Before my departure from TV world, I started to notice something in the newsroom: many of the young people working as reporters or producers were sort of ignorant.
I’m not saying they weren’t smart, just poorly educated in certain areas. What areas? Oh, I don’t know — little things like history, politics, culture… the sort of things you learn by doing some reading.
We saw a good example of that this week at Chicago’s WGN-TV where they used a wildly inappropriate graphic with a story about Yom Kippur:
Who would use this painful reminder of the Holocaust to represent a story about Yom Kippur? Someone who’s clueless. More likely, several clueless people — from the graphic artist who found the image and prepared it for air to the producer(s) who’s supposed to review this stuff.
Rack it up as an honest mistake.
Nobody knows everything — and context is not something people learn in school