For all the clamor about "fake news," it sure doesn’t help the media’s argument when they display a fake graphic that gave an election result — the night before the election!
MSNBC had egg on their faces Monday night when, during the constant and never-ending election coverage, they aired a graphic showing Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum on the verge of beating Republican candidate Ron DeSantis.
Without further ado, take a look:
Well, that’s embarrassing. Hayes tried to explain the gaffe his network had made by saying that it was the result of MSNBC’s system “inadvertantly” populating “some test numbers.”
"Quick clarification here,” Hayes said. “Just want to say, earlier this hour, we showed a graphic of the Florida gubernatorial race. May have caught your eye because our system had inadvertently populated some test numbers.”
Networks and other media organizations do have test graphics to determine whether that graphic will work or not when the time comes. But that graphic had to have been loaded into the system, and someone had to make that graphic appear. The graphic was on the screen for a full seven seconds.
Something like this just goes to show that people should take what they see on the news with at most a grain of salt and a heavy dose of healthy skepticism.
H/T: Deadline Hollywood