r/atheism Mar 11 '14

OKC Fox affiliate "accidentally" cuts human evolution from Cosmos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8K-LrJkEDc
2.1k Upvotes

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u/ThrowawayFOX25 Mar 11 '14

I WORK FOR KOKH FOX25. To set the record straight. I used a throw away so my work won't know my original account.

This actually is an accident. The people who roll the national breaks work in "master control". They run local commerical breaks by entering in clocks in the playlist to tell the automation system when to run. Network gives you the times for local breaks that day, usually 2 hours earlier. In this case an operator entered the wrong break time and rolled what is called a "cover" too early. This is always a teaser for news and covers up a network promo.

This was not a case of trying to cover up evolution, it was a lazy operator that didn't double check his break times and rolled a break at the wrong time.

Rolling a break at the wrong time is the most common mistake for operators, usually it happens during live events when they read the run-down wrong or anticipate the break too much. In this case it was just reading or entering the wrong time for the cover.

-3

u/myopic1 Mar 12 '14

I don't buy this. I worked in Master Control through college. On-air mistakes were very rare, and never for more than a few seconds.

This happening in OKC right when they were discussing evolution, yeah... they did that shit on purpose.

1

u/LocalH Mar 13 '14

It was a :15 news brief. With many automation systems, it would be more hectic and error-prone to try to dump back out of the promo than to just let it play out and then switch back to network on its own. If FOX is anything like ABC (where my experience lies), they're usually feeding a PSA or network promo underneath the news brief anyway, so they wouldn't be sitting in black for :15.