Van Susteren “Sick About” B-Roll Mistake Showing Sherrod Instead Of Rep. Waters
Some anchors take a day or two to apologize for a mistake. For technology-savvy Greta Van Susteren, it took about 40 minutes to take to her blog and apologize profusely for a five-second mistake (that she technically wasn’t involved in).
What happened? Video of Shirley Sherrod aired when it was supposed to be Rep. Maxine Waters.
During a segment on the possible ethics violations of Rep. Waters, Greta had ABC’s Rick Klein On The Record. As he talked, b-roll of Rep. Waters was supposed to air, but instead it was about five seconds of Sherrod, followed by actual footage of Waters (video below).
In a Gretawire blog post titled “OOPS…we so screwed up on this one and we are sick about it…” (that’s actually the headline), Greta writes:
We hate it when we screw up here at ON THE RECORD. Right now we are trying to console ourselves with the fact that, while we did a doozy of a mistake, at least it was unintentional, we noticed it immediately and scrambled to fix it immediately. And yes, even with telling ourselves that, we still feel horrible! (and we should feel horrible!)
What happened? I hate to tell you but we need to fess up to this one. Somehow when we were talking about Congresswoman Maxine Waters during the news show, tape went up on our screen of Shirley Sherrod and not Congresswoman Waters. Yes, a very bad mistake and a painful one for which we are very apologetic.
Obviously, when race is involved in the mistake, even honest errors take on extra meaning. But even though this was likely a screw-up by a production assistant, Van Susteren felt she had to take the lead and apologize and draw attention to the fact that the show did notice. Of course, a blog post that begins “OOPS” will end up drawing more attention to the incident.
Here’s the fairly minor, innocent mistake:
