{"id":11255,"date":"2016-04-27T13:30:13","date_gmt":"2016-04-27T18:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robertfeder.com\/?p=11255"},"modified":"2016-04-27T15:59:40","modified_gmt":"2016-04-27T20:59:40","slug":"wgn-crains-get-hastert-sentence-all-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/2016\/04\/27\/wgn-crains-get-hastert-sentence-all-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"WGN, Crain\u2019s rush to get Hastert sentence all wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Steve<\/a>

<\/a> Steve Sanders, Dina Bair and Paul Lisnek (WGN, April 27, 2016)<\/p><\/div>\n

In the rush to be first, they got it wrong. Way wrong.<\/p>\n

Well before Judge Thomas M. Durkin handed down a 15-month prison sentence to Dennis Hastert, multiple Chicago media outlets broadcast and posted inaccurate reports Wednesday that the former U.S. House speaker would serve no jail time.<\/p>\n

The error apparently occurred when some reporters misunderstood Durkin\u2019s reference early in his remarks to two years of \u201csupervised release\u201d for Hastert after his prison term for paying hush money to cover up sexual abuse from decades ago.<\/p>\n

Several television stations seemed initially confused, but none compounded the mistake as aggressively as WGN-Channel 9.<\/a> For close to an hour, the Tribune Media station\u2019s midday news anchors, Steve Sanders and Dina Bair, discussed, dissected and disparaged the \u201cno jail time\u201d angle with in-studio news analyst Paul Lisnek, an attorney. Lisnek repeatedly called it \"the luckiest day of Hastert's life\u201d for avoiding prison.<\/p>\n

Even as competing stations and social media accounts began questioning WGN\u2019s rush to inaccuracy, \u201cChicago\u2019s Very Own\u201d wasn\u2019t backing down from its own \u201cDewey Defeats Truman\u201d debacle.<\/p>\n

Asked for comment, a spokesperson for WGN later said: \u201cWe regret the error and updated our story as soon as we had the most current information.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Crain's<\/a>

Crain's Chicago Business<\/p><\/div>\n

While Durkin was still leading up to pronouncing Hastert\u2019s sentence, Crain\u2019s Chicago Business<\/a> headlined on its alert: \u201cDennis Hastert is not going to prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe realized pretty quickly that we had sent out some inaccurate information and corrected that as soon as we possibly could,\u201d said Craig Newman, assistant managing editor for daily news and digital operations for Crain\u2019s. \u201cWe regret that there was an error made.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mistakes weren\u2019t limited to local media. CNN Breaking News<\/a> ran with the \u201csupervised release\u201d no jail time story online and still had it wrong more than 10 minutes after the actual sentence was handed down.<\/p>\n

CNN later tweeted: \u201cThis earlier tweet gave incomplete information. Hastert sentenced to 15 months in prison in addition to 2 years supervised release.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the rush to be first, they got it wrong. Way wrong. Well before Judge Thomas M. Durkin handed down a 15-month prison sentence to Dennis Hastert, multiple Chicago media outlets broadcast and posted inaccurate reports Wednesday that the former U.S. House speaker would serve no jail time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11255"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11255"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11268,"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11255\/revisions\/11268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertfeder.dailyherald.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}