An ex-commercial pilot and occasional consultant to the station was the source of the fake pilot names broadcast by KTVU after the Asiana Flight 214 crash in perhaps the year’s most ridiculous media mess-up. Blogger Rich Lieberman says that the fake names were passed electronically to investigative producer Roland De Wolk, one of three staffers known to have been fired after the fiasco. Lieberman also says that managing editor Michelle Toy read the fake names before noon anchor Tori Campbell uttered them on-air and approved them after she was told they’d been confirmed by the National Safety Transportation Board. (The what-was-I–thinking NTSB intern who “confirmed” the names was canned in a couple of nanoseconds.)
But while the station fired the producers over the snafu, Toy’s job was spared, Lieberman says, because. . . KTVU didn’t want to further offend the Asian community.
Weird. As is the station’s self-imposed silence that has compounded the bad PR and made its news operation look, who knows, maybe even more foolish than deserved.
