On Sunday night, the United States of America practically came unhinged. Stories were flying about Usama Bin Laden (Obama, er, Osama if you like) being killed by U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six in the far off land of Pakistan. Good news is — America got the number one terrorist on earth. Bad news is — the truth was clouded by haste to ‘be the first’ to the Internet. The Hollywood Republican is guilty of the latter.
Over and over, newscaster after newscaster kept saying, “Obama bin Laden is dead,” only to correct themselves or have someone correct them to say, “Osama bin Laden is dead.” With the excitement in the air, if you will allow, it’s easy to see why this trip of the tongue could make people laugh. You can also see how embarrassed news anchors, reporters and the like would be when they made the mistake of saying, “Obama bin Laden is dead.” I’m sure they felt like crawling under the news desk.
My Bad
As for The Hollywood Republican, this is the gaffe which was made. On Monday, May 2nd, THR posted the following to Twitter:
The link above is to a YouTube video below:
What this advertised 19-year-old YouTuber did was what eventually caused me to have egg splashed all over my face — by my own hands. The original description of the video stated WTTG Fox 5 News Anchor/Reporter Matt Ackland was the anchor who committed the mistake, only to be corrected by his co-anchor. THR has noticed this description has been changed to remove the anchor name and Google does not cache descriptions of videos on YouTube, so there’s no way to post what was originally written.
Today, @MattAckland reached out with a post to his Twitter account:
After seeing his post, I immediately went back to my post on Twitter and noticed the original YouTuber changed the description. After about thirty minutes of dissecting the video clip with other video clips of Matt Ackland and another WTTG Fox 5 News anchor, I could clearly see the mistake I made. I was too fast to repost something to Twitter which wasn’t verified. I have confirmed who the anchor is, who unintentionally said the fateful words, “President Obama is, in fact, dead,” however, I’ve decided I won’t republish his name here.
Mea Culpa
It’s clear to see I got caught up in the moment and re-posted a link without fact-checking. The anchors looked similar, yet had I watched a few reports from either, I would have caught my mistake. With that said, I owe it to Matt Ackland an apology. He politely asked for it on Twitter and I will politely post it here. I could’ve have just blasted out a post to Twitter, but I chose to post an article here. Most news organizations have a CORRECTIONS page which is usually buried deep on a website and rarely do people see those.
I hope most people will see this post — here.
I am,
The Hollywood Republican
