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There’s a lot of dubious content that passes for news these days on the networks and their local affiliates. But WVLA-TV took it to an entirely new level recently when it aired a 10 p.m. newscast that was one week old.

The gaffe occurred on Sunday, Nov. 17, after Sunday Night Football. The Dallas Cowboys’ 14-10 victory over the Washington Redskins ran over the allotted time, so the newscast started late. The lead story was a puff piece about Tampa Bay Buccaneers running back Warrick Dunn’s charity program that finds homes for needy families. Given those circumstances, one could argue that a casual observer—even one in the control booth—might not have noticed.

But someone’s ears should have pricked up when they heard crime reports that had run in The Advocate a week earlier. And they really should have clued in when a report aired about the New Orleans Saints’ 34-20 loss to the Atlanta Falcons—hours after the Saints’ 30-20 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs. Still, the newscast kept running right on through to the close, which ended with “… and that’s the news for Sunday, November 9th.”

WVLA News Director Jeff Hamburger would say only that he was “investigating” the cause of the mistake. He declined to comment further and did not return subsequent calls.

Assuming it was a mistake, the situation points to the hazards of producing a newscast in one market and airing it in another, which WVLA has done since it began airing weekend newscasts earlier this fall. The local NBC affiliate produces a portion of its weekend content with a skeleton staff in Baton Rouge, then sends it by way of fiber lines to sister station KETK-TV in Tyler, Texas, where the rest of the show is put together and anchored.

Technically, it’s not really local news—only partially local news—and it’s a growing and troubling trend in the industry that enables cash-strapped media companies to maximize already-stretched resources. When the station launched the newscasts earlier this fall, company President Steve Pruett touted the advantage of having a digital network of stations that could collaborate and share content.

“The beauty of being digital is that your newsroom can be 200, 300 miles away from your control room,” he said at the time.

The Nov. 17 newscast, however, clearly shows the downside of doing news that way. Hopefully, it is a lesson from which the station will learn.

Just the facts

WAFB-TV recently aired a sensational story about marital infidelity that was shot and produced entirely in an out-of-state market—an arguably significant fact the station didn’t share with viewers.

The report, which aired on a 10 p.m. newscast, was entitled “The Cheating Season,” and detailed private investigators observing more instances of adultery during hunting season, when husbands have a plausible alibi. The two-and-a-half-minute feature included interviews with a private investigator as well as grainy surveillance videos that caught one unsuspecting philanderer at a party and a strip club when he was allegedly dove hunting.

Let’s table a discussion of whether the subject constitutes news. The more troubling issue is that the story was written, videotaped and produced by WAFB’s sister station in Memphis, Tenn., and viewers were never let in on the secret.

In all fairness, WAFB reporter Jim Shannon—who voiced over the local version of the story—identified a man in the report as the manager of a Hardeman County hunting club. But unless a viewer was paying close attention, that scant reference likely went unnoticed—especially since Shannon didn’t mention that Hardeman County is in west Tennessee.

WAFB News Director Vicki Zimmerman defends the report, pointing out that Shannon and the station’s assistant news director called local private investigators to confirm that Louisiana has a thriving cheating season of its own.

“We didn’t feel as though we needed to shoot local video and interview local hunters because we know WMC is a credible news organization and they had vetted the story,” Zimmerman says. “If we thought that cheating spouses during hunting season only happened in Tennessee, we would have made it a point to tell the viewers this story was from the Memphis area.”

The disclosure of location is a basic tenet of journalistic storytelling, even if it is largely irrelevant to the subject of a story. It needs to be established. That it was not shows a disrespect of the viewers and a lowering of the ever-eroding standards of what passes for television news.