Fox News accidentally airs Arizona carjacking suspect's suicide on live television

'That was wrong, and that won't happen again on my watch, and I'm sorry,' said anchor Shepard Smith in an on-air apology after the a man was seen pointing a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. The man was fleeing police in a high-speed chase after an alleged carjacking.

Published on Sep 28, 2012 by TheYoungTurks

"Embarrassed Fox News executives and shocked viewers from coast to coast were horrified Friday when the network aired an Arizona carjacker's suicide on live television. The stunning feed of the fleeing suspect putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger aired at 3:31 p.m., with anchor Shepard Smith caught cringing before the coverage ended — seconds too late. "Get off, get off, get off," said a clearly distraught Smith, his voice rising as the man's deadly intent became clear. "Get off it! Get off it! Get off it!" The network blamed human error for the gruesome gaffe, with one source indicating a Fox producer was slow to cut away from live coverage of what started as a high-speed police chase. The unidentified man was pronounced dead in the Arizona outback shortly after Fox viewers watched the mortally wounded suspect fall face-first to the ground. Fox News veteran Smith, after the network abruptly cut to commercial, returned to the air with a lengthy apology for the fatal fiasco...".* Ana Kasparian, Cenk Uygur, Ben Mankiewicz, Jesus Godoy discuss on The Young Turks.

 

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BY DON KAPLAN , CHARLIE WELLS AND LARRY MCSHANE / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

PUBLISHED: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2012, 4:44 PM

UPDATED: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2012, 11:40 PM

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FOX NEWS

An alleged carjacking suspect led police on a high speed chase for more than an hour through Phoenix, Ariz., before pulling off the road and appearing to shoot himself in the head on live television.

Embarrassed Fox News executives and shocked viewers from coast to coast were horrified Friday when the network aired an Arizona carjacker’s suicide on live television.

The stunning feed of the fleeing suspect putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger aired at 3:31 p.m., with anchor Shepard Smith caught cringing before the coverage ended — seconds too late.

“Get off, get off, get off,” said a clearly distraught Smith, his voice rising as the man’s deadly intent became clear. “Get off it! Get off it! Get off it!”

Shepard Smith apologizes for airing suicide live on Fox News

Published on Sep 28, 2012 by brain615

Shepard Smiths explains and apologizes for airing a suicide after a car chase live on Fox News on September 28 2012

The network blamed human error for the gruesome gaffe, with one source indicating a Fox producer was slow to cut away from live coverage of what started as a high-speed police chase.

The unidentified man was pronounced dead in the Arizona outback shortly after Fox viewers watched the mortally wounded suspect fall face-first to the ground.

Fox News veteran Smith, after the network abruptly cut to commercial, returned to the air with a lengthy apology for the fatal fiasco.

FOX NEWS

Fox News Anchor Shepard Smith repeats the command "get off it" to his staff in the studio as footage of the suicide is broadcast on live television.

“We really messed up, and we’re all really sorry,” said Smith. “That didn’t belong on TV. . . . And I personally apologize to you that it happened.

“It is insensitive, it is just wrong,” he continued. “And that was wrong. And that won’t happen again on my watch.”

The network said nothing about possible disciplinary action over the morbid miscue, which became an instant YouTube and Twitter sensation.

But a Fox News source said the Studio B control room was in “utter shock” after the suicide — a sentiment likely shared by its 1.8 million afternoon viewers, who witnessed the death from their couches.

A producer at the network’s Rockefeller Center newsroom “didn’t hit the dump button” fast enough to cut away from the live feed, the source said.

The reaction to the mistake was instantaneous.

 

FOX NEWS

The suspect had allegedly carjacked a red Dodge Caliber and reached speeds of up to 110 mph.

FOX NEWS

The running man was near the California border when he pulled off the road and raced from the car.

“Whoa!” came a shocked off-camera voice before Smith repeatedly shouted for someone to cut away from the Arizona coverage — immediately.

The network, beaming live footage from a KSAZ-TV helicopter, was operating on a five-second delay, according to Smith.

Just seconds before the man pulled the gun, the copter camera actually zoomed in on the distraught man wearing a black No. 81 football jersey and black pants.

Smith, while providing a play-by-play of the erratic man’s 90-minute run across Arizona, seemed to sense something was about to go awry near the small western town of Salome.

“This scares me,” he said. “You wait for the end of these things, and you worry about how they may end up. This makes me a little nervous, I’ve got to tell you. A little nervous.”

The armed suspect stole the four-door SUV at gunpoint from a couple outside a Phoenix restaurant, and then fired at police during his failed getaway, said city police spokesman Sgt. Tommy Thompson.

Fox picked up the chase, with the fleeing felon speeding at up to 100 mph as he drove west along Interstate 10 toward California.

He killed himself about 80 miles east of the border, pumping a single bullet into his head on national television.

In the seconds before the suicide, Smith provided an impromptu play-by-play as the desperate man stumbled, collapsed and then regained his balance.

“He’s looking kind of erratic, isn’t he? ... It looks like he’s a little disoriented or something,” Smith said. “It’s always possible the guy could be on something.”

