WTAE Doesn't Check Their Facts...

[takingaction4you 4]

Pittsburgh saw some sleet and freezing rain this morning and all of our Pittsburgh television stations were in high alert mode.

 

WTAE was on the air at 4:30AM, and they also decided to talk to Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl. The only problem was that he was in Paris, and didn't want to talk about the weather; he wanted to talk about his plan to get international flights from Pittsburgh to France.

 

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This must be a bit embarrasing for WTAE; shouldn't Kelly Frey or Andrew Stockey have known that he was in France? At the very least, shouldn't someone behind the scenes know that he didn't want to talk about the weather because it was in France? It sounds like there was a major breakdown in communications at WTAE.

[Ntropolis 596]

To make it worse, Luke Ravenstahl used the opportunity as a free plug for his "Pittsburgh 250" thing...

[LoadStar 364]

*shrug* I actually thought they handled it particularly well. Yeah, they "oops"-ed and didn't realize that he was in France... but without even a beat, they quickly spun it into a nice news piece, over 2 minutes long, talking about something that is possibly even more newsworthy than "yup, it's still snowing" type of news reporting.

 

Trust me, after watching the local stations today doing wall-to-wall weather, and watching them rehash the same stories over and over and over and over again, I'd rather they do a 2 minute interview with the mayor about overtures he's making to cities in Europe to help improve the economic situation of the city.