News In Brief

TAPE IT? NO WAY!

In Kuwait, a flight attendant was arrested because he just wanted to watch a soccer game on TV. Wait, you say, isn't that a bit harsh? Not under the circumstances. It seems the national team was playing Kyrgyzstan in a qualifying round for next year's World Cup. Unfortunately, the telecast conflicted with a Kuwait Airways flight to Beirut, Lebanon on which our guy was scheduled to work. So he telephoned a bomb threat, delaying takeoff by two hours. Oh, the game? Kuwait won, 3-0.

OOPS, OUR MISTAKE. SORRY.

Unfortunately for them, hundreds of workers at a Madrid company were too slow to take advantage of a bank's error that made them all multimillionaires - at least for a few hours. Their paychecks were converted from pesetas to euros, the single European currency, at a ratio of 1 to 1. Alas, it takes 166.4 pesetas to equal one euro. The goof was corrected before any of the checks could be cashed.

Phoenix TV station saluted for Election 2000 coverage

Network TV news operations have come under withering criticism for the botched calls they made on election night. Now, the Annenberg School for Communication's Norman Lear Center in Los Angeles has examined another media tendency during campaign 2000: how little time local stations devoted to "candidate centered discourse" - primarily footage of campaigners talking. It surveyed 74 channels in 58 markets and found the average "CCD" was 45 seconds per night in the month prior to the election, versus the recommended industry standard of five minutes. The stations that did best, in minutes and seconds:

1. KNXV, Phoenix 5:44

2. WPTV, Palm Beach, Fla. 4:03

3. WCPO, Cincinnati 3:38

(tie) WRAL, Raleigh, N.C. 3:38

5. KJRH, Tulsa, Okla. 3:16

6. WXYZ, Detroit 2:55

7. WEWS, Cleveland 2:44

8. WKRC, Cincinnati 2:39

9. WJAR, Providence, R.I. 2:32

10. WTVJ, Miami 2:30

- Business Wire

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