A ruckus could be heard in the studio background, as the suspect suddenly fired the gun with his right hand. Smith said the delay was supposed to prevent such an error.

“If anything went horribly wrong, we would be able to cut away from it without subjecting you to it,” said Smith.

Fox News Executive Vice President Michael Clemente issued his own apology for the network’s mistake.

FOX NEWS

The man desperately ran, but appeared to quickly realize that there was nowhere he could hid.

FOX NEWS

An alleged carjacking suspect led police on a high speed chase for more than an hour through Phoenix, Ariz., before pulling off the road and appearing to shoot himself in the head on live television.

“We took every precaution to avoid any such live incident by putting the helicopter pictures on a five-second delay,” he said.

“Unfortunately, this mistake was the result of a severe human error and we apologize for what viewers ultimately saw on the screen.”

Fox, more than other national networks, airs live coverage of car chases from its affiliates — and even showed a Los Angeles police pursuit earlier Friday.

The Phoenix station had cut away from its chase coverage prior to the suicide.

FILM WITHIN A FILM

“Argo”

BY ANTHONY LANEOCTOBER 15, 2012

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Ben Affleck stars in and directs a film set during the Iran hostage crisis. Illustration by Concepción Studios.

The new Ben Affleck movie, “Argo,” begins in November, 1979, with the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran. A crowd breaks into the compound, taking more than fifty Americans hostage. Six escape through the back of the building and take refuge in the residence of the Canadian Ambassador. How can they be spirited out of the country, or, as the jargon puts it, exfiltrated? Back in Washington, the task falls to a C.I.A. staffer named Tony Mendez (played by Affleck), from the Office of Technical Services. Various plans have been mooted, the most credible being that the hostages could make it to the border, hundreds of miles away, on bikes. Mendez, however, has an even better idea. Well, not a better one, but a more ridiculous one: how about making a movie?

Enter John Chambers (John Goodman), a prosthetics guru whose work on simian features, for “Planet of the Apes,” earned him an Academy Award, in 1969, and whose talents the Agency has called on in the past. Mendez goes to Hollywood and asks Chambers to devise a nonexistent film: find a script that requires a Middle Eastern setting, and build up a simulacrum of a genuine production. Posters, storyboards, costumes, read-throughs, buzz in the trade papers: everything will help. Mendez, posing as an associate producer, will fly to Iran, issue false identities to the six Americans, claim that they are scouting locations for a Canadian science-fiction movie, and then fly them out.

Four things should be said about this pipe dream. One, it went ahead; two, it worked; three, it wasn’t declassified until 1997; and four, it makes for a good movie, and further proof that we were wrong about Ben Affleck. Few of us, watching “Armageddon” and “Pearl Harbor,” could see a way out, or back, for an actor so utterly at the mercy of his own jawline. Did he flinch at a future composed of all-American strivers, each more earnest than the last, or had he always been nipped by the directing bug? Whatever the case, Affleck was suddenly there with “Gone Baby Gone” (2007), which was more roughened by energies and doubts than all his performances combined. He took the precaution of recruiting actors more formidable than himself—Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris—to boost his endeavors, and that habit remains. “Argo” has Victor Garber as the Canadian Ambassador, Bryan Cranston as Mendez’s superior, and, most enjoyable of all, Alan Arkin as Lester Siegel, a producer so scornfully amused by Mendez’s request that he has no option but to obey it. He does have one proviso. “If I’m doing a fake movie, it’s going to be a fake hit,” he says.

The fake they decide upon is entitled “Argo,” made by a bogus company called Studio Six, and lovingly described by Chambers as “a twenty-million-dollar ‘Star Wars’ ripoff.” I can’t be the only person who ardently wishes that he and Siegel had gone ahead and shot it. Affleck has a lot of fun, perhaps an ounce too much, with the daftness of the film industry; when Mendez, thinking ahead to the hostages’ cover stories, asks whether you can be taught to direct movies in a day, Chambers replies, “You can teach a rhesus monkey to be a director in a day.” No one is more skilled than Goodman, with his faintly bullying geniality, at dishing up lines like that, but must we buy his character’s implication that Hollywood is just another planet of the apes? Is it good for mendacity, and nothing else?

This matters because “Argo” is, in part, a battle of the textures. When it comes to period detail, Affleck seems to take his cue from Mendez, who worked for the Graphics and Authentication Division of the O.T.S.; just look at the typography of the opening credits, with its bulbous seventies curves. Affleck’s beard and hair style suggest someone who moonlighted from the intelligence services to pose for “The Joy of Sex,” and, as you study the fashions of the era, you have to ask whether the Ayatollah’s fury was provoked by U.S. support for the Shah or, more simply, by the width of Western shirt collars. Everything about the Tehran sequences, in fact, is a rebuke to style. The camera work is anxious and twitching, with a grainy surface to match. Here, we gather, is the real thing: life hemming us in, like a mob.

