Posted: 12:00 am
July 6, 2008
Google the name "George Takei" and you will come up with nearly 830,000 hits.
And you don't have to scroll through each one of them to double-check the spelling of his last name either. The first page of Google will do, starting with his personal Web site, georgetakei.com.
Despite the instant availability of this information, Takei's name was misspelled "Tekei" last Sunday night on Ch. 4's news in a story about the Gay Pride Parade.
The misspelling ran in both the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts and no one bothered to correct it in the online version of the story that I viewed Monday morning on wnbc.com.
Moreover, the story, which showed Takei and his longtime companion participating in the parade, referred to Takei's character on "Star Trek" as "Captain Sulu," a rank Hikaru Sulu did not attain until the feature film "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country," according to Wikipedia (I looked it up and if Wikipedia is wrong, Trekkies, take it up with them).
Sulu was most famously a lieutenant, not a captain, when he worked as helmsman on the USS Enterprise in the original TV series.
I bring this up not to pick on Ch. 4 (although I guess that's what I'm doing), but to make the point that TV news seems riddled with careless errors lately.
The errors seem small when taken individually, but taken as a whole, it sometimes makes you wonder whether you should bother watching local news at all.
The errors include typographical mistakes in the "supers" shown on-screen to identify people, plus many instances in which the on-screen i.d.'s are mistimed so they appear under the wrong people, if they appear at all.
Then there is the great variation in facts when you go from station to station. A recent example had one station reporting a story from "the Melrose section of the Bronx," while another reported the same story from "the Mott Haven section." Which one was correct? Who knows?
Stations were definitely not in agreement concerning the story of a young woman fatally shot by another in an incident that left one bystander wounded. One station said the bystander "was expected to survive," which you might have already known if you'd seen the same bystander very much alive with a small bandage on her chest and being interviewed on another station that same evening.
