Ranker has a fascinating article on internet reactions to the announcement by President Obama that Osama bin Laden had been located and killed.
Number one on their list was Fox News getting it terribly wrong:
If that weren’t bad enough, they did it again:
But they weren’t the only news organization with that particular fail:
There are a bunch of others — I’ll include two more that made me laugh just to give you a taste:
UPDATE: Potential Republican presidential candidates react to bin Laden’s death.
21 Comments
Point of clarification: those were Fox affiliates. However, all the “mistakes” I saw were from Fox affiliates. Cherry picking? Perhaps…but I doubt it.
It took all of 10 minutes for a Facebook friend of mine (some old high school mate) to dismiss Osama’s death as possibly some grand conspiracy to announce his death years after his “real” death. Then came the criticism of his “I, I, I” speech. Well, I copied the transcript and did a physical count. Fourteen times, Obama said “I” or “me” or “my”. Half of those were in the subjective and half in which he was was secondary to the subject. Fifty-two times he invoked “us”, “our”, “we”, and “America”. They were so pre-disposed to dislike Obama’s speech, all they heard were the “I’s” and missed all the “we’s”.
I sure do like facts. It makes arguing so much easier.
One moron even admitted it by saying, “Well I disagree with almost all of Obama’s policies and politics, so of course I heard the I’s.” In other words, she didn’t even listen to the words. She was too busy gathering up her hate.
As much as I hated hearing George Bush speak, I still listened to the words he used and judged them accordingly. Many of those judgements were negative, naturally, but a good number of them were somewhat positive or positive enough for me to feel secure that I wasn’t too much of a victim of bias.
President Obama made it clear before he even took his oath of office that he would make finding and killing Osama Bin Laden one of his top priorities – a priority important enough to him that he was able to do it in less than 2 1/2 years.
Just youtube this entire phrase.
Obama / McCain Town Hall Debate Part 11 – Pakistan
about 1:40 into the debate.
Lets give him a little credit on following up on his word, okay. Especially since most thought he was weak on foreign policy and national security issues.
First: Obama kicking in that door is awesome.
Second through however-many-I-go:
Sammy: Geraldo actually said Obama was dead as well, he was on the air for Fox News at the time of the announcement. To be fair, I also confused the two names once or twice while chatting on facebook with friends. An easy mistake considering the two names come up a lot when discussion the subject.
What I found funny, and something I’d like to share with the rest of you, was that the network heads ALREADY knew that Obama was dead well in advance of all the breaking news announcements. I got the tip from my roommate at around 10:15/10:25 PM EST that Osama (I actually almost typed Obama there) had been captured or killed. His aunt and uncle work for NBC and CBS respectively and had known for a few hours prior to Geraldo’s official announcement of Osama’s death.
Now the most entertaining part for me was that about ten minutes before Geraldo announced officially that Osama had been killed (he was the first I saw to announce it), he seemingly out of nowhere mused, in a ridiculous fit of terrible incredulous acting “wow I just had a thought, what if it has something to do with Osama bin Laden?”.
The fact that he was undoubtedly already sitting on this information and chose such a horridly corny way of spreading the news made my jaw drop further than the initial call I received from my roommate telling me to turn on the news to see the announcement.
I was watching CNN live, and Wolf Blitzer was tele-interviewing a NYC firefighter. Then at one point he interupted the firefighter and said something along the lines of, “Excuse me, but we lost the connection” and then started talking to someone else in the studio. It looked the connection was fine, but they wanted to end the interview.
NPR was another to put Obama instead of Osama in headlines on the Web site. The comment people were freaking out until it was corrected. I recognized the “I” as taking full responsibility for Bin Laden death instead of laying the blame on anyone else. Basically he was saying “The buck stops here.”
I hadn’t given Bin Laden a thought for a long time. Sunday morning I woke up thinking of his kidney dialysis and how he had survived a long time. I got a strong shiver when I heard the news.
There have been a bunch of Osama/Obama mistakes. Radio stations, various TV shows, just about everyone in my family has slipped up, me on various occassions. It’s a pretty easy mix up.
Great job Bush and Obama. Well done
@BTN I heard that too. After the speech, we put on CNN to listen to the “reactions.” It was where the firefighter started saying “and this quagmire, for lack of a better word, that we’re in in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the middle east, I hope to god that it’ll be one step closer to being ov-” where he was promptly cut off by Wolf saying the connection was bad and they would have to stop him.
hahahahahaha.
Blitzer is such a tool.
LOL @ THATGUY:
“What I found funny, and something I’d like to share with the rest of you, was that the network heads ALREADY knew that Obama was dead well in advance of all the breaking news announcements.”
Looks like everybody’s making the mistake…
CGE, I’m totally cracking up at that one.
Haha like I said earlier in the post, I did it as well.
I’ve probably done it myself. I just think it is funnier when a professional news organization (even NPR) does it, since they are supposed to have people to catch that kind of thing.
The thing I actually find curious about it is why they would use Osama bin Laden’s first name. I mean, they shouldn’t be using the name Osama to identify ObL anyway, they should use his last name.
What I’m not understanding is why all the news corps, except Fox, are using Osama instead of Usama. The FBI’s most wanted spells it Usama, which I’m thinking is the more accurate source the cable news. So it should be UBL, and that should make things a tad simpler I suppose.
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten
That’s a good point. But I’m not sure that there is an absolutely correct way to spell Osama/Usama, simply because it is transliterating Arabic into English.
I heard Obama died and they replaced him with a pod person.
Yeah. His name is Ubama.
No CGE and RK its Urmama. 🙂
Barack Saddam Obama Bin laden
YoMama bin Barackalama