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A local Fox affiliate in San Diego doesn’t think that it needs to apologize after depicting President Obama as a rape suspect.

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The Times of San Diego reported that the station thinks that their mistake was no big deal:

At 10:04 p.m., viewers heard anchor Kathleen Bade say: “The only suspect in a sex assault at SDSU will not be charged.” At the same time, a picture of Obama appeared with the legend “NO CHARGES.” … “Yeah, there was an accident when they had an over-the-shoulder” display, Wille told Times of San Diego. “It wasn’t on purpose.”

… Asked why there was no on-air acknowledgment or apology for the error, Wille said: “They really don’t do that when it’s a small thing like that.”

There are some troubling elements to this “mistake.” Why would somebody at the station with the president’s picture that read no charges beneath it? President Obama isn’t under investigation for anything, so why would this graphic exist? If it was a mistake in creating the graphic, just say so.

The other problem is that a five second mistake is a substantial error, so even if the graphic was put on the air accidentally, an apology is in order. It would take less than thirty seconds to apologize. I am sure a half a minute can be found anywhere in the mostly fluff that makes up a local news broadcast. There should be a sense of urgency when a mistake happens, not a hope that if the error gets swept under the rug no one will notice.

One can only imagine the level of rage that Republicans would feel if this “mistake” happened to George W. Bush? When a local station depicts President Obama as a rapist, it’s no big deal, but when anyone criticized Bush’s Iraq war all hell would break loose.

There is an obvious disrespect double standard at work here. The irony is that by, not apologizing for the graphic the station made a bigger story out of it than it would have been otherwise. The lesson here is that the cover-up is always worse than the lie, and if the media want to be trusted, they need to own up and hold themselves accountable for their mistakes.