Does Jenny-May Coffin ever check what she is given to read out? (July 25, 2015)

Does Jenny-May Coffin ever check what she is given to read out?
Sports journalism in New Zealand is a Mark Richardson-calibre joke
Television One News, Saturday 25 July 2015

Too many sports “journalists” know little or nothing about sports. Sadly, the worst of them seem to be chosen, apparently on purpose, to “work” in the electronic media. Anyone who has managed to endure a few minutes of Radio Sport or the thankfully now defunct LiveSport will be only too aware that the people who spend all day flapping their gums about sports are not drawn from the top, or even the lower middle, end of the talent pool. Dull, indolent, prejudiced and ill-informed sports commentators are a perennial problem in the United States: one of the most infamous is Tom Heinsohn who, during a live TV broadcast of a 1985 NBA finals game, woofed: “What the Lakers need is more white bodies out there.” It’s also a problem in Great Britain—New Zealanders will remember the deeply unpleasant and dishonest Sunday Times rugby curmudgeon Stephen Jones. Australia’s rugby commentators (league and union) are embarrassingly bad, whether it’s Andrew Slack or Nick Farr-Jones uttering inane platitudes or Phil Gould acting as a crude shill for the poker machine lobby during live game calls.

http://www.theroar.com.au/2011/07/13/phil-goulds-argument-nothing-but-a-sham/

I know the virus is pretty bad in Canada, France, and in Japan as well.

You might say that useless and/or offensive sportscasters are a universal problem. But even so, it gives me no pleasure to say that New Zealand seems particularly afflicted by really, really bad ones. Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I present for your inspection Murray Deaker, Martin Devlin, Doug Golightly, Andrew Saveloy, Jim Kayes, Tony Veitch, Mark Watson, Nigel Yalden, Wiwwy Wose and, perhaps worst of the lot, that gruesome twosome, those horribly unfunny try-hards Mulligan and Richardson. That’s a representative, rather than a complete, sample.

Viewers of tonight’s sports bulletin on One News were subjected to one of the worst of this grim fraternity delivering one of the worst gaffes imaginable. Substandard performances by Television One auto-cue reader Jenny-May Coffin have drawn comment from many quarters, including this forum, in the past…..
http://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-20062015/#comment-1032625
http://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-27042013/#comment-625478
http://thestandard.org.nz/whose-values/#comment-422251

However, this evening she managed to excel—if that’s the right word for something so abject—herself, as she burbled: “Real Madrid beat Manchester City last night in front of 99,000 spectators, a record football crowd for the Melbourne Cricket Ground.”

Now, if Jenny-May Coffin were a serious journalist, or a reasonably knowledgeable sports authority, or even mildly interested in the material she was given to read out, then she would have known that that statement was ridiculous.

If she had bothered to check, she would have discovered that the record football crowd for the MCG was 121,696 for the Victorian Football League grand final between Carlton and Collingwood. The year after that (1971) the crowd for the St Kilda vs Hawthorn game was 118,192—a hell of a lot more than were at last night’s association football game. In fact, the Real-Man. City attendance was nowhere near the top TWENTY football crowds for the MCG, as Jenny-May Coffin would have known if she possessed even a rudimentary level of professionalism….

http://afltables.com/afl/crowds/vn_mcg.html