ABC's Good Morning America uncritically promotes the liberal agenda, regardless of the facts. But it's not just political stories that excite the credulous hosts. On August 4, George Stephanopoulos eagerly announced, "A Southern California city on edge, because they fear a lion is on the loose? It's all over that video right there." He narrated, "This grainy video is causing all the excitement."
Journalist Nick Watt breathlessly reported, "A lion's gait, a man-eating countenance, the security video is spine-tingling." Except, as it turns out, the video wasn't of a lion. It was almost certainly a dog. Blake Smith is the host of a skeptical science podcast called Monster Talk. The September 10th episode investigated the media hype that ABC, the Los Angeles Times and others spread with a "tale of an African lion loose in the suburbs of L.A."
Smith recounted the sloppy mistake that GMA and other media outlets made:
BLAKE SMITH: After a bit of digging, I found that all of these videos being shown were second generation at best. The video had been recorded from a monitor replay of the security footage. When I tracked down the best copy I could find, I paid close attention to the screen where the date stamp was located. There, in an easy to ignore pan across the screen, was a really important clue.
The monitor revealed that the playback was at half speed. Literally, every news outlet was showing the video at 50 percent of its natural playback speed. I decided to see what the animal looked like at normal speed, so I took the clip of footage and applied a speed increase to it. And, suddenly, the feline quality was gone and this looked like a much more familiar animal.
Just as in other cases with the mainstream media, journalists offered loaded questions when asking about this supposed lion:
SMITH: I contacted one of the lion experts quoted in the coverage about the Norwalk lion and I asked him a few questions. I wanted to know how he had been approached by the media. What specific questions did they ask him and how did they present the data to him? It was enlightening. They came to him with the clip of footage that was being played at half speed. But he didn't know that at the time. And the question they asked wasn't "what is this animal," but, rather, "does this look more like a cougar or an African lion?"
It wasn't until the very end of the GMA segment that Stephanopoulos and other hosts provided some skepticism. But by that time, they had already aired the footage and breathlessly hyped it.
On August 14, the local NBC affiliate revealed that the so-called lion was actually a dog:
The mystery of an animal that was caught on surveillance video wandering through a Norwalk neighborhood may have been finally solved, with an area resident saying the stocky animal that was initially thought to be a lion appears to be her family's dog, a city spokesman said Thursday.
Norwalk public information officer Jeff Hobbs said the unidentified resident, who lives a few blocks away from the surveillance camera that captured grainy images of the animal around 3:45 a.m. July 29, called city officials Wednesday after seeing enhanced images on television.
She said both she and her children believe the animal on the video is their dog, Buddy.
Of course, Good Morning America never followed up, with the slightly less dramatic news. Instead the show moved on to other non-stories. This style of "journalism" is entirely common for GMA. On May 20, 2014, for instance, the hosts gave more time to strippers, models and reality TV than they did the latest Veterans Affairs revelations.
