Local ABC affiliate under the media microscope

10.12.2012 by André Natta · → Leave a comment

Read Offline:

ABC 33/40 logoIt’s not like Birmingham, AL hasn’t been making its share of news about news recently. It appeared to do so again yesterday, when Jim Romanesko’s website highlighted a decision by the city’s ABC affiliate, ABC 33/40, to pull a story about the pending nuptials for Good Morning America’s weekday weatherman, Sam Champion and his his longtime boyfriend Rubem Robierb announced last week.

The thread that originated the conversation was started on October 8, three days after the original post was made to the station’s website. It was the same day they posted a link on their Facebook page to a brief piece on gay marriage as it relates to the race for Alabama’s State Supreme Court chief justice.

The link referenced to in the Romanesko story does indeed point to the site’s “our apologies” page.

A search online though does provide a link to an AP story posted to the owned station’s site about the nuptials (the one referenced in this Facebook thread). According to the site, the AP story was published at 3:17 p.m. CT on October 5 (the same day it appeared on the GMA portion of the Yahoo! News site at 2:25 p.m. ET ) and references his title on the show in the URL slug. A close look at the URL sequence also shows that the link referenced to in the Facebook thread was a newer post (#19762177), perhaps a duplicate to the original (its sequence number is 19748879).

The removal of the Facebook references are ironic when you consider the same day Champion’s news broke, they shared another piece via their fan page about the expanded influence of the social network. It does make you wonder though what would have happened had this series of events happened on Saturday (it’s the official observance of  Gen Y Get Offline Day) or next March during the National Day of Unplugging… Or do you ever unplug?

Read Offline:

Filed under: Media · Online