News Network Fails At Basic Geography [Video]
MSNBC failed in an epic way in pinpointing the geography of New York State yesterday.
The MSNBC geography mess happened on the low-rated Martin Bashir show, which fortunately or unfortunately seems to be watched only by other members of the media.
During the Bashir program, reporter Kristen Welker was providing a overview of the route of President Obama’s upcoming New York State bus tour when the news network put up a graphic that was all wrong in terms of the location of four major cities.
As Mediaite describes the geographically challenged presentation, “So.. did someone just throw darts at a map of New York and Pennsylvania and randomly decide to place those four cities where ever they fell? Syracuse is probably about 150 miles west of that spot; Binghamton roughly 150 miles southwest; Buffalo 300 miles west; and Scranton is most certainly at least 100 miles east of that mountainous region in central Pennsylvania. But, hey, ‘A’ for effort. At least Scranton is in Pennsylvania and the other three are within the borders of New York.”
Bashir later tweeted that it was “an honest geographic mistake.”
According to MediaBistro, last month NBC Nightly News erased the state of New Hampshire from a map of the US/Canada border.
As we previously reported, MSNBC — which reportedly is considering adding actor Alec Baldwin to the liberal lineup for a once-a-week prime time show — has also been called out several times for selective editing of gun control-related footage.
According to Newsbusters.com, the geography fail is a symptom of larger journalistic issue: “This seemingly trivial incident is a window to a more fundamental point, which is that demonstrations of sloppiness and ignorance such as these should make us very confident that many other pertinent facts of greater interpretive import are either misreported or not reported by our establishment press on a daily basis.”
Are you surprised the MSNBC/NBC producers appear to be having difficulties processing basic US geography or cartography? How would you interpret the meaning of an “honest” mistake?
This is how wrong MSNBC’s map of NY and PA was: http://t.co/ZIcBrAmCt9 pic.twitter.com/0i9v0a41c4
— Dan Amira (@DanAmira) August 14, 2013
