William Fleming coverage angers one viewer

Weekdays, WSLS airs the 700 Club during the afternoon. But, one viewer doesn’t like the disclaimer we have before the show.

Dempsey Gray of Fieldale wrote, “I was watching the 700 Club today, I don’t regularly watch this show. I saw you put up a disclaimer about the content of the show. This offends me GREATLY! There are so many programs on your channel that contain bad language, sex, partial nudity and just really bad behavior! I don’t see disclaimers on these shows! I’m to believe such poor behavior is acceptable but a Christian based show is not! When did we reach a point as a society that we regularly show sex, violence, profanity and drugs but must apologize for broadcasting a Christian show?”

WSLS responds: Thanks for your perspective. First we are not apologizing for airing a Christian based show, simply letting people know that it’s not our programming. You see, there’s a difference between network programming and the 700 club. The 700 club is paid programming, meaning they pay us to air their show. As such, it’s important for us to issue a disclaimer so it is not implied that we are endorsing the content of that show. And we do that for all paid programming that airs on WSLS whether it’s the 700 club or
AbFlex.

Beth from Roanoke called in to complain about our coverage of the opening of the new William Fleming High School.

“You did not report anything about the William Fleming new school opening. You barely mentioned it. The other station did a very good job on it. So, I was wondering what the problem was. If it had been any other school you would have done so,” she said.

WSLS responds: Beth, thanks for the call. I wanted to let you know that we did cover the Fleming opening. We had a story about the ribbon cutting and took a tour of the school with two Fleming alumni. The initial story aired during our 5pm newscast and a different version aired at 11pm and again during the morning show the next day.

Finally, one viewer wrote in with a grammar lesson.

Mark from Dublin wrote, “Hey, here’s a note from the ‘grammar police.’ In the lead story about the Giles Co. water situation, Jay Warren used the word ‘impact’ incorrectly not once, but twice. ‘Impact’ is not a synonym for the verb ‘affect.’ It’s a common mistake, but I hope you’ll agree that media professionals need to be as error-free as possible.”

WSLS responds: I have to be honest. I spent a half hour looking through the AP Style Guide, which makes no mention of this, the dictionary and dictionary.com trying to figure out the mistake. And frankly I couldn’t. So, we’ll take your word for it and agree with your last point; it’s very important for our producers, anchors and reporters to be as accurate and error-free as possible.