic police department to provide some pictures,” it said.
Editors at Jiangxi TV and CCTV failed to notice the mistake, which resulted in the wrong image being aired in the news program, it said.
“The apology is acceptable. I understand it’s not easy to work in TV. It’s not possible to avoid all mistakes, but what’s more important is to learn a lesson from it,” Chen Xuanfeng, an assistant to the director at Hunan TV, said.
Several online “experts” aired their views on what they thought had really happened.
“CCTV had foreseen this issue, so they prepared this letter one year ago,” a Web user said, without divulging its sources.
A person named Liang from CCTV’s news department told the Global Times that the company did not “copy and paste old letters,” but had made a genuine mistake.