NBC Entertainment Ignores Breaking News Event

I reported earlier on the mishap involving the M&Ms balloon in this year's Macy's Thanksgiving parade. The anchors for the parade were news veterans Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, and yet as the news of the balloon crash and resulting injuries was being broadcast on other outlets, NBC went merrily on with the parade and made no mention of the problem.

During its live coverage of the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, NBC did not tell viewers that a giant balloon had caught on a street lamp and injured two sisters.

At the point in the broadcast when the "M&M's Chocolate Candies" balloon was supposed to have crossed the finish line, announcers Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker stuck close to their scripts and the network ran footage of the balloon from last year's parade.

Couric told the audience they were seeing old footage and bantered with Lauer and Roker, but there was no further mention of the accident.

An NBC spokeswoman said Friday that producers knew something had happened with the balloon but didn't know exactly what.

"There was no further comment on air at that point in time because we did not have further information," said Cameron Blanchard, a spokeswoman for NBC's entertainment division, which is responsible for the parade broadcast.

You'd think that two newsies like Katie and Matt would be anxious to report breaking news, but according to Richard Huff in his Daily News columnn today, neither was notified by NBC of the accident that had occurred out of their view. The folks in the entertainment division clearly didn't want breaking news to disrupt their syrupy and sappy parade broadcast.

Sure, you can make an argument why they shouldn't have mentioned the crash. But the fact that someone was injured in a similar incident in 1997 was enough to make the crash worthy of mention on-air.

If it was possible for NBC's cable network, MSNBC, to report the accident - before NBC's own parade coverage ended - then someone should have gotten a word to Lauer and Couric.

Instead, NBC left Lauer and Couric journalistically dangling and, as a result, risked their credibility with viewers.

Thankfully there were no serious injuries, but given that the wind conditions were part of the parade story, the accident should have been mentioned on-the-air, especially when they were running old footage of the M&Ms balloon.

I'm not sure that Lauer and Couric will suffer any credibility problems, because frankly I don't know how many people really consider them journalists as opposed to talking heads who interview half-asleep people in the morning. I do, however, think that they'll be having some words with the entertainment division just because this situation makes them look silly.