TV News Review

On Thursday night the Utah mining rescue was brought to a sudden and tragic halt as the rescue team of miners suffered their own mine collapse that resulted in the deaths of three rescue miners and six others injured, as of the time of this writing.

Fox News was the first to break the news at 9:50pm ET, during Hannity & Colmes. MSNBC and CNN came in with live coverage at 10pm ET. Anderson Cooper stayed on live with the breaking news until 2am ET, at which time he handed off to anchor Tony Harris for continued coverage.

While on Fox News, Greta Van Susteren anchored live coverage until 12 midnight ET. Rather than having Greta continue or bringing in a new anchor, Fox chose to show the rerun of Bill O’Reilly from earlier in the night. At 1am ET a rerun of Greta Van Susteren was on Fox, while Anderson Cooper was doing live coverage. Much of the coverage on the rerun of Greta was old by this time. Fox had to go so far as to superimpose an Alert banner updating that a second miner had died, over the Fox News Alert banner that had originally aired during Greta’s show. (The third miner died later.)

Fox continued their overnight lineup with a rerun of pseudo-comedy, panel discussion show, ‘RedEye’. Followed by a rerun of ‘Special Report’ at 3am ET, while CNN continued their live coverage with their reporters in Utah staying live to update on the condition of the surviving miners and the situation at the mine.

Fox did, from time to time, break in for live updates from their overnight news break anchor Suzanne Sena and reports from the local Fox affiliate reporter. Alicia Acuna, the on-site Fox News reporter, having signed off for the night when Fox News decided to call off their live coverage. Sena, while trying hard, was showing herself to be woefully unable to handle the breaking news. (This blogger remembers back to last summer when, now former, Fox News anchor Donna Fiducia, provided excellent anchoring during the overnight coverage of the war between Israel and Hezbollah.)

Perhaps the worst of Sena’s attempt to anchor was when she ask the Fox affiliate reporter a question and then as he started to answer she cut him off so Fox could go to a commercial break. At the end of the commercial break Fox returned to the rerun of “Special Report”.

This blogger is shocked that Fox News has handled this breaking news so poorly. Choosing to not call in true news anchors and go with live coverage was a bad decision but to actually run a rerun of “RedEye”, a comedy show, is incredibly inappropriate.

Fox News senior management needs to seriously consider if they intended to be taken seriously during breaking news that happens between 12 midnight and 6am on the east coast. If they do wish to not embarrass themselves then they need to place in charge producers that can know how to handle breaking news and to hire either an overnight anchor that actually can handle breaking news or at least have a real anchor, someone who has a background in true news and not entertainment reporting, on call that can come in. Fox News can study CNN’s coverage from early Friday morning to see how Fox should have handled things. Meanwhile Fox News’ post midnight coverage is a textbook example of dropping the ball. Getting the story first doesn’t mean stopping the coverage first also, because it is your bedtime.

It wasn’t the jokes on ‘RedEye’ that will have people laughing at Fox News, but rather that Fox News thought a rerun of ‘RedEye’ was more important than live coverage of breaking news.

At 4:14am ET Fox News has a rerun of Bill O’Reilly on. CNN is carrying live the press conference by Utah’s Governor Huntman.

Fox News continues to compound their mistakes and embarassing themselves.

If Fox News’ President Roger Ailes and his VP’s don’t make heads role over this then it will show they don’t care if CNN is the channel that people tune to when breaking news happens.

One Eyed Man