CNN Places Hong Kong In Brazil, To The Surprise Of No One

A new CNN Hong Kong report has placed the country smack-dab in the middle of… Brazil?

That’s right. Apparently, the Cable News Network does not require basic geographical knowledge for their graphics editors, because according to an image making the rounds, they’re a bit confused as to where Hong Kong is.

Zero Hedge caught the flub-up originally, and it didn’t take long for things to go viral from there.

Needless to say, it also didn’t take long for the Internet to have a field day on comments, with most admitting that they were absolutely not surprised by the error.

“Why not? They’ve been reporting fake news for years anyhow…”

“Nice! Concocted News Network”

“Sad and not surprising!”

“I gain more knowledge watching Sesame Street than watching CNN”

“Welcome to SE Asia. I mean Rio.”

The last year hasn’t been too good of one for the once-respected news outlet. In addition to becoming the butt of jokes on The Daily Show for ongoing Malaysian flight coverage, the network had trouble distinguishing its iReport brand from its regular news items, resulting in an erroneous end of the world story attributed to NASA.

In that account, a citizen journalist posted a news story to the company’s website claiming that NASA foresaw the end of the world in 2041.

The story caught the attention of NASA, which was forced to issue a statement retracting the story. That retraction made the story appear as if it came from the CNN A-Team, and editors had to remove it within 24 hours to save face, but not before it blew up across the web.

As for the CNN Hong Kong report noted above, the funniest thing we’ve probably seen lampooning it came from the Free Republic, which took some PhotoShop liberties.

While no publication is perfect, and we’re all prone to mistakes, as I’m sure many of you are, it’s a bit difficult reconciling this along with the other foul-ups.

It definitely feeds in to the idea that the state of the news media is in decline, a fact backed up by a recent Gallup poll showing that a minority — 44 percent — say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust and confidence in the mass media, identical to 2011 but up from 40 percent in 2012, the lowest reading since the polling organization regularly began tracking the question in 1997.

What do you think, readers? Is the CNN Hong Kong report more reason not to trust your mainstream media outlets, or do you think things are just fine as they are?