Who’s the mayor here? KAKE debate graphic stirs more Wichita campaign weirdness | Opinion

What’s wrong with the picture above?

If you don’t see it right off, don’t feel badly because I didn’t notice it either while watching KAKE-TV’s mayoral debate at home Tuesday evening.

The problem is that Brandon Whipple is identified as “Mayoral Candidate” and Lily Wu is identified as “Mayor of Wichita.”

It is of, of course, the other way around. Whipple’s the mayor and Wu is challenging him in the Nov. 7 election.

Simple mistake? Or maybe some wishful thinking on the part of someone at KAKE, where Wu first came to public prominence as one of the station’s on-air reporters and still has many friends?

Whipple’s campaign manager Chris Pumpelly sent a, shall we say sharply worded, message to KAKE’s general manager demanding on-air corrections throughout the broadcast day.

The station GM, Mike Rajewski, wrote him back that the audience likely understands that errors occasionally will occur in an hour-long program being broadcast live without commercials. He told me later that they noticed the error and fixed it during the broadcast, so it didn’t happen again.

Whipple largely shrugged it off, although he did note that Wu declined to debate him on public-television station KPTS, the only significant TV station in the market where she’s never worked.

I’m always reluctant to judge other journalists’ mistakes, because corrections, while inevitable and necessary for the credibility of the profession, feel like a bullet to the chest. Also it’s bad karma. As soon as you do it, the journalism gods punish you with a correction of your own.

So it’s not without some trepidation that I enter this arena (and I almost misspelled trepidation just now).

But I do have some experience here.

In college, I primarily studied broadcast journalism before embarking on my 40-year career in print (a long story for another time).

I worked in TV and radio news and the daily stress level — and corresponding after-work alcohol consumption — was an order of magnitude higher than any print newsroom I’ve ever been in.

TV journalism job listings refer to it as a “fast-paced environment.” It’s more like hours of running full-speed on pure adrenaline, followed by a psychological crash when the show ends and there’s nothing more that can be done.

The strip of lettering at the bottom of the screen is probably the most likely place for a mistake to occur.

In TV lingo, it’s known as a “super,” for superimposed, or a “Chyron,” for the company that decades ago was the dominant provider of equipment to generate text electronically.

As an intern at Channel 9 in Hollywood, one of my duties (in addition to putting felt suns and clouds on the weather map), was to double-check the Chyrons and make sure they matched the paper script for the nightly news.

I was supposed to immediately alert the producer if I noticed any discrepancies, but I never did (sorry Steve), because it felt a little too much like snitching on a co-worker. I’d just catch the eye of the production assistant who typed them in and whisper “you might want to check the Chyron on that.” It’d get fixed and nobody got in trouble.

I don’t know if Lily Wu will win the mayor’s race, but the KAKE debate gives her a commanding 3-0 lead in campaign-benefiting mistakes committed by prominent local institutions.

In April, the city-supported Botanica linked to a Wu podcast/campaign ad on its Facebook page. Botanica officials initially claimed to have been hacked, and later blamed the mishap on a former executive director, Marty Miller. Miller called me several months later and said he was floating down the Rhine River on a European cruise at the time and had nothing to do with any of it. So who knows what really happened there?

In July, Exploration Place, a city- and county-supported agency, shared a post and link to Wu’s campaign page after she attended their weekly park run. To his credit, the museum director admitted it was a staff error and had the post deleted as soon as he found out about it.

This could be, and probably is, just a coincidence.

But just in case, we here at The Eagle will be keeping an eye out for any more mistakes between now and Election Day.