WBAL TV 11

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 9:54am on Thursday, February 26th, 2009

February 25, 2009: Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reported about a WBAL TV reporter in trouble:

"A Baltimore television reporter has lost his job after acknowledging that he doctored a video to make it appear that Fox News Radio host John Gibson had made a racial slur.

In the bogus video, which was picked up across the Internet, Gibson seemed to be comparing Attorney General Eric Holder to a monkey with a "bright blue scrotum." There had been chatter on Fox News earlier about such a monkey, which had escaped from a Seattle zoo.

A spokeswoman for WBAL-TV confirmed yesterday that technology reporter John Sanders is no longer employed by the station but she declined to comment on whether he had been dismissed. His profile was promptly removed from the NBC affiliate's Web site.

Gibson, who had actually been discussing Holder's comment about America being a "nation of cowards" on racial issues, said in an interview that the fake story has had a "personal" impact on him. "Jeez, people will believe anything," he said. "These days it's really dangerous on the Internet. These things go viral, and people don't see the correction and the mea culpa. You can't un-ring the bell."