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After about 13 years at WSMV-Channel 4, James Lewis has resigned following a piece in which he reported that Metro cops arrested a McDonald’s employee when the worker sold a Big Mac to a hooker, thus violating a law against giving “nutrition to a prostitute.”
Lewis’ recent pre-recorded package about the Metro Police Department’s undercover prostitution sting was a solid piece of reporting. The live tag at the end was when everything came unraveled: “In one case, they even arrested a McDonald’s employee because the police officer pressed the button and said, ‘I’m a prostitute. I want a Big Mac.’ They sold it to her and busted her because it’s against the law to give nutrition to a prostitute,” Lewis said, addressing anchors Demetria Kalodimos and Dan Miller.
A clearly surprised Miller seemed to sense something was wrong: “James, a little more on that. What kind of crime is that, to provide food to a police decoy? It is actually a crime?”
It is, if you believe the weekly “Fabricator” column here in the Scene, which is where Lewis got the information. Last December, the satirical Fabricator—which ended with the tagline, “The Fabricator is not reality. Sometimes it just seems like it”—“reported” the McDonald’s bit, complete with absurdly funny “quotes” from Police Chief Ronal Serpas. (“It wasn’t just a Big Mac; it was a combo, with fries and a Coke,” The Fabricator quoted Serpas as saying. “Their bodies are the commodity that is being sold, and the food fuels the body.”)
In researching his piece, Lewis did a Google search that returned, among other items, the December 2004 Scene humor column, which he used in his package wrap-up. WSMV news director Andrew Finlayson says Lewis recognized his mistake almost immediately, before the Metro Police Department or anyone else even had time to call and complain.
“The package he did was all straight-up reporting,” Finlayson says. “What James did was make a terrible mistake of emphasizing something that was clearly not true…. He didn’t realize
did joke news articles.” (Finlayson proudly says he doesn’t read the Scene, and didn’t know about The Fabricator column either. He returned Desperately’s call because his new general manager wants him to cooperate with “you people.”)
Finlayson says Lewis quickly apologized to the staff and anchors, and Kalodimos subsequently read an on-air apology about the erroneous report. “He was beside himself,” Finlayson says. “I said, ‘James, I understand, but you didn’t check it out yourself. And you didn’t attribute.’ He said, ‘I know.’ ”
http://www.nashvillescene.com/Stories/Columns/Desperately_Seeking_the_News/2005/10/13/A_Career_Ender/index.shtml#
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