As a writer of fiction (among other stuff) I am constantly amazed when I read some fantastic true silly story, where I come to utter: “I can’t think up stuff this good!” It’s a sure ‘truth is wackier than fiction’ ethos we all just seem to be living daily, with all the current actual wackiness that’s coming at us constantly.
My latest ‘truth is wackier than fiction’ happened this week via CNN during one of their stories reporting Dolly Parton’s death. The mega news/entertainment network mistakenly used a photo of a living Las Vegas celebrity impersonator, Kelly Vohnn, in that impersonator’s pose as Dolly Parton in newscast coverage of her death during the Laura Coates Live newscast.
A picture of Vohnn was shown in a montage that featured five archival photos of Dolly Parton.
“We regret the error and apologize to the Parton family,” said a CNN spokesperson in a statement.
Vohnn got in front of the gaff by stating:
“I know it was a mistake, but it was very weird. I started getting all these texts in from friends saying that I was on CNN, not Dolly. And to be clear, I have never represented myself as Dolly in public. I thought about calling CNN but was really consumed by the grief of losing Dolly that I just wanted to be at home with my thoughts, raising a glass of wine to that brilliant woman.”
Ok, I’ll grant you, this isn’t the biggest mistake a news network has made. I suspect in all the retractions CNN, FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC have made in their past (and I am not counting newspapers or online sites), there are plenty more gaffs, omissions, shoddy reporting and dissimulation that our supposed 4th estate have made that we never know about. But stuff like this Dolly mix-up makes me wonder, especially in an age where our news is coming at us so quickly from so many sources, and so much of it clearly backed up by a bias, what of what we are getting is accurate?
This all makes one wonder how far off the mark cries of ‘fake news’ really are. Yeah, I know, so-and-so says this a lot, so we have to dismiss it instantly. But do any of us ever really consider the veracity of what we are getting daily if what we get feeds our personal narrative of the way we want to world to be? Who among us would have caught the Dolly gaff, even if we saw it, because we simply have given our reporting sources such a wide berth these days? And in the end, even though CNN apologized, does anybody care that they did as much as does anybody care in the first place about the mistake they made?
I’ll mourn the real Dolly this week, thank you very much. As I will Tim Curry, good old sassy Jaye P. Morgan, Shelley Fabares, and rock critic Dave Marsh.
Make no mistake about it.
