WGHP stubbornly immune to the facts

GREENSBORO, NC -- Last week, Bob Buckley of WGHP MyFox8 reported of a multi-month Greensboro Police Department intensified traffic patrol on Wendover Avenue, that:

"the number of crashes dropped dramatically as a result."

That was at odds with what other media had reported, so I emailed Bob and the news director to ask them what their source was. The news director attributed the reporting to a GPD press release that he forwarded to me. However, the press release itself actually contradicted WGHP's reporting of a decline in crashes. It claimed that, as a result of the Wendover traffic initiative:

"There was a slight increase in the number of crashes."

Once this was brought to WGHP's attention, Bob said they'd correct it on the next newscast and in the accompanying website article.

It didn't stick. Once again today, WGHP MyFox8 is reporting on their website:

"During the same initiative on Wendover Avenue, police reported a 21 percent drop in the number of traffic accidents."

That's false and in direct contradiction to the GPD press release WGHP previously cited.

Regurgitating press releases is bad enough—a correlation between crime, accidents and increased traffic patrols does not prove a cause and effect and it's lazy to say so—but completely misreading a press release when doing so and grossly misreprorting what it says is really amateurish.

You may recall that WGHP MyFox8 was the instigator for the wildly exaggerated story of "Nearly 400 people" and "hundreds of students" involved in a "massive brawl" in downtown Greensboro last summer. (Police reported there were a handful of small fights over a seven hour period that Saturday night, never a several-hundred student brawl.) That malpractice by WGHP was one of many among a persistent pattern of WGHP getting their facts wrong, a pattern that continues today.

It seems to me as if WGHP would benefit from a focus on increasing its attention to detail, fact checking and critical analysis. You know: journalism.