Democracy Has Prevailed.

August 31, 2006

Well, that worked out not so well...

The decision to stop daily updates by the hospital of Pittsburgh Mayor Bob O'Connor's condition is apparently what led to everyone and his brother hearing the false rumor that O'Connor had passed away yesterday.

While I did receive a couple of emails yesterday afternoon, from what I heard the MSM (radio in particular) was far more active in helping to spread the rumors than the supposedly error-filled blogosphere.

I saw nothing on any local blogs until well after the rumors had been put to rest.

KDKA seemed to have the most coverage. Video available here.

Obviously, the wildfire rumors that Mayor O'Connor had died must make a bad situation even worse for his family and friends...

For future reference, it was reported that if the worst came to be, City Council President Luke Ravenstahl would be almost immediately sworn in (with time given to the media to cover the event) so it's unlikely that you'd be hearing any terrible news from an email that you could not verify yourself through, say, the Post-Gazette or local television stations.

4 comments:

EdHeath said...

The PG story you linked to didn't help. Dick Skrinjar is saying the mayor is unchanged, but hadn't seen him and couldn't answer questions about whether he was on life support. Sheesh, how can you say someone is unchanged if you haven't seen him. Dick didn't need to go to Shadyside to not see him.

Maria said...

Well, it does make it clear that he's ALIVE.

spork_incident said...

I received a phone call yesterday at 5.30pm informing me Mayor Bob had died.

Happily, I had the good sense to wait for confirmation before posting the info.


.

Maria said...

I got emails in the early afternoon, but the P-G had the article that I linked to up online somewhere around 3:30 or 3:45 and KDKA TV was on air at 4 pm discounting the rumor.

I wsn't about to 'go' with the rumors either for this blog.