Building trust starts tomorrow!
CBS News’ new director Bari Weiss spoke at City Hall on Tuesday, denouncing the public’s lack of trust in the facts journalists present.
Unfortunately, the journalist did so while presenting a slide containing obvious factual errors.
Laughing, spies told Page Six that Weiss showed colleagues a chart comparing Tiffany Network’s ratings over the past 30 years or so to those of rivals NBC and ABC.
But the lines showing NBC and CBS’ performance swapped places, so the graph showed CBS locked in a noble (if entirely imaginary) decades-long battle for network news supremacy with ABC.
To the casual observer, this may seem like a relatively minor oversight, except that CBS is virtually synonymous with “number three” in the news industry, while NBC and ABC have been making headlines for years vying for the number one spot.
CBS insiders assured Page Six that this was just an error and that CBS was not trying to make itself look any better than it had to be.
One network executive scoffed: “For a network that touts the importance of accuracy and reliability, this is sloppy.”
Meanwhile, eagle-eyed publicists also noticed an on-air typo on the network Tuesday night.
The brain health section was teased with an image of a grandmother-like woman holding a toddler and the words, “We’re still a long way off…Brian Boost.”
It looks like there are a few people at CBS who aren’t using Brian.
Additionally, there was a major gaffe on ABC News that same night, with reporter David Muir introducing two reports instead of one, resulting in a dead start to the broadcast. An ABC source told the Daily Mail that the glitch was due to a computer problem, while another source told Page Six that the incident had caused “chaos” in the network’s control room.
One CBS official even joked that it’s always better to have a typo.