Then comes the climax. If you visit the C.I.A. Web site, you can read Mendez’s account of events in January, 1980. “As smooth as silk,” he calls the hostages’ passage through the airport, whereas Affleck, chopping up the action and spinning it out, insures that no nails remain unchewed. This is absolutely his right as a teller of tales, and “Argo” never claims to be a documentary. It struck me as a bit rich, however, to make such sport of Hollywood deceitfulness and then to round off your movie with an expert helping of white lies, piling on car chases that never occurred. As for the aftermath, it goes on forever. We get hurrahs for Canadian-American relations; a shot of Mendez hugging his wife, from whom he has been estranged, with the Stars and Stripes fluttering behind; images of the actual hostages, presumably for any skeptics who still find the film implausible; and, finally, a voice-over from Jimmy Carter, lauding the efforts of those involved. All this is, frankly, uncool—a pity, because the rest of “Argo” feels clever, taut, and restrained. Why not close with the perfect coda that Mendez himself supplied? “By the time Studio Six folded several weeks after the rescue, we had received twenty-six scripts,” he wrote. “One was from Steven Spielberg.”

THE REPUBLICAN GARDEN OF EDEN
Posted by Ron Hauge

October 10, 2012

In the beginning the LORD created the Heavens and the Earth, featuring a handful of small but helpful lands offshore. On the sixth day He built Adam by Himself, requiring not any government assistance.

Adam, like the Etch A Sketch, was fashioned from dust and one American’s good idea.

On the Estate of Eden no taxes abounded, and in this environment Adam was fruitful. As those at the top prospered in Paradise, so prospered all in Paradise.

The LORD created the animals and bade Adam to name them. Dressage Animals became known as “horses.” Domesticated Animals for Open-air Transport and other Domesticated Animals That Someone (Unknown) Let Out were called “dogs.” Another large animal was named either “moose” or “elk.” Probably “elk.”

Adam set out to build his own business by himself, beseeching the LORD to provide only paths over land and water. Adam’s understanding of this covenant was that these gifts were not to be tallied against his own achievement later.

Adam created Eve and then created a job for her by making her his first legal wife. They were naked and unashamed, especially the latter. Of these, it turns out, one is much, much better for business.

Woman was made vice-president of Man’s corporation and for her an office was constructed with a ceiling made of glass.

Forbidden were the apples on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but Eve was tempted by a free business model and she did breach her contract with the LORD. Adam did not contest that he, too, had unknowingly sampled from the tree, and for the first time Man and Woman felt shame for their private sectors. Eve did quickly appeal to have her transparent ceiling removed, but this appeal was not heard by the LORD, and Man was not overly supportive of Woman in this plea.

When the Estate of Eden did fail and both principal officers were forced to relocate out of country, Adam did fault his SUPPLIER, excessive regulations and “the woman’s agenda.”

As happened often in distant times, the woman most highly placed in the corporation was set up to receive the harshest judgment.

Eve did blame the Serpent and his persuasive, liberal take on what belongs to the people and what belongs to “The Man.” The LORD cursed the liberals above all others and condemned the ninety-nine per cent to be the enemy of the human race.

Adam was condemned to appreciate the work requirement in welfare. Eve was condemned to a lifetime of painful childbirth with no exception for the health of the mother.

The LORD’s pledge that Man and Woman would live forever under Messiahcare was quickly broken, surprising Adam not.

When Adam did retire from Eden he taketh with him a package of 38.4 million apples. Eden was then bankrupted of its fruit and many moose or elk were said to perish or relocate to other Paradises.

Adam sought to prove his dominance over Eve in the new land and “take back Eden” but found it difficult to gain a clear majority in any of his early contests against her. Never was he able to produce a witnessed birth certificate, being the only candidate ever born in the time before witnesses. Also not helping were his positions for and then against Messiahcare and Eve’s threat to produce the pre-leaf sketches she’d always secretly held onto.

The local vote was always split 1-1, counting not the disputed 2-0 landslide for Adam’s party in ’04. That year Eve was heavy with Seth, so Adam’s firm oversaw the counting. Adam’s term was served in virtual silence. In later years Man and Woman agreed on little during their many, many private “debates,” except the need for more and larger stones along the border fence that did separate them.

Eve multiplied many times. Her descendants in later years would include Ronald Reagan and country-music legend Garth Brooks.

Cain and his brother Abel did follow their father Adam into the money-changing business. In time Cain did prove to be the more outgoing and effective businessman.

Adam and Eve’s children did marry unto one another, complicating the estate-tax laws enough to render them unenforceable for millennia while their fates did linger in the courts.

Countless scrolls were recorded about Adam’s years in business but only this scroll has been witnessed by other men. Thus Adam did give his assurance to all that he looks “golden” in the unseen scrolls, adding that he did not plan to release more of them “any time soon.”

All of Cain’s descendants were wiped out in the Great Deluge after they did fail to get in on the I.P.O. for Noah’s ark venture.

Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years, suffering not in that time the indignity of receiving public assistance after many years of paying in.

Illustration by Exem Story.

Oct. 3: Domestic Policy

Oct. 11: Running Mates

Oct. 16: Town Hall

Oct. 22: Foreign Policy

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