I’ve complained before about new outlets that put little to no effort into fact-checking in an effort to rush a story on their air. Another fine example of this occurred this morning when Fox 31 KDVR in Denver reported on this morning’s tragedy in Seattle. Using an iPad, the new anchor showed viewers photos from the accident site that were taken in real time and uploaded to Twitter. The fatal mistake occurred when the anchor started flipping through all of the trending photos live, on the air, and apparently without checking what the content was beforehand. First, we see a picture of Edward Scissorhands; then, a photo of a Chimichanga; then…a photo of a full-frontal nude male. The reaction of the whole news crew when this blunder happens is pretty priceless; you can click here to watch it, but it should go without saying that this is not safe for work!

Besides the obvious problem with airing full-frontal nudity on afternoon news, this whole scenario points to the larger and more disturbing trend of carelessly airing anything, anytime, under the guise of news. Even if the news station hadn’t potentially violated federal law*, why in the world were they showing irrelevant snapshots in the first place? It gives the appearance of the news station doing exactly zero research beforehand. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and say that perhaps they did look at the Twitter stream ahead of time and just clicked through the irrelevant content by mistake, but still – could you not open the newsworthy photos in a new tab? And if a Twitter stream has close-ups of genitalia on it, should that not be a sign to skip using that platform as a source live on the air? From what I can tell, it looks like they were pulling up any photos that were included in the trending topic. It should truly be a no-brainer to anyone with even a vague familiarity with Twitter that there will be all kinds of unrelated material being spammed or incorrectly marked with the topic at hand, so why would you use it as a source? Furthermore, if you allow yourself to be surprised, you have no way of knowing that the pictures “From the scene” that you are viewing are actually from the location or day in question. Even 10 minutes of research could have produced an iPad browser with multiple tabs opened to newsworthy material from individuals at the location, instead of wasting viewer’s time with unverified nonsense.

On another note, I think the selection of photos aired perfectly sums up social media in a nutshell. Horrific tragedy? Check. Pop culture? Check. Food? Check. Nudity? Check!

*ETA: I should point out that the FTC is likely all but giving up prosecuting “Fleeting nudity”, although airing obscene content still remains illegal according to their site. What they consider to be “Obscene” is another interesting and inconsistent topic!